
Shutdownify is shutting down - jawns
http://www.shutdownify.com
======
kzhahou
Truth is, this service never quite delivered on their promise. When my last
two startups closed shop, it took shutdownify over 3 days to process the first
one, and the second was still a full two days to get up and running. At that
point I could have just put together a page myself.

It didn't help that they rewrote their tech stack from Ruby to Node even as
they were trying to find customers. In the end, the user doesn't care what
it's built with.

~~~
asavadatti
They had to transition to Node. The UI was really counter intuitive in Ruby.

~~~
eterm
This is one of those posts for which poe's law was written. (notsure)

~~~
chrisdevereux
Challenge accepted!!!! (Possibly missing the point)

    
    
         setOfAllPossibleStatesOfWorld.every(s => s.app.isRewrittenInNode) && app.rubyVersion.hasReallyUnintuitiveUI

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mischanix

        $ whois shutdownify.com
           Updated Date: 19-aug-2015
           Creation Date: 19-aug-2015
           Expiration Date: 19-aug-2016

~~~
uptown
Their incredible journey....

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cpmsmith
Haha, brilliant. I believed it for more than a moment. The WHOIS records spill
the beans, though:

    
    
      Creation Date: 19-aug-2015

~~~
IkmoIkmo
Haha it's fooling virtually everyone in this thread

~~~
stevetjoa
... in part due to some hilariously complicit Hacker News accounts that are
making serious-sounding comments. Not gonna lie; I was initially fooled.

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sz4kerto
Testimonial:

I've been a Shutdownify client as a CEO of many companies, and I must say it
was a joy to shut down my companies using Shutdownify!

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gk1
While I feel bad for the companies who relied on this service and must now
write their own shutdown notices, it's their own fault for trusting a SaaS and
not using a self-hosted solution.

Edit: Can anyone suggest alternatives?

~~~
reinhardt
[http://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/](http://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/)

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actsasbuffoon
Are we sure they're actually shutting down? Maybe this is just a demonstration
of their product, and the quality of the shutdown notice is so high that we're
unable to distinguish this from the real thing.

As a matter of fact, fake shutdown notices could be a great source of...

=== NOTICE OF COMMENT SHUTDOWN ===

The board has decided that this comment stopped being funny several sentences
ago, and has decided to disband the whole thing and go get a sandwich. Cheers!

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joshrotenberg
Calling themselves shutdownly or shutdown.io probably would have saved them.

~~~
nathancahill
shutdownjoy.com

~~~
ZirconCode
drop the 'shut'; downly, downjoy, and eventually migrate to down.io and
down.com, they would certainly have succeeded

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danso
Well-done satire...having the blog run on Tumblr and using a barely modified
Bootstrap template, with parallax scrolling over a background image of a
Brooklyn coffee house would've made it perfect.

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edgesrazor
You just know there's a startup somewhere saying, "Dammit, that was our
idea!".

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pbreit
Wow, for a split second I thought that was real!

~~~
staticelf
I thought it several seconds. I even thought "wow this idea must be the
dumbest...." before I loaded the comments of this thread and immediately
realised that it was I who were dumb.

~~~
protomyth
Actually, it tells us all a lot about the world when we think, even for the
briefest moment "well, I guess, it isn't the most absurd thing I've heard".

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edvinbesic
Does this count as dogfooding?

~~~
bbcbasic
They will be their own customer forever, so they can give themselves $10MM a
month for the notice, and hence produces revenues of $120MM, and easily get a
$6bn valuation.

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jliptzin
"Our board has decided that the company should shut down now and sell all
remaining assets"

I am floored that someone actually invested in this idea, much less an actual
board of directors.

~~~
jliptzin
Whoops, just realized this is all a joke. Thank God.

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huhtenberg
I really hope this is a brilliant piece of satire.

~~~
kyrra
Based on the creation date from it's whois info I'd say it's satire:

    
    
       Domain Name: SHUTDOWNIFY.COM
       Registrar: 1 & 1 INTERNET AG
       Sponsoring Registrar IANA ID: 83
       Whois Server: whois.1and1.com
       Referral URL: http://1and1.com
       Name Server: NS1.DREAMHOST.COM
       Name Server: NS2.DREAMHOST.COM
       Name Server: NS3.DREAMHOST.COM
       Status: ok http://www.icann.org/epp#OK
       Updated Date: 19-aug-2015
       Creation Date: 19-aug-2015
       Expiration Date: 19-aug-2016

~~~
JosephRedfern
Start-ups these days, eh? Serious lack of commitment!

~~~
bbcbasic
You are so 2013. Fail fast!

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fredkbloggs
They really should have tried to find a way to keep going (longer than a day,
at least!). There's going to be a lot of demand for this service in the coming
year. Someone should buy their assets and wait for the coming bust^Wboom.

~~~
jerf
Unfortunately, I regret to inform you that the sum total of their assets is
already freely available and downloadable on the web. I don't think they'll be
able to sell them for much after that sort of IP disaster. Another business
destroyed by CTRL-S piracy. When will the browser vendors take this sort of
thing seriously and put DRM on web pages?

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dvanduzer
For all the satisfied clients, and the investors that just took a writedown on
this year's tax return, now's a good reminder that the Internet Archive
accepts donations:

[http://web.archive.org/web/20150819204235/http://www.shutdow...](http://web.archive.org/web/20150819204235/http://www.shutdownify.com/)

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jbyers
Cue the press release announcing their assets have been purchased by
Acquirely...

------
syncerr
If you guys don't know the author (Shaun Gallagher), he's a pretty awesome
guy!

He's also the author of
[http://www.correlated.org/](http://www.correlated.org/)

~~~
joepvd
...and
[http://www.experimentingwithbabies.com](http://www.experimentingwithbabies.com).
Awesome stuff!

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hakcermani
I had the opportunity to meet the CEO and founding team. Brilliant guys. But
they got too caught up with the how. Ruby then to Node and now to Go. The
promises - from companies shutting down to pay up, didn't pan out. I wish
there was a consumer version of this - I would love to set up a page to
survive me after my demise and I prepay for 10 years of hosting. Demisify ?

------
rdl
The funny thing is this actually could be a good idea. Big companies do source
code escrow as part of on premise software purchases. A SaaS equivalent which
handled data portability, ongoing legal/compliance, etc, as a 10% surcharge on
invoices or something, could solve this for SaaS, making purchases happen when
they might not now.

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0xCMP
[https://twitter.com/shaun_gallagher/status/63410695062035251...](https://twitter.com/shaun_gallagher/status/634106950620352513)

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noonespecial
_Shutdownify 's last meal is its own dog food._

Believed it right up to this brilliant bit of snark.

(re)Curse you, Shutdownify!

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elwell
Or, it's real and this is a publicity stunt to get some exposure, or a
noncommittal way to see how people react to find out if anyone would actually
be interested.

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forgotAgain
Everyone said they were the next unicorn. What happened?

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kazinator
I heard a legend that the Shutdownify stack detects that an entry has been
created for Shutdownify itself. When that happens, it is treated like a FIN
packet: the software serves up the shutdown notice, but schedules an actual
shutdown of itself after a configured period.

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StavrosK
I was in the market for such a solution and tried to use them, but the pricing
was really high. I'm not sure that paying per view on a shutdown notice is the
best model, I would have preferred a flat fee.

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dredmorbius
JMK: In the long run we're all dead.

Would've made a good corporate motto.

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ryanSrich
I don't know what it says about myself or the current state of startups but I
thought this was real until coming to the comments.

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landtco
As a very loyal and frequent shutdownify customer, I am willing to save the
business. Offer is equity only.

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d2xdy2
How does something like this even get investors? The business model banks on
the fact that start-ups are going to fail-- I could imagine scenarios where
potential investors also have money invested into the companies that
Shutdownify would be servicing.

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bbali
It was a perfect business that didn't get the timing right. Their business
would have thrived during 2000, 2008. Now if they lasted a few more months,
they would have been perfectly positioned to take major market share in the
Fall 2015 recession.

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protomyth
Sadly, my first thought was someone tried to outsource the gathering of
company failures to the actual company so they could write an f'd company
article for the ad revenue. Worse, this didn't sound as bad as other business
concepts.

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pkfrank
Reminds me of a 30 Rock bit where Jack is talking about Tracy's kooky
investment:

(S03E15) "His video game made a fortune and he invested all of it in a company
that dismantles bank signs. They're doing very well."

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aerovistae
This is fucking hilarious.

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logfromblammo
Guess they couldn't compete with ExitPlan.com . They do full shutdowns _and_
acquisitions, as well as auctioning off the redundant employees to the highest
bidder.

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ptman
[https://www.reddit.com/r/shutdown/](https://www.reddit.com/r/shutdown/)

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beambot
Business model failure: Bankrupt startups couldn't swing the monthly recurring
payments after shutting down. Pity. Goodbye Shutdownify.

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taytus
This is the Silicon Valley version of Möbius Strip.

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franze
while we are chatting trivialities, does somebody know where the constant
"pinterest is shutting down" rumours
[http://replycam.com/i/Screen_Shot_2015-08-19_at_22_50_13_1B8...](http://replycam.com/i/Screen_Shot_2015-08-19_at_22_50_13_1B8523A1.png)
are coming from?

~~~
nikanj
Those google results come from their app crashing and people seeking remedies

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ronjouch
Brilliant. Considering they can still use their own service, does the
recursion mean infinite $$$, or a stack overflow?

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yaronn01
Shutdownify github page now leads to 404. You would think they should know
better than that. Stay classy, S9Y.

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hathym
That's what you get when you bet on other startups failure

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nickpersico
This should've been their landing page all along.

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gpvos
Is this legit? I can't find anything about them.

~~~
georgemcbay
They used to be called startupify, but they pivoted earlier this week to get
ahead of the bursting startup bubble.

Unfortunately it looks like they ran out of runway soon after the pivot.

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erbo
Far and away, one of the great trolls of all time!

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samstave
Best HN title I have read in a while.

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thatdrew
can someone actually build this service? thx.

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stbullard
/ _checks date_

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BjoernKW
Very meta ...

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zeeshanm
tl;dr :: shutdownify^2

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bbcbasic
The problem with this business model is clearly that if a company is shutting
down it has severe cashflow problems and would not be willing to pay for a
SaaS service for such a thing as trivial as a shutdown notice. It really is a
badly formed business model and is rampant in this 'oh lets get a good team
and we can always pivot if we fuck up' world.

This kind of start up irks mes as a sign that we have really reached the top
of the bubble. Really sell your SF real estate now. Its is going to crash. It
is such a waste of developer talent to put effort into hapless startups like
this. I would like to know which fools invested in this so I can avoid taking
their investment too.

</ Look someone has to take it seriously ;-D >

Edit: Damn this backfired. The downvoterz haz spoken!

~~~
api
Don't feel bad for taking it seriously. I can't tell satire these days. The
world is too strange.

~~~
caffeinewriter
My thoughts went from satire, to serious, then back to satire. It's worrying
how plausible it was that this was a real business at some point in time.

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jsprogrammer
Is it just me or does this title keep changing?

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kungfooman
kthxbye

