
Sprintly Is Not Shutting Down - troydavis
https://support.sprint.ly/hc/en-us/articles/360005769833-Sprintly-Shutting-down-August-1st-2018
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dang
The title above originally said "is shutting down" but we've since received an
email saying that was reversed, so I changed the title to reflect that.

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ianamartin
I wish there were a sort of gentlemen’s agreement that cool projects like this
that don’t make it as businesses would be open sourced.

Almost every project is based on open source stuff somewhere in the stack,
whether it’s the OS, the main programming languages, frameworks, or whatever.
And most people don’t have the time to contribute a ton to the tools we all
use.

It would be really neat if companies that don’t make it could give a bequest
to the various communities and help build a massive library of stuff that, at
least at one point in time, ran successfully in production, delivered a
certain level of scale, and was able to make some money. If for
anthropological or historical or research purposes if nothing else.

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tommoor
Always a shame to see a company shut down that many people have poured years
of effort and belief into.

Maybe a lesson here - I have engineering and PM responsibilities and couldn't
be more squarely in the target market - still I have never heard of this
product, I wonder how they marketed it…

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annabellish
Indeed, I'd never heard of this, which is unfortunate as I've previously tried
to find something - anything! - in the void between "not so complex as to be
unusable" JIRA and "perfectly simple - too simple" Trello.

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sridharvembu
(Disclosure: Zoho CEO here) Have you looked at Zoho Sprints?
[https://www.zoho.com/sprints/](https://www.zoho.com/sprints/)

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DarkStar851
TIL Zoho has an Agile tool. I've been using you guys for mail for years.
Awesome products, but too many to count these days.

edit: Suggestion, compile that, the bug tracker and a Git repo service into
one bundle. It'd definitely sell.

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dkersten
I’ve used sprintly in the past and overall quite liked it, but there were bugs
and feature requests in their tracker, untouched for _years_ , with comments
like “yes, soon”. Besides the odd few reporting features, it just felt to me
that development stopped and stagnated. This is a large reason why I didn’t go
back to using it.

Overall, I liked sprintly and am sad to see it shut down, but I’m surprised it
survived this long given how it started to feel a bit abandoned. (Sure you
could argue if it’s not broken don’t fix it and sprintly mostly worked great,
despite some issues being untouched so long, so I don’t think that’s what
happened here. I do think it was perhaps a marketing problem not a
feature/product problem, but it just gave a very abandoned impression)

I found out about it on recommendation by one of their advisers. I would never
have heard about it otherwise so definitely think that it could have been
better marketed. Although, with that said, it’s teue that sprintly was
opinionated and that most teams have their own opinions that may not match up.
For example, I wanted a way of having a pool of tasks that people could choose
from rather than strict ordering (eg maybe a priority system where any equal-
priority task at the top can be taken, not just the top task) but sprintly
didn’t have any way of marking priorities or groups and they didn’t want to
add the feature because it went against their strict top task next workflow.
I’m not at all saying they should have supported that feature, of course, just
how even small differences in opinion on workflow can make the tool less of a
fit.

JIRA is the opposite in that it lets you customise it to fit whatever workflow
you like, but in the process becomes a complex beast that I dislike using. I
at least enjoyed using sprintly even if it didn’t always fit perfectly.

In any case, good luck on future ventures!

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bartread
I don't use sprint.ly, although I've been aware of it for a while, but this
does slightly worry me, and certainly it's sad to hear of something that's
been a very personal investment for somebody failing.

We use Clubhouse, another project management system cut from the "more than
Trello, less than JIRA, and somewhat opinionated about how you should work"
mould. I don't love it in some ways but, y'know, it's pretty good. Our tech
team, plus a number of people outside the team use it and, in the last 12
months, we've added getting on for 16,000 stories.

If Clubhouse failed I'm not sure exactly what we'd do: possibly use GitHub
projects given that these are starting to get close to good enough (they've
been good enough for my side-projects for a while). Hell if I'll go back to
JIRA, but the thought of migrating all that data makes me feel slightly unwell
no matter the eventual destination.

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unrealchild
a swing-and-a-miss is still a swing...something few people are willing risk!
best of luck on the next leg of the journey

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spumoni28
My company used sprintly a few years back and our experience ranged from not-
good to god-awful. It seemed like all feature requests were either ignored or
met with the attitude of "We know better than you do", which was unhelpful at
best.

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eganist
I mean, this is also reflected in their ethos:

> we offered an opinionated way of managing teams and it turned out not enough
> people shared our opinion. In hindsight this is pretty obvious since
> workflows are kinda like opinions in that everyone has one. I think this is
> why tools like JIRA and Trello are so successful. They let you decide how to
> manage your workflow.

It's not a bad thing, it's just a thing.

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spumoni28
It's a thing for a company to do that internally. It's a bad thing, as
evidenced by sprintly's failure, for a company offering a SaaS product in this
space.

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benatkin
That's too bad. It seemed to be going strong for more than half a decade. I
was bummed when SimpleGeo, also cofounded by Joe Stump, got shut down after
being acquired by Urban Airship [1] and glad to see Sprintly thriving. I think
both can be counted as successes, but it's too bad that both no longer exist.
I look forward to see what Joe Stump does next!

1: [https://techcrunch.com/2012/01/13/with-simplegeos-
shutdown-i...](https://techcrunch.com/2012/01/13/with-simplegeos-shutdown-
imminent-parse-swoops-in-with-a-life-preserver/)

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matchagaucho
I read this blog post while simultaneously entering stories into our Pivotal
Tracker (PT) sprint backlog.

There is certainly market demand for good, agile PM tools. Hope this Founder
does a reboot after retrospective.

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adrianmsmith
I have this feeling you are implying Pivotal Tracker is lacking some things?
(Excuse me if I'm wrong.) If so, what sort of things would you like to see
improved? (I've no relation to Pivotal Tracker, I'm just curious.)

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ianhawes
My experience with Sprintly was that it was god-awful slow and had a user
interface straight out of 2008.

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gscott
When I closed my CRM system I put it on cheap hosting and left it up for all
the users who are currently using it let them drop off on their own.

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slig
What about support, uptime, etc? I believe that even if the users aren't
paying they will pester you with demands and support requests.

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gscott
At first but then I spent a lot of time making help videos that walked through
each feature I was able to get tech support near zero with 30 new signups a
day and about 1,200 daily users.

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spraak
> Something that wasn't quite as complicated as JIRA, but offered more
> powerful features than a Trello.

Clubhouse.io fits this perfectly for my team.

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draw_down
That’s too bad. I wanted to work on the product a few years back but I could
tell they really just wanted me to work on consulting projects, and the
Sprintly work (if it ever came around) would be a “reward”. Too many aspects
of it made my Spidey senses tingle to accept.

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calimac
Courageous decision. I tip my hat to you. Best Wishes!

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kapauldo
Congratulations on getting up to bat and giving it your all. Consider the loss
tuition.

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thebigspacefuck
Are there any .ly companies that are just killing it?

~~~
mv4
musical.ly did okay

