
Grove.io shutting down - helper
https://grove.io/blog/grove-shutting-down-october-13
======
Rayne
It's getting a little difficult to trust stuff by Leah Culver. Everything
(that I know of) that she has done so far has either shut down or been
acquired and shut down.

That said, no hard feelings. It's hard out there. I've never tried to run a
company, so I can't judge.

~~~
btipling
Leah is out there creating things, writing code and spending valuable time on
new ventures, despite the risk and opportunity cost. I admire her courage and
creativity and I can't imagine why you would say something like this.

I'm sure she would have loved to have all of her projects succeed.

Grove.io is a high quality service. We love using it at Leftronic and are very
sad to read this news. I wish Leah and her team the best.

~~~
Rayne
I'm not sure what I said that was so terrible. I think Leah is great and I
really hate hear news like this. I also agree that the service was good. My
sole point is that companies that use this service also get hurt by this
shutdown. When it happens several times as it unfortunately has in her case,
you start to worry about new ventures disappearing too.

It is in no way a shot at Leah or her work. It's just a recognition of
history.

~~~
pbiggar
Your first sentence was the thing you said that was so terrible.

~~~
jmathai
But every sentence afterwards put it in context.

~~~
pbiggar
I don't agree. You can't start with a statement like that and then backpeddle
- your lede has the most impact and is what people remember.

He had a chance to edit his post to better reflect his position, but chose not
to take it. I wish he had.

(And to complete this, lets not forget that Rayne is also a person who just
made a mistake. It is the action which is bad, not the person).

~~~
vitriolix
He didn't backpedal, he explained his reasoning for making the first
statement. Hard and a bit unvarnished, yes, but understandable.

------
polemic
Ugh, I don't understand how Grove.io can just drift apart like that. Surely
Grove's costs were relatively low, and my impression was that there was a
significant level of uptake.

> _"..our team has moved on to other projects.."_

So, unprofitable, or just not the next Facebook? Is there really no one that
is happy to keep the service ticking along?

I feel like there is a pretty significant problem with tech startups, where
everyone is so busy trying to be the next big thing, that everything else is
dropped and abandoned in that pursuit.

~~~
sbarre
I also wish they would address:

1) why not open source the project?

2) why not look for someone to take it over and run it?

I also have a hard time seeing how something like this could be at the very
least not break-even (unless they had less than 10 paying customers or
something).

~~~
niggler
Just because something _should_ have paying customers doesn't necessarily mean
that it has paying customers. There are other factors involved.

Better put: are you a paying customer? If not, then most likely other
potential customers are unaware.

~~~
tswicegood
FWIW, I was a paying customer. I know others who were as well. Most everyone I
know, including myself as of two weeks ago, has stopped paying for the
service. It had gone downhill to the point of being unusable.

There is a demand for this type of service. Real-time chat is in extremely
high demand still. Chat was the number one requested feature a "build-you-own"
social network startup I worked at a handful of years ago even before Facebook
added their chat.

~~~
Jaigus
I'm not doubting what you say, but I'm interested in how the service went
downhill?

------
thedjpetersen
Grove inspired me to make an open source alternative: Subway
<https://github.com/thedjpetersen/subway> . And while it is far from perfect
it is a start towards opening up IRC to teams.

~~~
mmahemoff
This looks good. Does it keep history? I think one of the benefits of web-
based systems like HipChat and Campfire is you can log in and see the previous
conversation even if you weren't there.

~~~
StavrosK
You can use bots for that:

<http://instabot.stochastictechnologies.com/>

------
jdoss
Here is why this failed... Anyone with half a brain is going to be able to:

* run their own IRC server

* run a XMPP server ( _cough_ openfire)

* Sign up for another service that has more features (Campfire or Hipchat)

Not to be mean, but the pricing on grove.io is stupid for what they offer. I
run a XMPP server at work and costs us nothing for the basics, which is group
chat and private chat. They could have offered this for far cheaper and maybe
they would be alive now... and by cheaper I mean a flat fee, no slot pricing
for a hosted solution. IRC has low overhead so really, offer IRC+ features for
dirt cheap and people will sign up. Hell, if they wanted a higher end one time
fees, they knock out a self hosted solution with high end support on a yearly
support contract.

If the features are that good for your IRC based service, knock it down to
$5/mo unlimited users and get a user base going, find out what they want and
then add on value addon features based on that feedback. If you can't offer
the service for that cheap, then you have too much overhead (bodies).

~~~
polemic
We were doing this (and still do run our own XMPP servers for other purposes),
and opted for grove for the logging, availability and to ease the maintenance
burden.

Just because anyone can do it, doesn't mean everyone wants to, even (or
especially) when you're a highly tech-centric organisation.

~~~
dools
Yeah I run my own IRC server but when it came to my clients, I didn't want to
be responsible for that. Grove is fantastic but wasn't all that reliable. I
wish it had taken off, though! I might be forced to fill the void ;)

------
kenn
As a founder of <http://lingr.com>, I know firsthand how hard to build a chat
app and make it sustainable. I've been working on it since 2006, first as a
startup, then as my personal side project.

I've learned to not invest too much on the project, staying with the minimum
server cost, and that's the only sustainable way for me. In fact it costs me
almost nothing and users have built trust on me for running it for 6 years.

I'd give her tons of credit for trying to turn it into a real business. That's
what I've been failing so far, or maybe I just don't even have the guts to do.
I admire her courage and thus feel really sorry.

Hopefully I'll find another course, who knows.

~~~
tijs
Looks pretty good actually (from the screenshot), you even have an iPhone app
and everything. Why not just charge a small something, even if it's only to
get you a nice side income? Somebody mentioned $5/month as a reasonable price
for something like this. For me personally that would make me less hesitant to
sign up as currently it would seem you could pull the plug any moment. Unless
you like the idea of being able to pull the plug at any moment of course,
which of course is your prerogative.

~~~
kenn
Thank you. I think you made a good point - by not charging I may be actually
making people skeptical. We even have a vibrant developer community on bots
and extensions, but it's barely known (shit, I realized that it's not even
mentioned on the top page). I'll have to come up with some turnaround ideas.

------
jorde
For those who liked Grove and its combination of IRC and web chat, I
personally recommend Flowdock which also has an IRC interface
<https://flowdock.com/> I know the people behind Flowdock personally and know
that they are going to be around for a long time.

As a personal note, it's sad to see Grove go away. It was the first bigger
service I got to design and I loved working with Leah.

~~~
mh-
can you point me to Flowdock's IRC interface? I evaluated them before we
started adopting Grove, and I did not see that option.

edit: dunno how I overlooked this before: <https://www.flowdock.com/help/irc>

thanks for making me look again, though!

~~~
jorde
They added that afterwards

------
DanielRibeiro
I wonder what they will do next. Grove.io started out of Convore(YCW11)[1],
announced just 249 days ago[2, 3, 4].

[1] <http://gigaom.com/2012/01/10/convore-grove-io/>

[2] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3449917>

[3] <http://betakit.com/2012/02/20/convore-shutting-down-april-1>

[4] [http://blog.convore.com/post/17951919109/convore-shutting-
do...](http://blog.convore.com/post/17951919109/convore-shutting-down-
april-1st)

------
gkoberger
This is disappointing. Grove.io was really awesome. IRC channels seem easy,
but are (relatively) hard to get going:

    
    
      - Finding a server
      - Registering it properly
      - Explaining it to non-tech people
    

The last one is way harder than you'd think. With Grove, you just send them a
URL and it's easy.

It's a shame they're shutting down. I stopped using because it was too
expensive for a channel with a few friends (a channel with fewer than 10
friends was costing $25/month).

~~~
smhinsey
I set Grove up for my distributed team but it didn't stick. I still think
team-level chat is a problem worth solving, but nothing I've tried has gotten
any real traction.

~~~
saurik
What are you currently using? I didn't use Grove, but I use IRC; I've
definitely found that some people really take to it, and some people don't;
some people even end up using IRC only to watch what other people are saying,
and then send PMs as if they were using instant messenger, but never say
things in the channel in public, even if they later talk about the things
being said on IRC when we are all at dinner.

~~~
smhinsey
It tends to naturally revert to gchat or aim, which are not awful, but they
seem to make it easier to accidentally exclude people.

------
mathrawka
I remember trying it out when it was free, and then I got a notice about the
pricing plans. I emailed and said that the prices were outrageously expensive
for just a few users. I never got a reply, but I got an auto-reply a week
later telling me to fill out my billing info.

They put the service out there, and didn't really listen to much feedback or
improve it. I was rather disappointed and find this ending... expected.

------
TallboyOne
Can I ask a stupid question? What causes a message like this? How many people
are involved in the team? Is this a 'startup' or just a few developers having
fun? I just started <http://pineapple.io> and when I see messages like this it
always makes me wonder. it's not the first time i've seen something like this.

It makes me nervours...

------
webology
Some friends of mine were trying to kickstart a business with an open source
Convore / Grove like service called Helm (<http://www.indiegogo.com/helm>).
Daniel's open source work speaks for itself and I think it's an excellent idea
and model.

------
rdl
That has to suck for Leah, especially since there's definitely a worthwhile
product somewhere in the team realtime communications space; maybe grove.io
wasn't it, but I find team IRC and IM to be incredibly useful, and if there
were a good way to combine the two (and some kind of wiki/logging/etc.), with
security, it would be great.

It would be cool if there were a way to put systems in escrow in case a
company tanks or pivots, to protect users. The time to fund and set that up is
during development/normal use, not once you've run out of money and decide to
shut down, though.

------
holgersindbaek
How was the ride? How does the team feel about shutting it down?

------
kenneth_reitz
Shocking.

~~~
whalesalad
I feel/sense sarcasm. I did not see this being useful from day one.

~~~
kenneth_reitz
It's sarcasm mixed with caremad.

I was a huge fan of Pownce, Motion, LeafyChat, Baconfile, Convore, and Grove.
All failed.

I was really hoping this one would work, but after seeing no improvements in a
year, it became obvious it wouldn't. :(

~~~
mh-
Would like your opinion: do you think this is still a viable opportunity-
serving this niche? (paid team chat)

..or is Campfire/HipChat/whatever-else-is-left "good enough" to make it not
worthwhile?

~~~
heretohelp
Hosted IRC is an awkward place to be.

Those that don't give a fuck are using Campfire/HipChat.

Those that do give a fuck are usually hosting their own IRC.

Find a way to squeeze out both and you have a potentially nice business model.
(Hosted IRC + nice web clients for paying customers?)

------
dabeeeenster
What I don't understand is why they dont sell it on Sitepoint or somewhere.
The app must surely have several hundred dollars a month in revenue at the
very least. Someone would pay several thousand dollars for that.

------
Uchikoma
Great move writing a Python export script.

------
BadassFractal
On that note, any good guides for hosting your own IRC server on your home
network (and safely expose it to the Internet) if you have a spare Ubuntu
server box lying around?

~~~
mibbitier
I'd suggest against it personally. Get a $10 linode and setup an ircD there.

If your home network gets DDoS'd, it's going to be quite an inconvenience.

------
malandrew
Instead of shutting down the service with an export option to a data file, how
about identifying two or three competitors you'd recommend and working with
them to export the content directly into another service. This way you help
out both your customers and another startup.

For example, if Grove.io content can be made to work with Flowdock, contact
the Flowdock team and work with them to put a big "Migrate to Flowdock" button
on the shutdown announcement page.

------
tanepiper
The many pivots of Leah Culver

------
timjahn
"...our team has moved on to other projects"

That's the part that gets me. I've seen this many times in other startup
shutdown posts.

They say it so casually. Like this is just another extracurricular activity
they do after school. If they're tired of basketball, they're going to stop
and try hockey.

Except that's not how your customers view it. They're paying you money for a
service they're using to presumably save/make money.

------
dmishe
Back to campfire, I guess.

~~~
pbiggar
I'd recommend hipchat.

~~~
dchuk
We're using Campfire currently, and had used hipchat before that for a few
months. Hipchat was fine on desktop, but holy shit their mobile apps are
terrible. They were so bad that we had to move away because we're a fairly
mobile group.

Honestly, the group business chat niche is just riddled with "incomplete"
products in my opinion. Some are great in the browser but have no native web
apps (Flowdock), some have shitty mobile apps with mediocre web versions
(campfire and hipchat).

I hope someone with a good set of developers, cash in their pockets, and an
eye on simplicity would come in and build a full suite of desktop and mobile
apps on the back of a good chat system one day. It's absolutely not a solved
problem at this point.

~~~
pbiggar
To be honest, I expect that team to be hipchat. They've got cash now since
their acquisition, and they're making steady improvements to their desktop
app.

Personally, I wouldn't enter this market, regardless of how good my devs or
how much money I had. There are at least 3 polished and loved products. The
problems you describe will probably be fixed before another team could come in
with a good solution.

~~~
robbiet480
Just because there are at least three other services out there means you can't
also enter the space and try to disrupt it still?

~~~
pbiggar
Campfire is made by a company with a massive and rabid following, and is
cross-sold to the users of three other popular products, two books, and a
massive blog.

Hipchat is an amazing product which is steadily getting better under the steam
of great developers. It is also owned by Atlassian, a company with great
execution and a strong track record of successful cross-selling.

So under these circumstances, no, I personally wouldn't enter this space.

~~~
mibbitier
You're stuck in a bubble.

Campfire gets a fair bit of attention here, but is unheard of outside the
'startup'/B2B space. The stats they post are laughable - last time I checked
it was a few thousand messages a day - which is pretty minuscule.

Hipchat fills a hole as well, but there are literally thousands of different
ways to spin 'webchat' and carve a big following out.

~~~
pbiggar
> The stats they post are laughable - last time I checked it was a few
> thousand messages a day - which is pretty minuscule

That is laughable - as in it can't possibly be right. Can you provide a link
to this?

From campfirenow.com: "Over 100,000 people have used Campfire to send more
than 60,000,000 chat messages"

~~~
mibbitier
Campfire was released in 2006, 67 months ago.

60,000,000 messages, over 67 months, works out at 895,000 a month - approx
28,000 messages a day.

Or one message every 3 seconds. Campfire could be run from a single small VPS.

I think it's entirely believable that the usage of campfire is that low. All
credit to them, they've managed to get people to pay for something people
don't actually use very often.

~~~
pbiggar
You can't just average them out - you think they have the same number of
customers now as they did when they started?

Let's assume they doubled in size every year - I think that's a good if
imperfect approximation. That would mean 30m messages sent this year, 80K sent
today. A far cry for "a few thousand".

~~~
mibbitier
80,000 messages a day is still ridiculously minuscule. It's a rounding error.
Average them how you like. Assume exponential growth. Whatever. It's still
around the same number of messages that go on in say a single channel on
freenode.

------
alagu
Are there any plans to opensource it? The API hooks were awesome.

------
martindale
This is really a shame. Grove.io is a big part of our startup's
communications. I really hope Leah considers open-sourcing the project, or
turning it over to someone else.

------
twodayslate
I strongly recommend using Atheme services for your next IRC project. They
have a nice web interface and EGS is a really nice third party web interface.

------
kmfrk
The writing was on the wall, after they pivoted from Convore.

Convore even seemed like a darling at Hacker News at the time.

------
baconhigh
ARGH.

I really liked using this service.

------
dr_win
What to do now? What is a viable replacement for Grove.io?

------
stevewilhelm
I have never used IRC. How is it better than Google Chat?

~~~
jsilence
Internet Relay Chat is THE archetype of chat protocols. It has been around
since the early days of the internets. Hence the protocols and software are
mature albeit with some flaws or restrictions that are hard to come by.

Google Talk is using XMPP, an XML based presence and chat protocol that has
also been there for quite a while. It is widely used throughout the net apart
from Google Talk.

So both protocols serve their purpose well. IRC is a little more focussed on
group chats. While one to one conversations are simple, a presence service is
not what IRC was made for. XMPP is strong on presence and one to one chats,
with less focus on group chats.

------
phmagic
noooo! this feels like arrested development.

------
brendoncrawford
I recommend FlowDock as a good alternative.

------
heretohelp
This is why I refuse to use external services hosted by small/tiny companies
that haven't open-sourced their tech.

Even in this moment, they still don't seem to be bothering to open source any
of it.

There's a lesson to be learnt here in terms of gaining buyer trust when you're
small.

I continue to use our own setup for IRC.

~~~
pbiggar
Its a self-fulfilling prophesy. You can't get big without customers, but
customers won't use you because you're small.

How do we overcome this?

(Edit: I was asking a rhetorical question to counter the parent. But great
discussion below.)

~~~
crag
No NO.. it's not because they're small. It's because tech start-ups have a
history of shutting down or selling, and leaving their users in the dust.

The list is long. Another recent example was Sparrow. I broke my rule about
buying/licensing software from small companies (unless I got the source) with
Sparrow. I didn't just buy 1 copy, I (we) brought 15 (for the office). And of
course, I got burned. Again.

It will not happen again. Period. Unless you tell me up front your plans -
what you plan to do for me, the user, when/if you fail or sell.

~~~
jonursenbach
Did you really get burned with Sparrow though? You bought software, not a
service. Them being bought, and shut down, by Google has zero effect on you
given that you can continue to use their software. Forever.

~~~
_neil
According to a friend, the most recent version of Sparrow is essentially
broken (100% CPU and crashes). I haven't upgraded in a while for this reason,
and I'm not expecting that issue to be fixed, ever.

That said, I'm still using Sparrow on my laptop and desktop machines as well
as my iPhone. But probably not for a whole lot longer.

~~~
hzy
I don't know about your friend, but I'm happily using the latest version of
Sparrow with no issues whatsoever, maybe he has some other unrelated
problems...

------
rorrr
Why shut down if you have paying customers? Just let it run. Servers are dirt
cheap, there's no way they are losing money at their prices.

~~~
mibbitier
They're hosted with rackspace afaik. So they probably _are_ losing money.

~~~
kenneth_reitz
I'm pretty sure YC companies get either free or heavily discounted Rackspace.

<http://www.rackspacestartups.com/yc/index.html>

