I'm sure we're all familiar with the regular posts that pop up here about startups shutting down on their users, often with very little notice.
As a potential user, this often makes me uncomfortable investing a lot of time into products I come across. It's difficult to tell the difference between a sustainable business model with clear vision and values, vs the typical "hypergrowth" startup which a year from now will probably have either shut down, completely pivoted, or been acquired.
An idea I had which could help alleviate this problem: a set of standardised "pledges" which startups can commit to, which outline some mututally agreeable obligations between the service and the end user.
This could of course cover many areas, but the ones that I think would make a good start are: Long-term service (X years minimum of guaranteed service), Personal data integrity (no selling data to 3rd parties), No data lock-in, Transparent subscription pricing, and Privacy-first (user data always private unless opting-in).
Draft for the more detailed conditions of the pledges here:
- https://github.com/jamesisaac/pledges/blob/master/pledges.md
Advantage for users: easy to recognise at a glance that the company is following agreeable standards (don't have to scrutinise marketing copy / terms of use / privacy policy). Advantage for providers: clear focus on values could be a USP over competitors.
I've created an example of how this could be presented on my product's landing page: https://nachapp.com (scroll to "Our values")
So, is anyone here interested in this? I think it would work best as a group/community effort where the pledges are finalised by consensus. So, if you're either a user who'd like to help define what constitutes a good product, or a founder who'd potentially be interested in committing to these pledges, it would be great if you could drop me an email (contact details in profile) so I can coordinate the effort and keep everyone updated.
Realistically your pledge means nothing if you go bankrupt and shut down. Your startup could still fail and nobody really has any recourse in general. You could probably find ways around that but forcing liability on founders will probably make this less likely to catch on.
An acquirer is going to be held to these presumably, and they probably can't just go bankrupt to avoid them - so that's less likely to happen. Maybe that's what you want but it cuts a big exit path out for founders - and acquisitions aren't always terrible for users. I wouldn't be surprised if there exist acquirers for some startup that would keep users happy for >X years but not commit legally to doing so for X years.
I guess there's a bit of a cycle and it really leads to the pledge being worthless. Less likely to be acquired + can't pivot for X years -> keep doing the same product -> but it's losing money -> no viable exit, no pivot -> shut down.