Grove.io shutting down

https://grove.io/blog/grove-shutting-down-october-13

by helper • 14 years ago

125 197 14 years ago

gkoberger• 14 years ago

This is disappointing. Grove.io was really awesome. IRC channels seem easy, but are (relatively) hard to get going:

  - Finding a server
  - Registering it properly
  - Explaining it to non-tech people

The last one is way harder than you'd think. With Grove, you just send them a URL and it's easy.

It's a shame they're shutting down. I stopped using because it was too expensive for a channel with a few friends (a channel with fewer than 10 friends was costing $25/month).

chank• 14 years ago

Yea, but that last one wasn't worth the cost and the user limit. Most groups using IRC in this fashion probably have a high level of technical experience.

Campfire succeeds at this because it wasn't their first product. They essentially brought customers in from their other products and then tied them all together. As a stand alone service, it's fairly useless IMO.

dasil003• 14 years ago

Campfire is the only 37s service that has been sticky for my team.

na85• 14 years ago

>I stopped using because it was too expensive for a channel with a few friends (a channel with fewer than 10 friends was costing $25/month).

Wouldn't it be easier to just register a quakenet channel or even run your own passworded ircd on a spare linux box?

saurik2• 14 years ago

That does not solve the "The last one is way harder than you'd think." problem that was mentioned.

smhinsey2• 14 years ago

I set Grove up for my distributed team but it didn't stick. I still think team-level chat is a problem worth solving, but nothing I've tried has gotten any real traction.

saurik2• 14 years ago

What are you currently using? I didn't use Grove, but I use IRC; I've definitely found that some people really take to it, and some people don't; some people even end up using IRC only to watch what other people are saying, and then send PMs as if they were using instant messenger, but never say things in the channel in public, even if they later talk about the things being said on IRC when we are all at dinner.

gaoshan• 14 years ago

We use standard chat messaging, Skype, Google Hangouts, teleconferencing and a team mailing list. So... clunky, I guess, but it gets the job done.

Chat messaging is for quick questions or requests to Skype or Hangout, Skype for 1 to 1 video or extended audio chats, Hangouts for small group video chats (quality is kind of crummy though), teleconference is for larger meetings and the team mailing list is for "hey everybody, check this cool thing out" type stuff.

IRC would be too much for our designers and some project managers.

vida• 14 years ago

We use Flowdock at Testive and we _love_ it.

ajtaylor• 14 years ago

We've been using HipChat for several months now and have been quite happy with it. I'm using it to manage several remote contractors. The pricing is very reasonable. And it has an XMPP interface should you need it as well.

dmishe2• 14 years ago

Back to campfire, I guess.

pbiggar21• 14 years ago

I'd recommend hipchat.

dmishe2• 14 years ago

Thanks. What's up with Hip in names nowadays?

dchuk5• 14 years ago

We're using Campfire currently, and had used hipchat before that for a few months. Hipchat was fine on desktop, but holy shit their mobile apps are terrible. They were so bad that we had to move away because we're a fairly mobile group.

Honestly, the group business chat niche is just riddled with "incomplete" products in my opinion. Some are great in the browser but have no native web apps (Flowdock), some have shitty mobile apps with mediocre web versions (campfire and hipchat).

I hope someone with a good set of developers, cash in their pockets, and an eye on simplicity would come in and build a full suite of desktop and mobile apps on the back of a good chat system one day. It's absolutely not a solved problem at this point.

mibbitier14• 14 years ago

Mibbit is an option ;)

michokest• 14 years ago

Or http://talkerapp.com, which is free and maintained by the (subscription driven) Teambox

kenneth_reitz3• 14 years ago

Shocking.

whalesalad• 14 years ago

I feel/sense sarcasm. I did not see this being useful from day one.

kenneth_reitz3• 14 years ago

It's sarcasm mixed with caremad.

I was a huge fan of Pownce, Motion, LeafyChat, Baconfile, Convore, and Grove. All failed.

I was really hoping this one would work, but after seeing no improvements in a year, it became obvious it wouldn't. :(

pwang2• 14 years ago

I was a paying customer. I had other shit to deal with than setting up an IRC server with robust logging, and it worked well enough for our team (except the random disconnects).

I guess we'll be looking at hipchat and some of the other alternatives posted here.

scorpion032• 14 years ago

"Success is the ability to move from one failure to another without loss of enthusiasm" - Winston Churchill.

If she keeps at it, she will do a successful product, too.

mibbitier14• 14 years ago

That only works if you learn from the failures. Hopefully the reasons grove.io failed are obvious enough.

heretohelp16• 14 years ago

This is why I refuse to use external services hosted by small/tiny companies that haven't open-sourced their tech.

Even in this moment, they still don't seem to be bothering to open source any of it.

There's a lesson to be learnt here in terms of gaining buyer trust when you're small.

I continue to use our own setup for IRC.

pbiggar21• 14 years ago

Its a self-fulfilling prophesy. You can't get big without customers, but customers won't use you because you're small.

How do we overcome this?

(Edit: I was asking a rhetorical question to counter the parent. But great discussion below.)

robryan3• 14 years ago

It takes time. Some kind of competitive advantage over everything else in the marketplace will help to. People need a reason to bet on your company which overcomes the risk in instability.

As time passes and your service stays solid more people will come on board. Something like github is a good example. I doubt many big companies would have considered relying on them early on, but their track record has changed that now.

crag3• 14 years ago

No NO.. it's not because they're small. It's because tech start-ups have a history of shutting down or selling, and leaving their users in the dust.

The list is long. Another recent example was Sparrow. I broke my rule about buying/licensing software from small companies (unless I got the source) with Sparrow. I didn't just buy 1 copy, I (we) brought 15 (for the office). And of course, I got burned. Again.

It will not happen again. Period. Unless you tell me up front your plans - what you plan to do for me, the user, when/if you fail or sell.

zhoutong• 14 years ago

There are always early adopters that are passionate about every new product they can find, and there are also skeptical customers that refuse to use anything provided by startups. That's actually how sustainable startups grow.

flatline3• 14 years ago

Sell software and a service. Make it so I can install your code and run it indefinitely. Provide your source to paying customers.

See Atlassian for an example.

joe_the_user• 14 years ago

Did you miss the "that haven't open-sourced their tech" part in the parent?

mibbitier14• 14 years ago

You overcome it by offering something valuable for users that they can't easily setup themselves.

As far as I can see, Grove.io didn't do this. They didn't have any easy means to grow quickly.

Also perhaps they're paying a lot for hosting (At rackspace). I don't know, but there's no reason they shouldn't be making some profit if they have a few paying customers. Shame they can't build on that.

rcsorensen• 14 years ago

Maybe you touched on the solution.

If you're a small startup, putting forward a statement that all the code will be open sourced if you shut down should increase the level of comfort your customers have in the product.

What are the downsides I'm not thinking of? Companies that reuse code across multiple products, perhaps. Product A dies, but uses component Foo in Product B that still exists, and represents some kind of special-value-add.

pbiggar21• 14 years ago

I thought about this earlier - putting a statement on circleci.com saying that if we shut up shop then we'll open source everything. However, I think its dangerous to plant that seed in a users' mind - I think it suggests that there's a danger of that happening (which there isn't, CI fans).

I actually think the solution is to ignore customers with this view. We'll get their business when we "cross the chasm".

chc• 14 years ago

The most obvious downside is that it creates perverse incentives -- potential customers benefit if you fail. It also telegraphs a lack of...I don't know what the word is. Tenacity? It's kind of like putting a bounty on your own head so that at least somebody can benefit if you die. You really want people to be invested in your survival.

It also limits what you can do with your program. If your program uses code you don't have a license to release, you can't open-source it.

justincormack• 14 years ago

Escrow clauses are perfectly normal for commercial software and services, for enterprise contracts.

It probably needs to be a contract, as the liquidators might ignore it if it is just a statement, depending what happens to the company.

lazerwalker• 14 years ago

It gets tricky if your exit path ends up being the sort of combination talent/product acquisition where your new employer wants to keep your tech proprietary (see: Apple acquiring Siri, Facebook buying Face.com and shutting down their public API).

mibbitier14• 14 years ago

If they open sourced it, they'd likely feel obligated to support it.

So it would kinda defeat the point of shutting grove down maybe...

heretohelp16• 14 years ago

>If they open sourced it, they'd likely feel obligated to support it.

That's their psychological bugaboo, not mine.

jkaljundi• 14 years ago

There is no difference between large and small tech companies shutting down their services. Google has shut down close to 50 services in recent year if I remember correctly: http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/03/google-shutdowns-continue-i...

heretohelp16• 14 years ago

I am in the middle of moving an API over from a Google one that got shutdown recently. This has cost me a substantial chunk of time, more than it likely has cost you.

I'm viscerally aware of inverterate corporate capacity for volatility.

njr123• 14 years ago

These things are not really on the same level. Google usually gives more than a years notice, and always has a way to export your data. These guys are shutting down in the month and it looks like the only help you get with your data is a link to a gist on github.

huhtenberg• 14 years ago

How's being an open source a requirement?

One would want to use an external service, because... well... it's a service. You are paying for someone else to maintain the system and care about the uptime, scalability, security, etc. You surely do not imply that you would pay grove.io simply because you can't bring your own IRC server up, do you?

heretohelp16• 14 years ago

I already have IRC for our company.

zeeg2• 14 years ago

Why should anyone create software just so you can have it for free? You're not entitled to open source software, or the goodwill of others. If they decided that they didn't want to continue running their product, they can choose to shut it down.

This is exactly the same as Sparrow, TextMate, etc. None of these companies owe you anything to where they should be required, or even expected, to open source their work.

heretohelp16• 14 years ago

I don't demand anything of them, but they won't create a dependency where I previously had none and expect to be rewarded with money for it.

I am making founders aware of this attitude so that they can

1. Realize that there's a problem

2. Distinguish themselves among their competitors by addressing this concern

I'm not aiming to prescribe solutions, just describing the heuristics I presently rely on to determine if a service is likely to become a liability. I always do a fluid cost-benefit analysis beyond the black-and-white I described in my top comment.

That you believed what I said had anything to do with "demanding" free labor of anyone is telling and indicates a defensive posture on the subject.

Not a surprising reaction to have, given that Sentry (your errors-as-a-service project) depends on people trusting you not to just shut it down tomorrow.

plusbryan2• 14 years ago

When your favorite restaurant closes down, do you demand they post all their recipes?

heretohelp16• 14 years ago

Only if they demand I make them my sole source of food and stop cooking for myself while I'm their customer.

holgersindbaek• 14 years ago

How was the ride? How does the team feel about shutting it down?

Rayne3• 14 years ago

It's getting a little difficult to trust stuff by Leah Culver. Everything (that I know of) that she has done so far has either shut down or been acquired and shut down.

That said, no hard feelings. It's hard out there. I've never tried to run a company, so I can't judge.

roryokane• 14 years ago

List of projects by Leah Culver: http://blog.leahculver.com/about.html – Hurl, Baconfile, Convore, Pownce, and Grove.

robryan3• 14 years ago

Was my first thought to, no real explanation of why they are shutting down either. If something is a low friction consumer app, it is expected that many will evolve and pivot.

With something like a business tool though I want something that is going to be around for the long term and it would be a factor on further products she creates.

From experience I know a startup is hard and things don't always go to plan so I can sympathise there, just that when choosing tools for business stability is a factor.

pbiggar21• 14 years ago

And yet you just did.

As a community we praise people for trying, then when it fails we pillory them? A dick move, sir.

Rayne3• 14 years ago

If it came off that way, I apologize. I was just expressing the thought that popped into my mind when seeing this. I'm not at all trying to judge her. I think she does excellent work and has just had a few bad apples. I hope her next project is successful.

akkartik• 14 years ago

  pil·lo·ry [pil-uh-ree] noun
  a wooden framework erected on a post, with holes for securing
  the head and hands, formerly used to expose an offender to public
  derision.

Is that really what grandparent did? I think it's an unfair characterization. It was a personal opinion stated weakly and with restraint, not some attempt to incite a mob.

I have no opinion on this specific startup. Perhaps they've provided enough time to migrate; that's for their paying customers to judge. But it's naive to think failures doesn't affect your reputation. It does, and it should. Do you really think savvy users won't take your track record into account when deciding whether to use your service? It goes against their interests, and nothing is more darwinian than a startup.

---

Here in silicon valley we say that failure is ok. And yet accountability is also good. There's a tension here.

Perhaps failed startups are fine for investors, who might have diversified into many different vehicles. They're more problematic for customers who rely on a product. And paradoxically, the closer a startup gets to solving a hair-on-fire problem, the more careful they need to be about how they treat their customers on the way out.

Even if investors claim failure is ok, is that always the case? I suspect past track record does play a role somehow, even if it's subtle and hidden behind the scenes.

Even if failure is sometimes ok, there are failures and there are failures. A lot depends on how the wrap-up was carried out, and how people feel about it.

When startups are few and creation is to be encouraged, failure can be ignored. When startups are plentiful and failure starts to be taken for granted, perhaps it's time to emphasize accountability.

ricardobeat4• 14 years ago

The funny part is that http://convore.com/ redirects to grove.io with the shutdown notice :)

heretohelp16• 14 years ago

We should take bets on how far the, "we're gone, but here's our new thing!" chain will go.

jaseemabid• 14 years ago

So damn true. Soon grove will add such a notice

sown• 14 years ago

I wish I could create things that people might actually want but I can't think of anything that I could make that people would want.

dchuk5• 14 years ago

The vast majority of the time, if you build something that scratches your own itch, there will be others out there that will also find it useful. The challenge is to find a big enough itch.

mh-5• 14 years ago

you could start with a replacement for grove.io.

heh. can someone recommend an alternative that also supports connecting via standard IRC protocol?

btipling• 14 years ago

Leah is out there creating things, writing code and spending valuable time on new ventures, despite the risk and opportunity cost. I admire her courage and creativity and I can't imagine why you would say something like this.

I'm sure she would have loved to have all of her projects succeed.

Grove.io is a high quality service. We love using it at Leftronic and are very sad to read this news. I wish Leah and her team the best.

Rayne3• 14 years ago

I'm not sure what I said that was so terrible. I think Leah is great and I really hate hear news like this. I also agree that the service was good. My sole point is that companies that use this service also get hurt by this shutdown. When it happens several times as it unfortunately has in her case, you start to worry about new ventures disappearing too.

It is in no way a shot at Leah or her work. It's just a recognition of history.

heretohelp16• 14 years ago

What's with the hagiography? Culver made things people came to depend on, then those things disappeared.

I don't see how this is any different than picking up women and telling them you think they're serious girlfriend material in a context (business services) where that's the expected standard, then dropping them for the new hot thing.

Why is it suddenly acceptable to do this just because they called themselves a startup?

northband• 14 years ago

I agree. Best of luck and keep coding!

plusbryan2• 14 years ago

Companies are shut down for a variety of reasons, and entrepreneurial success is often equal parts idea, luck, and hard work. Leah has built several popular products with loyal followings - which is more than a lot of us can say.

BadassFractal• 14 years ago

On that note, any good guides for hosting your own IRC server on your home network (and safely expose it to the Internet) if you have a spare Ubuntu server box lying around?

mibbitier14• 14 years ago

I'd suggest against it personally. Get a $10 linode and setup an ircD there.

If your home network gets DDoS'd, it's going to be quite an inconvenience.

twodayslate2• 14 years ago

I strongly recommend using Atheme services for your next IRC project. They have a nice web interface and EGS is a really nice third party web interface.

kenn2• 14 years ago

As a founder of http://lingr.com, I know firsthand how hard to build a chat app and make it sustainable. I've been working on it since 2006, first as a startup, then as my personal side project.

I've learned to not invest too much on the project, staying with the minimum server cost, and that's the only sustainable way for me. In fact it costs me almost nothing and users have built trust on me for running it for 6 years.

I'd give her tons of credit for trying to turn it into a real business. That's what I've been failing so far, or maybe I just don't even have the guts to do. I admire her courage and thus feel really sorry.

Hopefully I'll find another course, who knows.

tijs3• 14 years ago

Looks pretty good actually (from the screenshot), you even have an iPhone app and everything. Why not just charge a small something, even if it's only to get you a nice side income? Somebody mentioned $5/month as a reasonable price for something like this. For me personally that would make me less hesitant to sign up as currently it would seem you could pull the plug any moment. Unless you like the idea of being able to pull the plug at any moment of course, which of course is your prerogative.

kenn2• 14 years ago

Thank you. I think you made a good point - by not charging I may be actually making people skeptical. We even have a vibrant developer community on bots and extensions, but it's barely known (shit, I realized that it's not even mentioned on the top page). I'll have to come up with some turnaround ideas.

thedjpetersen2• 14 years ago

Grove inspired me to make an open source alternative: Subway https://github.com/thedjpetersen/subway . And while it is far from perfect it is a start towards opening up IRC to teams.

jsilence2• 14 years ago

This is what I love HN for. Thanks.

twodayslate2• 14 years ago

Awesome project! I am super impressed. Great work.

Nux• 14 years ago

Good man!

mh-5• 14 years ago

that's a hell of a "start."

great work.

mmahemoff2• 14 years ago

This looks good. Does it keep history? I think one of the benefits of web-based systems like HipChat and Campfire is you can log in and see the previous conversation even if you weren't there.

StavrosK• 14 years ago

You can use bots for that:

http://instabot.stochastictechnologies.com/

thedjpetersen2• 14 years ago

Yes it does keep history if you register a user.

alagu• 14 years ago

Are there any plans to opensource it? The API hooks were awesome.

jdoss• 14 years ago

Here is why this failed... Anyone with half a brain is going to be able to:

* run their own IRC server

* run a XMPP server (cough openfire)

* Sign up for another service that has more features (Campfire or Hipchat)

Not to be mean, but the pricing on grove.io is stupid for what they offer. I run a XMPP server at work and costs us nothing for the basics, which is group chat and private chat. They could have offered this for far cheaper and maybe they would be alive now... and by cheaper I mean a flat fee, no slot pricing for a hosted solution. IRC has low overhead so really, offer IRC+ features for dirt cheap and people will sign up. Hell, if they wanted a higher end one time fees, they knock out a self hosted solution with high end support on a yearly support contract.

If the features are that good for your IRC based service, knock it down to $5/mo unlimited users and get a user base going, find out what they want and then add on value addon features based on that feedback. If you can't offer the service for that cheap, then you have too much overhead (bodies).

polemic3• 14 years ago

We were doing this (and still do run our own XMPP servers for other purposes), and opted for grove for the logging, availability and to ease the maintenance burden.

Just because anyone can do it, doesn't mean everyone wants to, even (or especially) when you're a highly tech-centric organisation.

dools• 14 years ago

Yeah I run my own IRC server but when it came to my clients, I didn't want to be responsible for that. Grove is fantastic but wasn't all that reliable. I wish it had taken off, though! I might be forced to fill the void ;)

pbiggar21• 14 years ago

> I run a XMPP server at work and costs us nothing for the basics

It sounds like it costs at least 1 server, plus your time. Those are not free.

smsisgay• 14 years ago

a zero you-cost alternative is hosted xmpp server: merely add a few Resource Records to yer zone.

_hnwo• 14 years ago

ARGH.

I really liked using this service.

stevewilhelm• 14 years ago

I have never used IRC. How is it better than Google Chat?

jsilence2• 14 years ago

Internet Relay Chat is THE archetype of chat protocols. It has been around since the early days of the internets. Hence the protocols and software are mature albeit with some flaws or restrictions that are hard to come by.

Google Talk is using XMPP, an XML based presence and chat protocol that has also been there for quite a while. It is widely used throughout the net apart from Google Talk.

So both protocols serve their purpose well. IRC is a little more focussed on group chats. While one to one conversations are simple, a presence service is not what IRC was made for. XMPP is strong on presence and one to one chats, with less focus on group chats.

mibbitier14• 14 years ago

Many reasons. Mainly though I'd say IRC is extremely battle-worn. There are a ton of mechanisms for dealing with spam/abuse/idiot users.

Uchikoma• 14 years ago

Great move writing a Python export script.

rorrr• 14 years ago

Why shut down if you have paying customers? Just let it run. Servers are dirt cheap, there's no way they are losing money at their prices.

mibbitier14• 14 years ago

They're hosted with rackspace afaik. So they probably are losing money.

simonbrown• 14 years ago

So move it to another host?

kenneth_reitz3• 14 years ago

I'm pretty sure YC companies get either free or heavily discounted Rackspace.

http://www.rackspacestartups.com/yc/index.html

TallboyOne• 14 years ago

Can I ask a stupid question? What causes a message like this? How many people are involved in the team? Is this a 'startup' or just a few developers having fun? I just started http://pineapple.io and when I see messages like this it always makes me wonder. it's not the first time i've seen something like this.

It makes me nervours...

mathrawka• 14 years ago

I remember trying it out when it was free, and then I got a notice about the pricing plans. I emailed and said that the prices were outrageously expensive for just a few users. I never got a reply, but I got an auto-reply a week later telling me to fill out my billing info.

They put the service out there, and didn't really listen to much feedback or improve it. I was rather disappointed and find this ending... expected.

DanielRibeiro• 14 years ago

I wonder what they will do next. Grove.io started out of Convore(YCW11)[1], announced just 249 days ago[2, 3, 4].

[1] http://gigaom.com/2012/01/10/convore-grove-io/

[2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3449917

[3] http://betakit.com/2012/02/20/convore-shutting-down-april-1

[4] http://blog.convore.com/post/17951919109/convore-shutting-do...

jorde2• 14 years ago

For those who liked Grove and its combination of IRC and web chat, I personally recommend Flowdock which also has an IRC interface https://flowdock.com/ I know the people behind Flowdock personally and know that they are going to be around for a long time.

As a personal note, it's sad to see Grove go away. It was the first bigger service I got to design and I loved working with Leah.

mh-5• 14 years ago

can you point me to Flowdock's IRC interface? I evaluated them before we started adopting Grove, and I did not see that option.

edit: dunno how I overlooked this before: https://www.flowdock.com/help/irc

thanks for making me look again, though!

jorde2• 14 years ago

They added that afterwards

polemic3• 14 years ago

Ugh, I don't understand how Grove.io can just drift apart like that. Surely Grove's costs were relatively low, and my impression was that there was a significant level of uptake.

> "..our team has moved on to other projects.."

So, unprofitable, or just not the next Facebook? Is there really no one that is happy to keep the service ticking along?

I feel like there is a pretty significant problem with tech startups, where everyone is so busy trying to be the next big thing, that everything else is dropped and abandoned in that pursuit.

heretohelp16• 14 years ago

The fact that nobody's happy with a profitable, but modest bootstrapped company is causing them to abandon these smaller companies.

The abandonment feeds into the consumer mistrust and makes it that much harder to bootstrap the next company.

A good example of an industry that was utterly destroyed by a crisis of consumer confidence was the video game industry.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_video_game_crash...

>Revenues that had peaked at around $3.2 billion in 1983,[1] fell to around $100 million by 1985 (a drop of almost 97 percent).

It would be extremely unwise to believe the startup industry couldn't be subject to the same problem. VCs are getting uncomfortable with the valuations, the constant buyouts and abandonment are burning out consumers.

Were I not working on a startup of my own, I'd be happy to take upon somebody's profitable but small red-headed stepchild business.

sbarre2• 14 years ago

I also wish they would address:

1) why not open source the project?

2) why not look for someone to take it over and run it?

I also have a hard time seeing how something like this could be at the very least not break-even (unless they had less than 10 paying customers or something).

niggler• 14 years ago

Just because something should have paying customers doesn't necessarily mean that it has paying customers. There are other factors involved.

Better put: are you a paying customer? If not, then most likely other potential customers are unaware.

mutru• 14 years ago

Flowdock's similar IRC gateway is already open source: https://github.com/flowdock/oulu

martindale3• 14 years ago

I reached out to Leah with the same questions, but in lieu of a response I spent a few minutes setting up a replacement that is both an IRC server and a hosted web client: https://github.com/LocalSense/hosted-irc

I'll hack on it a bit more tonight, but it shouldn't be too difficult to replicate what Grove.io does.

nnnnni• 14 years ago

From Leah at grove.io:

Hi,

Thanks for your interest in Grove.

Unfortunately we won't be open sourcing the code due to the time and effort it would take to prepare and maintain it.

Thanks for understanding,

Leah

patcon2• 14 years ago

Someone should start a "start-up adoption" program. Facilitate others adopting projects when the owners want to move on, but the viability is still contentious

phmagic• 14 years ago

noooo! this feels like arrested development.

tanepiper• 14 years ago

The many pivots of Leah Culver

dabeeeenster• 14 years ago

What I don't understand is why they dont sell it on Sitepoint or somewhere. The app must surely have several hundred dollars a month in revenue at the very least. Someone would pay several thousand dollars for that.

rdl• 14 years ago

That has to suck for Leah, especially since there's definitely a worthwhile product somewhere in the team realtime communications space; maybe grove.io wasn't it, but I find team IRC and IM to be incredibly useful, and if there were a good way to combine the two (and some kind of wiki/logging/etc.), with security, it would be great.

It would be cool if there were a way to put systems in escrow in case a company tanks or pivots, to protect users. The time to fund and set that up is during development/normal use, not once you've run out of money and decide to shut down, though.

timjahn• 14 years ago

"...our team has moved on to other projects"

That's the part that gets me. I've seen this many times in other startup shutdown posts.

They say it so casually. Like this is just another extracurricular activity they do after school. If they're tired of basketball, they're going to stop and try hockey.

Except that's not how your customers view it. They're paying you money for a service they're using to presumably save/make money.

kmfrk• 14 years ago

The writing was on the wall, after they pivoted from Convore.

Convore even seemed like a darling at Hacker News at the time.

webology3• 14 years ago

Some friends of mine were trying to kickstart a business with an open source Convore / Grove like service called Helm (http://www.indiegogo.com/helm). Daniel's open source work speaks for itself and I think it's an excellent idea and model.

dr_win• 14 years ago

What to do now? What is a viable replacement for Grove.io?

martindale3• 14 years ago

This is really a shame. Grove.io is a big part of our startup's communications. I really hope Leah considers open-sourcing the project, or turning it over to someone else.

brendoncrawford• 14 years ago

I recommend FlowDock as a good alternative.

malandrew• 14 years ago

Instead of shutting down the service with an export option to a data file, how about identifying two or three competitors you'd recommend and working with them to export the content directly into another service. This way you help out both your customers and another startup.

For example, if Grove.io content can be made to work with Flowdock, contact the Flowdock team and work with them to put a big "Migrate to Flowdock" button on the shutdown announcement page.

Grove.io shutting down

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