

Etacts (YC W10) Shutting Down - Omnipresent
https://etacts.com/

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mikeknoop
"We will remain fully operational during the transition"

Transitioning from operational to shut down...? That's odd word choice.

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mikeknoop
Aha! [http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/21/salesforce-buys-email-
conta...](http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/21/salesforce-buys-email-contact-
manager-etacts/)

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yoseph
Did I read that correctly? Ashton Kutcher is an angel investor?

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oneplusone
He is listed on Angel List so I would assume so.

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dpcan
In my opinion, the problem with reminder services is that I have to remember
to use them.

They can ping me all day via email, twitter, facebook, SMS, whatever, but it
takes only 1 or 2 pings before my subconscious trains itself to ignore the
reminders.

Also, a reminder is hit and miss. If I don't have time to take action on the
reminder, it fails.

~~~
erikb
In my opinion, if you don't remember something yourself and then ignore
something telling you about it can be called on purpose.

But maybe it just means, this is not the right service for you.

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angelbob
That's deeply unfortunate. I loved you guys on demo day.

Based on my choices, apparently I shouldn't try more angel investment. I _was_
an investor in NewsLabs. This would have been another "yeah, let's invest"
choice if they were interested (they weren't). I think I may have picked the
two first to close up shop.

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joshu
I didn't realize you were angel investing, Noah. Drop me a line.

NewsLabs wasn't raising enough money, so I didn't even consider it. I've said
it before but: don't invest in companies raising too little. They will fail.

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axod
> "I've said it before but: don't invest in companies raising too little. They
> will fail."

I presume that by 'they will fail', you mean that the company will fail to
make your required ROI as an investor, being acquired for millions?

At first read it seems like you're saying that unless you raise a ton of money
you can't build a successful profitable business...

IMHO Newslabs failed because it was a terrible idea, not because of anything
else.

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joshu
I mean that it will go out of business.

Venture backed companies raise mone because they have have some significant
buildout to complete before they can got market. Raise too little and the
chances of reaching that point are too small.

Additionally, if a startup cannot attract a certain amount of interest from
investors, that is a big hint, too.

Note that didn't say how much that minimum is. You are making assumptions.

Bootstrapped businesses are great, too. But I am talking about a different
kind of company.

Anyway, yes, the news space is dismal and I avoid it. But I never needed to
get to that part of the analysis.

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axod
Thanks for clarifying. VC backed startups seem like a whole different world.

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joshu
Well, raising money = venture backed.

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paraschopra
I am amazed how such a small team can use $650k of funding in just 6-7 months.
Can anyone comment?

Though I would love to see a detailed postmortem post on this.

~~~
angelbob
Partly they're amazing guys. If you talked to them, you'd understand some of
how they managed.

All that stuff PG talks about -- utter confidence, and projecting "we're going
to succeed and change the world," like it was just going to happen with you or
without you? They were really good at that.

~~~
paraschopra
I think you misunderstood me. I did not ask how they raised $650k. I asked how
they used up all this money in 6 months. (Assuming they are shutting down and
have no money left)

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oscardelben
They have been acquired by salesforce apparently

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achompas
Apparently they're being bought out:

[http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/21/salesforce-buys-email-
conta...](http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/21/salesforce-buys-email-contact-
manager-etacts/)

~~~
atldev
If they are being bought out, seems like a sloppy way to handle the
communication. At a minimum it's confusing to existing users, which I assume
Salesforce would like to keep.

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hugh3
Doesn't Salesforce have a rather more limited target market than etacts? I've
never used either product but I get the impression that Salesforce is targeted
to salesmen and etacts is targeted to the general population.

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lincolnq
I'd love a postmortem.

~~~
gnok
Agreed. They didn't seem to have issues finding investments or visibility. If
this is one of those "other issues" cases, there's lots to learn from here.

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Alex3917
Startups don't fail due to a lack of funding or visibility; that's pretty much
the default.

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gnok
Hmm. That's interesting. I can think of many products that failed essentially
because no one heard of them and not because they were too expensive. I guess
I didn't think too much before applying this analogy to startups.

Could you cite some interesting examples of startup failures worth reading
about?

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Alex3917
"I can think of many products that failed essentially because no one heard of
them and not because they were too expensive."

Products don't fail because no one has heard of them, they fail because no one
buys them. It's your job to go out and find customers; waiting for people to
hear about you isn't a strategy, it's a 100% guaranteed way to fail.

Real entrepreneurs figure out their customer acquisition strategy before
designing and building their product. Those who do it the other way around
aren't entrepreneurs, they're just hobbyists. Read Four Steps to the Epiphany,
Crossing the Chasm, Bootstrappers Bible, etc.

~~~
gnok
Thanks much! For me (a hobbyist looking to be an entrepreneur), your response
was spot on.

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vietor
One of the reasons I'm leery of using products made by startups, in addition
to the risk of them failing, sometimes when they succeed you lose just as much
as if they'd failed.

We got burned pretty bad with a product a few years ago when our payment
provider was acquired and basically just shutdown without providing any means
of migrating. It was a subscription based data service and half of our
customers canceled because they no longer trusted us with their data after we
"lost" their payment information and they had to re-enter it.

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gfunk911
I signed up for this service but didn't really use it. I really like the
concept. It wanted to remind you when you hadn't been in contact with friends
in a while. Good luck to these guys.

Does any of the Etacts guys (or anyone else) know why they didn't target
Facebook?

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InfinityX0
Hard to not see the implicit, inherent irony that they couldn't determine an
effective way to remind you to use the service.

~~~
Terretta
I found their reminders effective because they were so spot on, people I
really did need to contact.

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jazzychad
Same goes for Email Oracle: <https://emailoracle.com/>

Edit: yes, they were both made by the same team...

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vinsan
<https://etacts.com/> & <https://emailoracle.com/> carry same message, word to
word. Guess they both were run by the same people.

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mileszs
I think you're correct. The privacy policy link on emailoracle.com points to
the etacts privacy policy.

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hopkins54
Why does everyone assume they "gave up" or "run out of money"? A private or
yet to be announced acquisition is just as likely...

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pclark
Didn't they raise a strong seed round in the past few months?

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bretpiatt
$650k according to CrunchBase on 5/14/2010
<http://www.crunchbase.com/company/etacts>

Depending on what they spent money on since then they could be reaching the
next point of fundraising again and decided it wasn't the right thing to go
do.

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axod
Off to work at facebook?

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Omnipresent
I'd believe that

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jimboyoungblood
is google believable too?

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Tyrberg
Anyone that knows about a service for tracking and remind you about unanswered
emails? Etacts (and their service EmailOracle) was saving me so many hours
each week. Need to find some new service for this! Do anyone knows a service
that does the same (track and remind unanswered emails)?

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andrewjshults
I'm not sure what I'd import the data into (at least right now), but it'd be
nice if they offered an export functionality rather than just wholesale
killing all the data. I don't use it all the time, but the followup feature
was great and something that I'm going to miss having.

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js4all
This seemed like a great idea. I bet the biggest obstacle were privacy
concerns.

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vineet
They provided a service which I would not have minded paying for (with a few
more features). So I am really surprised to hear this.

Looking forward to hearing why the decision was made.

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Omnipresent
It was a good product that caught the eye. Though, I didn't have a good use
for it I had few friends who used it on regular basis. Entertain a theory of
them catching google's eye?

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Tichy
I always meant to create a Greasemonkey script that lets your friends pictures
decay physically on Facebook or Twitter if you don't stay in touch. Still
think that could be fun.

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insight
Great service, used it all the time. Did priority inbox killed it? However,
the idea of tracking response to important emails, and contacts you was not in
touch with, is great.

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Adaptive
I've been trialing both etacts and gist for a while and really preferred much
of what etacts was doing, particularly the more sensible time-since-last-
contact reminders, etc.

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Monkeyget
Is there any alternative?

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jjsnyc
I've used both Gist.com and Rapportive.com...

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jordanlyall
To my knowledge, neither has a "days since contact" feature.

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jjsnyc
Agreed --- going to miss etacts, and hope one of the other companies can build
something similar in. I need something that will automatically remind me to
contact people within the network.

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vinsan
"... and hope one of the other companies can build something similar in..."
Well, EmailOracle is very similar and it is closing too, exactly on Jan 31,
2011

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jasonmcalacanis
I really liked this startup...

