I used to be very bitter about acquihires, and startups planning for exits from day one. But maybe - maybe just to retain sanity - it's time to look at things differently. Maybe SaaS startups should not be treated as actual products, but just as mere temporary experiments. If the company fails, the product dies. If the company succeeds, the products gets killed. But, however briefly, we get to see some concept implemented in software, adding to the list of things that could be done (but usually aren't).
It's really like the big company is outsourcing their R&D. The alternative would be to run dozens of experiments internally. Since most companies don't have the people power to do that, it's cheaper to just wait until a startup appears that solves their problem, or wait until they're successful enough to validate a market.
I've seen the head of a business unit in my large organization not so subtly hint to a Director that Problem X is something that we need to solve in the next 18-24 months, but we don't have the budget properly allocated to do it ourselves.
Lo and behold the Director shortly leaves the company to found a startup aimed at solving Problem X. Eighteen months later we buy them, aquihiring back the director and some engineers who left with him to start the startup.
The head of the business unit knew he couldn't get the approval from the board to solve Problem X, so he basically outsourced the risk and in the end the director and his engineers ended up with a nice chunk of change and their old jobs back.
That's pretty much how a lot of medical R&D happens. A lot of startup don't even bother trying to go market and big companies are cutting down on R&D. One consequence of this is that the big players get more and more entrenched and a lot of regulation is customized to their needs.
In tech it's also pretty sad that small startups with a good product still don't feel that they can make it on their own but instead prefer to be bought up by a bigger player who then shuts down their product.
A good team that ships product is still extremely valuable, even if it had no product-market fit. If you can aquihire them and put them to work on new ideas, it's still much less risk vs. having to bootstrap a team from scratch.
So, VCs are essentially funding speculative R&D, and big companies are buying successful results? This view sounds consistent and reasonable. Thanks for putting it this way.
That's actually exactly what is happening in the market. R&D budgets at big companies are nothing in terms of market value when compared to small companies.
To put a little wrinkle in it, it's both big companies outsourcing R&D to pick from the winners, but also tax payers subsidizing the R&D through R&D tax credits.
That might be a good idea. My chief concern is the exploitation of users and how to reframe things as an experiment. My guess is that it's hard to do without driving away potential adopters who don't want to be screwed when you disappear.
My general sense is that experimentation startups are inclined to think, "F the users. They're our tool, not our purpose."
> My chief concern is the exploitation of users and how to reframe things as an experiment. My guess is that it's hard to do without driving away potential adopters who don't want to be screwed when you disappear.
I'm still all for driving away potential adopters. The default understanding, that startups are putting out real products, is hurting adopters that grow their workflow around some SaaS offering, only to have the rug pulled out from under them. I'd much prefer if startups were up-front about their real goals, though I realize this won't happen, as it goes against the whole premise of fast and massive growth.
This is likely a middle case, not enough traction to get next round of funding as a viable product/company.
I personally use Astro on my iPhone (just uninstalled this morning when I got their notification). It was good app, but no way for them to get any money from me.
It's really hard to build a product AND a predictable, profitable, repeatable growth model that VCs want to fund.
Yes. But I'd find it better if they would rather just say in short "..and we are shutting down our service/apps. Whatever. Bye" instead of paragraphs long bs condescendingly trying to explain how it's better and how they are going to change the world and discover lemonade on Mars because they have "strategically" decided to "refocus".
A two-week shutdown notice is unbelievably short.
And given the way the Screenhero acquisition went, I wouldn't be too optimistic if I were an Astro user.
Screenhero was acquired by Slack, and while it wasn't shut down immediately, new signups were disabled. They eventually shut it down entirely when they released support for screensharing within Slack, but the experience of that is nothing like what it was with Screenhero. Even aside from forcing people to pay for a Slack instance just to screenshare[0], the actual video sharing experience just... doesn't work anywhere near as well. So the pattern seems to be:
- acquire product
- shut standalone product down
- replace product with inferior version of product, integrated into Slack
- charge more
[0] if you don't already share a Slack instance with the person you want to call, this is a really awkward workflow just to screenshare
For me, this is a knock against basically anything Slack related. Slack 100% has the power to ensure that Astro is around long enough for all parties to make a proper transition to appropriate solutions.
I get they want to keep Astro's clients around, but it's a big FU to companies that rely on Astro to have two weeks notice about changes potentially affecting their entire users base.
I agree. I've been nervously watching slack as a current Hipchat user, working out what our next move is (pretty much Slack or Microsoft Teams seemed the saner choices), and this makes me want to have nothing to do with them.
It reeks of arrogance. Sure I understand it was a acquihire, but that means you acquired the company and take on their obligations including moral. An it is poor form to dump customers / users out when they likely could have kept the services up for at least 3 months.
If slack doesn't care about that, then I am not sure this is a business I really want to have a dependency on.
> For more details about what’s next for Astro customers, read Astro’s announcement on their website.
What's next? Scrambling to find a replacement email workflow in t minus 15 days and counting ...
There is NO "what's next". The product they are using is disappearing forever. Why are these product shutterings always phrased as a "bold new adventure" for former customers?
> We’d like to thank you, our users, for whom we built this company, and for whom we look forward to serving further as part of Slack.
I realize it is exciting news for the Astro VCs (maybe?) and, again, maybe Astro's employees, but this isn't how you thank someone for being a loyal customer. Apologize for screwing them at least.
> Seems like the standard end for any half-way decent mail app: acquihire and shut down.
For context, it takes a day or two to build an app that can display an SMS message correctly, and maybe 25 person years to build an app that can display an email thread correctly. This means that no matter how much money you raise, by the time you have a semi-working product it will be pretty much time for your VCs to start returning money to their LPs before you can get traction.
If you want an email client that's not going to get shut down, try Missive... They are funding their email client from a side business selling t-shirts rather than taking VC, so it's much less likely to go anywhere.
Because the specs just for parsing out the headers, body, attachments, etc. are fiendishly complicated. Think all sorts of indefinitely nested recursive data structures that have no fixed order.
But that's the easy part. The hard part is that there is no spec at all that governs what actually goes inside the body of a message. The easiest way to explain is by way of analogy:
Imagine that you've never left your village and know nothing of the outside world, but are tasked with building a car capable of circumnavigating the globe.
So you start out by building the first version of your car that can drive on your village's streets successfully. So far, so good, you think you've solved the problem and assume it will just keep working. But as soon as you get outside your village you see that the roads are no longer paved, so the car quickly breaks down. So you go back and build a new car that can also drive on gravel roads, and set out again. And this works well enough until there stops being roads at all. So now you go back and build a third car that can handle paved roads, dirt roads, and off roading. And this works for a while until you encounter sand... And water... And -100 degree cold... And 10,000 degree heat... And zero oxygen... And people start shooting at you. Etc.
And of course if you're not very careful then the time required to build each new version of the car will increase exponentially, since you need to make sure it still works equally well on all of the previous terrain you solved for.
This is basically email parsing in a nutshell. It's also why you keep seeing these companies get bought out for tens or hundreds of millions of dollars without many users, and sometimes without having even launched anything. Because email is by for the world's largest source of human knowledge so it's a very valuable domain to be able to work with, but only a handful of people really have the expertise.
I get it. Hell, my first job involved parsing headers, body and attachments out of e-mails for further analysis. I just don't feel this is a 25 person-year job, unless you're including other people than developers working directly on the task.
Thanks. Was in the middle of my (week-long) honeymoon then, and didn't browse HN. Apparently Google didn't send me an e-mail about it, and they don't advertise the shutdown within the Inbox UI itself (I'm actively using it for my primary mail both on desktop and mobile, and didn't notice a thing).
I just went to Astro's site to see what they do and why this makes a difference for me... but all I can see is their acquisition announcement and I am not any closer to understanding what it is they do for Email :/
Sure... but "Slack buys Astro" means absolutely nothing to me. What does Astro do? How will this affect how I use Slack? What new features am I likely to get as a Slack user?
Well, you can read the announcement. It doesn't mention any specifics about integrating astro's existing product into slack, so there probably aren't any new features to be expected in the near term.
It's just a talent acquisition. If "slack buys astro" means nothing to you, maybe this article isn't meant for you. Not all news is relevant to all people.
And another example of why you shouldn't depend on SaaS startups for anything you can't replace very quickly with another SaaS or a homegrown solution.
1 - Slack has a terrible Electron app. I'd like to see money spent fixing that over buying more talent for some odd integration between my email and my work chat.
2 - Astro was great, it met all my needs/wants in an email client.
Point 2 is really the gotcha here. Astro snoozes, allows using the gmail keyboard shortcuts, supports maOS and iOS, and most importantly, implements the Office365 api directly. (As opposed to the typical Exchange and/or IMAP tunnels most clients use.)
The company I work for either through mandate, or just letting IT do stuff (I don't know which), has disabled IMAP access AND Exchange access to our Office365 Instance. BUT I can use the api.
Astro and Polymail both fit the bill.
I liked Astro better. I immediately thought about going to Polymail, but they have gone subscription. (I don't have a problem paying for an email client, but once should be enough, thanks you.)
I am going to stick to the ecosystem (Apple, Google or Microsoft) from now-onwards. Too many email apps tried - Sparrow, Mailbox, Newton, Inbox and now this. I have come to realize that the Mail app on Mac or Gmail just works. I can do without all those fancy features that were built into these apps.
This is so frustrating, as I really loved the client, and now it's just being killed off. It's absolutely burning a good chunk of whatever goodwill I may have had for Slack.
Superhuman. It’s hands down the best os x email client I’ve used. Don’t think they have an iOS app yet but it’s coming. Or maybe they do, I don’t do email on my phone.
Spark has scheduled sending, but not read receipts (I view the lack of read receipts as a feature; I do not need my outgoing emails to spy on the recipients).
Browser based apps are weird and I want an icon in my dock and I want alt+tab to work normally.... and with zero effort from me. Honestly I’m in the other camp, and maybe old fashion, but don’t waste your time on browser client, just do native apps.
Sadly that's never going to happen. Maintaining feature parity between multiple implementations of that complicated app would cost way more than it's worth. I actually just noticed this morning my Slack "app" was taking up over a gig in memory...
Your comment sounds like what I hear from non-tech people. "My computer is terribly slow. Must be viruses. Could you clean it up?". No, your computer is fine and (mostly) malware-free. It's just the continuous cosmic inflation of website bloat.
(And then I think: if you were inclined to learn some tech, I'd teach you how to use NoScript or uMatrix. Alas, you'll probably need to buy a new machine instead.)
Everyone's moaning about "aquihire and shut down" but it would make ZERO sense for Slack to do that in this case. Astro was in no way a competitor to Slack. Seems to me like they're going after Gmail for Business.
But they did acquire and shut it down. They may have future plans at some point but it has been (or will be very soon) shut down
> On Wednesday October 10, we’ll shut down our Astro apps for Mac, iOS, Android, Amazon Alexa, and Slack. As of today, we’ve also disabled signups of new users.
Well they are doing that, doesn't mean it's because of competition, maybe it was just for the talent and keeping the app up isn't worth their time and they would rather the newly-acquired employees focus on something closer to native Slack. Similar to what they did with Screenhero
The team is focused on making the experience of working in email and Slack seamless. Unfortunately, we're not able to support the existing products. Apologies about any inconvenience this causes.
