
Farewell from Waffle - gre
https://blog.waffle.io/farewell-from-waffle-%EF%B8%8F-794da4a72851
======
bastawhiz
Oftentimes I see farewell posts like this, but the company website has already
been mostly turned down. It would be helpful for folks like me who have never
heard of Waffle to know what the service was. Having that tiny bit of context
at the top of the article (or even just keeping the marketing site alive!)
helps to put the shutdown in context.

And yes, I can search, but more often than not the first page of search
results are news stories that the service is shutting down rather than
resources that describes what it actually was.

~~~
davweb
In short: Trello, but with GitHub integration.

[https://help.waffle.io/getting-started/what-is-
waffle](https://help.waffle.io/getting-started/what-is-waffle)

~~~
avip
But trello has github integration.

~~~
acct1771
Notice they're closing?

~~~
jasonmp85
Trello's integration is an afterthought and I never found it as useful or
simple as Waffle's; they'll be missed.

They're not "closing"; CA Technologies bought them a while back and now CA is
selling to Broadcom, who's killing the product.

------
jwr
When people ask me whether my self-funded (bootstrapped) business is viable, I
point out that a self-funded long-term stable business is more viable than a
VC-funded startup.

In discussions, I ask customers to imagine which of the possible outcomes of a
VC-funded startup would be good for them as customers (hint: none of the
possible outcomes are good for customers, with the possible exception of a
rare unicorn IPO).

My problem is that VC-funded startups have money to burn, so they artificially
lower subscription software pricing.

~~~
ddebernardy
It's not just lower subscription software pricing.

It's also faster time to market, because they're able to field entire teams of
engineers to deliver what your tiny team is working on much faster. And they
can do a lot more content marketing and advertisement that you've no time or
budget to get done.

And then when they run out of money they post a blog post on a Friday morning
to announce that you need to get your data out of their system _by the end of
the day_. (Edit: in this case 2 months.)

On an off topic note, your site's FAQ says:

> So is this a one-man operation?

> Yes, for the moment it is. Which is actually a good thing, if you're
> concerned about viability. This means that there are no investors, no burn
> rate to speak of, no need to shut the company down because the money ran
> out. It is a mature, long-term project.

FYI my own concern as a buyer would be what happens if you get hit by a bus.
You really need to get some kind of partner, or an employee the moment you can
afford one.

~~~
jwr
If I get hit by a bus, there is a list of people/companies that can take over
the business and continue to develop/maintain it. And since it is a viable
business, it will make sense for someone to take over.

Please note that getting hit by a bus should be considered in terms of
probabilities: while possible, compare it to the near-certainty of "something"
happening to a VC-funded business within 3 years, where none of the
"somethings" are good for customers.

~~~
ddebernardy
Consider adding that first paragraph to your FAQ. It will go a _long_ way
towards reassuring some of your prospects.

------
rsyring
If someone is looking for an alternative, we use:

[https://www.zenhub.com/](https://www.zenhub.com/)

I specifically like that it gives us estimates and a Kanban board approach. I
also like that they are thinking about the project management workflow as a
whole and trying to educate:

\- [https://www.zenhub.com/book/github-project-
management](https://www.zenhub.com/book/github-project-management)

\- [https://www.zenhub.com/github-project-
management.pdf](https://www.zenhub.com/github-project-management.pdf)

It's not perfect, but it's been serving our needs better than Redmine used to
and GitHub alone was doing.

No affiliation, just a mostly satisfied customer.

------
aupright
ZenHub Co-founder here. On behalf of the ZenHub team we wanted to take a
moment to acknowledge all of the incredible work by the Waffle.io team (past
and present) over the past four years. We have nothing but respect for the
team and want to wish them all the best in their next adventures!

While Waffle and ZenHub are competing products in a way, we both share similar
views on the importance of project management being developer-first. It's been
a fun journey building in the space along side Waffle and we continue to
remain excited about the future of project management in GitHub!

If anyone is interested, you can check out ZenHub here:
[https://www.zenhub.com/](https://www.zenhub.com/)

~~~
ndarilek
Man, I don't know if I'm going to regret posting this tomorrow, but if folks
at ZenHub are going to pop into this thread and promote themselves as a
product developers are encouraged to switch to, as a blind developer, I wish
they'd at least pay lip service to web accessibility best practices. As a
blind screen-reader-using developer, I tried to use ZenHub as a contractor at
my last gig and it was impossible. As in, I'm on my desktop doing a
screenshare to my coworker across the country viewing my screen on his iPhone,
and he's trying to tell me milimeter by milimeter how to move my mouse so I
can dismiss _one_ of your onboarding popups which I couldn't dismiss via
keyboard on several OS's screen readers, only to be presented immediately
thereafter by another. I couldn't use your broduct at all on my own until a
sighted coworker helped me to dismiss your onboarding popups, then I found it
hard and unintuitive how to navigate the interface as a screen reader user.

Not upset, just frustrated that I couldn't do my job, and I wish you'd done
some basic accessibility testing on your interface. If that's a gap in your
development staff, I'm currently looking for work. Just sayin'. :)

In any case, kudos for creating a quality product that folks I respect enjoy
using. I hope that one day I can be among them.

~~~
aupright
Thanks for this feedback ndarilek, I appreciate you taking the time to call it
out. Candidly, you're absolutely right—this is an area that we need to be more
considerate of as we continue to scale and I apologize that it lead to a less
than ideal first experience for you.

We've started down the path of completing an accessibility audit, and are
hoping to use those findings to drive highest priority areas of improvement
moving forward. While I'm not certain on timelines , I definitely think there
could be an opportunity to engage moving forward and would be happy to keep
you involved if you're interested.

If you'd like, you can reach me directly aaron@zenhub.com

~~~
ndarilek
Thanks, super happy to hear that! If I sound harsh, please understand that
it's from the perspective of someone who starts out excited about how the
latest and greatest startup will disrupt my life, only to realize that half of
their app is unusable to me. When I raise _any_ issues like this, the most I
can usually hope for is "thanks for your comments, they made our day,
unfortunately we have no intention of fixing these issues at this time." So
when I encounter inaccessibility among developer-focused tools, and think
about how unemployment among disabled folks hovers around 70%, it's hard not
to be jaded, and frustrated about how making accessibility an afterthought
makes employment a bigger challenge for some of us.

So I'm glad to hear that you're undergoing an audit, and I hope that I can
someday count ZenHub among the developer tools I can use. FWIW, Slack isn't
even in this group, which is shameful given they patted themselves on the back
for such a keyboard-friendly interface when they killed off XMPP. No, I'm not
bitter. :P

------
blackrobot
Is there a comparable kanban project manager that uses github issues?

I would migrate to github projects, but last I'd checked some key features
were missing from github projects:

1\. New issues are added to the backlog column by default.

2\. Epics, or anything that allows one issue to have multiple sub-issues.

3\. The ability to label one issue as blocking another by using keywords, eg:
_blocks #123_ or _requires #321_.

Is there a simple way of solving these with probot or github actions?

[probot]: [https://probot.github.io](https://probot.github.io)

[github actions]:
[https://github.com/features/actions](https://github.com/features/actions)

~~~
sevilo
Zenhub is a great alternative, has all the features that you mentioned!

------
rcarmo
I think it is _extremely_ positive that they built an export function to
GitHub projects, and wish more startups did a "clean" exit in terms of
customer data.

Kudos.

~~~
bdcravens
Presumably when you hit the point of shutdown, most companies don't want to
(or realistically, can't) spend the money on what is a new feature (and
potentially a pretty significant one)

(though a simple export to CSV would be better than what most companies do)

------
corprew
Farewell and good luck on your new adventure, loved your product and used it
to our great advantage a few years ago.

~~~
DoofusOfDeath
Totally agree. I've used your product in the past, and I was quite happy with
it. I think you can take pride in a job well done.

------
stblack
Unmentioned in comments so far: Waffle had the ability to consolidate issues
from several Github repos at once.

We used one view that made issues from four repos appear as one.

This is a feature I'll really miss.

What other product does this? Looking for something.

~~~
aupright
Hey stblack - we have that same feature in ZenHub. Feel free to check out
[https://www.zenhub.com/product](https://www.zenhub.com/product)

------
ErikAugust
The “Rally product” mentioned here is atrocious. To discontinue Waffle and
continue Rally is a tragedy.

~~~
bshimmin
I had the misfortune to use Rally for a few months about five years ago - I
often laugh quietly to myself when I hear people complaining about Jira's UX.

------
Larrikin
I was sad and surprised until I realized it wasn't the waffles I care about.

~~~
aboutruby
I thought it was the WaffleJS in SF.

------
xiaq
I really appreciated the candidness in this post - really feels like fresh air
compared to how such posts are usually worded
([https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/](https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/))!

~~~
dsimms
I wondered if they were consciously avoiding "journey"!

------
mrborgen
Hey all,

Always sad to see good products shutting down. Also a bit frightening as I'm
about to enter this same market, hehe.

I want to mention what we're building in case anyone looks for alternatives in
this thread.

It's called GitSpeak and it's a project management tool which prioritizes
developers first. Our goal is to create a PM tool that devs actually enjoy
working with, and which saves them time rather than eat time.

Some of our features include multi-repo views, boards, a rich text editor and
a neat screencasting option for code reviews, docs, and onboarding. Plus, we
are going to be the fastest one out there (we're using Imba.io to build the
tool btw).

Check it out here if you're interested:

[https://gitspeak.com/](https://gitspeak.com/)

~~~
mathrawka
Are you trying to get users to sign up for the product that you say you are
about to shutdown?

~~~
arcticfox
I don't think they're part of Waffle, but rather a new competitor.

------
3into10power5
Instructive when using SAAS. >>In the summer of 2014, we accidentally deleted
everyone’s “In Progress” column from their board. And not just the ones in
English either…. After 2 feverish hours of scripting, MongoDB ninjary, and
Google Translating, the columns were back and we decided we should not attempt
to ship anything else that day.

------
JMTQp8lwXL
This is why I find it really difficult to adopt smaller products. They quite
frequently get shut down.

~~~
ken
The primary issue is the cost of switching, and Waffle was actually very good
at this. It was basically just a front-end for GitHub Issues. I always knew
that if at any point Waffle shut down, I'd be no worse off than before I
started using them, and I'd still have all my data.

I'm actually much more concerned about GitHub itself. I still haven't found a
good way to back up my Issues. They used to point to joeyh's Haskell program,
which is neat but has many severe limitations (like: doesn't support private
repos at all). Their current recommendation seems to be a third-party service
called "BackHub", whose cheapest plan is more expensive than GitHub Pro.

~~~
JMTQp8lwXL
Maybe issues should just be built into Git itself. Can't really imagine
software development without them.

~~~
xkcd-sucks
If you track issues in a text file, sqlite DB etc -- they already are in git.
(But I've never seem anyone do this)

~~~
ken
SQLite files can't easily be merged. Putting one database in another database
doesn't allow you to take advantage of the best features of either one.

Text files are a good idea, and I've done that for many of my own projects.
You just need to figure out a filename scheme, and a file format (JSON?
YAML?). It's great to be able to atomically commit a fix to the source code,
and also close the bug report.

I'm not sure how well it would scale. (Mozilla has 1.5M bug reports in their
Bugzilla!) At the least, you'd need a local client that could index the text
files into a format more suitable for sorting/searching. It would only need to
download the diffs, though.

~~~
xkcd-sucks
Oh oops, there already exist bug trackers for a few decades :)

Take your favorite bug tracker and put its offline storage into a git
submodule?? I imagine they are all better than GitHub issues which are
literally just a forum of threads

------
tedunangst
Why did Broadcom buy waffle?

~~~
chipotle_coyote
They didn't, exactly. Computer Associates bought Waffle, and then Broadcom
bought CA. Not all of CA's priorities are going to be Broadcom's priorities,
so.

~~~
ralph84
It's even more far removed than that. A team of interns at Rally Software
created Waffle.io in 2013. Then CA acquired Rally in 2015. Then Broadcom
acquired CA in 2018. Waffle.io was not a material reason for either
acquisition.

------
forkLding
Used waffle.io for many years in my university years, however the market is
very competitive and I understand why they shut down.

------
nikofeyn
what is the deal with these startup company names that have nothing to do with
anything the company does? they are just random single words with a logo
directly representing that random word in a “cute” way. why not name the
company sensible? or is the mentality truly temporary?

~~~
aiiane
Well, it does avoid them needing to rebrand if they decide to pivot...

