

Harborly Is Closing Down - rgawdzik
https://harbor.ly/blog/harborly-is-closing-down/

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650REDHAIR
"Instead, a new venture that we’ve been working on as a side project has
recently gained traction. Given the potential of the opportunity, it makes far
more sense for us to shift our limited resources away from Harborly to focus
on this new project."

Wow.

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someear
Founders tend to have insider info on when a company is headed for death. Side
projects are essentially an internal acknowledgement of that, but the
"official" death of the company or the publicizing of the side project only
takes place once the project has gained enough momentum that they know it's
worth pursuing full-time. Mattermark/Refer.ly is a perfect example of that.

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dmor
Actually, we announced the Referly shut down in March 2013 (1) and played with
several ideas after that. Based on our most popular content, we thought we
would be a tech blog for about 4 weeks... code named "Cursive".

The first commit for Mattermark was made Apr 22, 2013 and we didn't buy the
domain for more than a month after that.

(1) [http://www.daniellemorrill.com/2013/03/zombie-
startups/](http://www.daniellemorrill.com/2013/03/zombie-startups/)

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bdcravens
Interestingly, even though I follow Bitcoin pretty closely (I regularly
read/troll r/bitcoin) I'm just now hearing about this company.

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hga
People often make comments like yours, and my reaction is that there's very
likely cause and effect going on here, they might not have failed if they'd
gotten the attention of people like you.

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bdcravens
Yeah, I think the idea applies to many startups: if the first time someone
heard of you is when you're writing "the announcement", it speaks volumes. I
only qualify the Bitcoin part given that it's fairly niche.

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pbreit
Wouldn't it make more sense to wait for an acquirer to be found to release
this statement?

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colinbartlett
Or one conclude from this statement's release that an acquirer could not be
found. That comment could be just a last ditch attempt.

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namenotrequired
I would expect potential acquirers would be a lot less interested anyway given
the founders are moving on.

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whatanasshole
As user said _650REDHAIR_ said

>Instead, a new venture that we’ve been working on as a side project has
recently gained traction. Given the potential of the opportunity, it makes far
more sense for us to shift our limited resources away from Harborly to focus
on this new project.

What does this even mean? And if it's gaining so much traction why didn't you
mention the name or link something about the project.

Seems to me they are running from it. I remember seeing this a few months back
and didn't know why it wasn't talked about anywhere bitcoin related. They
never really marketed themselves; fair is fair though the product looked
pretty beautiful. We call this a ditch...

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kzhahou
Sorry the original idea didn't pan out. Good luck on the new endeavor!!

