

Convore Shutting Down - arunagarwal
http://blog.convore.com/post/17951919109/convore-shutting-down-april-1st

======
dools
Grove is fantastic. I've been using IRC to communicate with my team forever
and we were just using freenode. I finally got around to setting up an IRC
server on one of our machines but when it came time to configuring and
securing it properly it was going to take days to read through all that
documentation, so I just locked it down at the firewall level and we all
connect using a forwarded SSH port, or from the local host (we all use irssi
as our chat client anyway).

A (rather large) ad agency that a friend of mine works for has a small group
of people that wanted a collaboration solution and they all liked IRC so I
sold them a monthly VPS with an IRC server configured but guess what - they
have to forward a port to connect. That was cool, they said, they're on OSX
and I provided them with scripts that just setup the port and opened Adium for
them in a single click ... then along came a contractor that wanted to use
windows :S

So I said look: you can pay me to figure out all this shit for you, it'll take
me days and cost you thousands of dollars, but for that same money you could
buy a few _years_ of a grove.io subscription and I can still connect all the
same bots that I've got running for you.

Seriously the price point they've got there is great. Properly configuring and
securing a high availability IRC server isn't as simple as "set and forget"
you have to do quite a bit of reading and configuring in order to get it
running properly. Plus Grove has a bunch of web configuration options that are
really handy for less technical folks.

IRC is the chat technology of the past, present, and future, keep it up guys.

~~~
moe
I agree with the praise for IRC, but I don't see what you need grove for.
There's mibbit, irccloud and a few other web IRC clients, all of which seem
quite a bit more advanced than grove. And for the server-part; why not hop
onto freenode, make a private channel - and off you go?

If you insist on private server then that shouldn't take someone linux-savvy
more than 15 minutes either.

You literally type 'apt-get install inspircd', tweak two and a half values in
the config file (to enable SSL and set a server-password) - and that's it. An
irc-daemon is not exactly maintenance-heavy, mine has been running for over a
year without a blip.

~~~
dools
Firstly, you're not actually allowed to use freenode like that, technically
it's supposed to be for open source projects right?

Secondly, I wouldn't run a server application like that on a publicly
accessible server without learning pretty thoroughly about how to configure it
securely, ymmv obviously but I just wouldn't do it.

Thirdly, there are a bunch of web configuration options that allow non-
technical folks to login and do a bunch of stuff. If my client were paying me
to do that for them they'd blow their Grove.io budget by an order of magnitude
or two each month.

~~~
rhizome
So don't use Freenode. EFNet has had invisible, keyed channels since forever.

------
RexM
I signed up and tried grove a few weeks ago, I didn't really see the point. I
then stumbled across some video tutorials for using hook.io to connect to an
IRC server (#4,5 in the list of video tutorials)
(<http://blog.nodejitsu.com/hookio-video-tutorials>) and immediately thought
of grove.

It seems, to me, that they decided to use the tutorial, hook up web sockets
(#9 in the tutorial list), add a nice interface, log all the events hook.io
emits, and decided to charge way too much for it.

I could be missing something, but that was my initial impression.

~~~
jfarmer
If you're comfortable configuring and maintaining your own IRC service and
have the time to do it, I daresay you're not Grove's target customer.

~~~
dabeeeenster
It's not exactly hard! Just compile a package, run it and forget about it...

~~~
hugs
The same logic could apply for hosting your own git server. And yet, GitHub
thrives. Why is that?

~~~
dmix
Also Heroku. Tons of examples...

~~~
pluies_public
To be fair, unless you're a huge organisation with thousands of users, an IRC
server is just a single process on a low-end machine or small VM. You can't
really compare that with the whole infrastructure Heroku provides.

------
maxklein
Paul Graham said. "We're trying to figure out why this YC batch did so well.
One theory: they all used Convore (<http://convore.com)>

What actually made the startups switch _away_ from convore? At the point pg
said that, quite a number must have been using it. Then they just stopped?

~~~
mahmud
There are many reasons why Paul Grahama might speak too highly of Convore, but
one theory is endowment effect:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endowment_effect>

People think more highly of things that they have an ownership stake in.

------
bonaldi
So they burnt the Convore customers ... why would I trust them with Grove,
exactly?

Pivoting in real life is an elegant move; this feels more like stumble-and-
run.

~~~
ellie42
Leah Culver can't do startups right. First Pownce, now Convore. What's next?
Grove? Let's wait and see.

~~~
yummyfajitas
While I'm not a fan of Leah Culver at all (I view her as Eric Raymond^2,
better at selling the image of geekiness than at actual coding), most startups
fail even with good founders.

Besides, don't we pride ourselves on accepting failure and treating it as a
learning experience?

~~~
rdl
I've met her a couple times, and have a different opinion. (I admit, I was
biased a bit before meeting her, based on all the press and the murder of a
friend's RAID while drunk...)

While she might not be the best computer scientist in the world of startups,
she's great at the other roles in a startup, and is certainly a competent
developer now. Not everyone in a startup needs to be a classically trained
computer scientist with a Stanford PhD. Not every successful startup has to
look like Google. You know who also wasn't a great computer scientist? Steve
Jobs.

(I actually met esr when I was growing up in Pennsylvania, too -- he ran the
local community Free-Net which I used for Internet access. He was a hardcore
geek back then, and seems to have shifted more toward self-promotion and
politics over time. He actually wrote some decent code for BSD/OS and ISP
operations.)

------
goodweeds
Late last year I was in an incubator where Convore started. There were 2 other
companies doing the same exact thing .. All of the YC companies were using
HipChat, Convore seemed like "yet another copycat site to sign up for an
account with". Chat is a solved problem. Let's move on.

~~~
nkohari
Nothing is a solved problem. HipChat's a great product, and in my opinion the
current market leader, but there are always ways to innovate and disrupt.
(That being said, using IRC probably isn't it.)

~~~
mattdeboard
You can't mean this literally.

~~~
nkohari
No, I do mean it literally. The wheel is a pretty basic invention, and yet
tire manufacturing is a $140 billion industry that spends a great deal on
research and development.

When you think a problem is solved, it's actually in a perfect position to be
disrupted.

~~~
functionform
Are you familiar with the phrase "reinventing the wheel"?

~~~
nkohari
Yes. My point was that there's a huge amount of effort currently being
expended to do just that. No one is trying to change the fact that a wheel is
round and rolls, but from there, there's quite a bit of space to innovate.

------
fudged
My opinion when I got accounts on Convore and Pownce: "This is neat, I guess."

I can't quite articulate what I think they did wrong... but these products
just felt too startupy to survive.

~~~
aspir
Agreed. But their "pivot" into Grove is actually really valuable. Chat is
pretty essential for teams (ours at least), but it's not that easy to build it
yourself without running into major scope creep and other headaches. I'd
rather pay a little for reliability rather than distract the team from the
main goal to build a chat system.

------
tef____
I would have preferred to see an extended read-only period, rather than a
month in which to panic-download your data (and the export functionality seems
to be broken right now too <https://convore.com/export> ).

I'd really like it if there was more time to capture the site and submit copy
to the internet archive. I'll see what I can do with archive team.

So long, and thanks for all the data! Perhaps convore is an apt name for
something that consumes your history. :-)

~~~
akkartik
Export worked for me, but it's moronic. It seems like every user gets all his
utterances.. which are utterly useless without context.

They're basically treating the data as if it's email or facebook posts and
comments (those last also mostly useless without context). But it's not, it's
a far finer granularity of interaction.

Convore, please let users download logs for the channels they're members of.

------
tomatohs
I'm working on a site with functionality similar to convore. Discussion is
centered around links in a manner similar to reddit or HN. Just finished an
alpha test, you can register for the beta at <http://b00st.com>.

------
driverdan
I don't understand Grove. Why would you pay so much for hosted IRC with very
limited users? $10/m for 5 users seems crazy high to me.

~~~
socialist_coder
Especially since Skype gives you all of their functionality for free. I'm
really wondering what advantage this has over Skype group chats (which is
free).

~~~
dasil003
Without even looking at their page: logging, persistence, availability, API
hooks.

Skype is awesome and is the cornerstone of my team for private communications.
But if history is only transferred when parties are connected, and only
between people who are explicitly added to each chat, it leaves a giant gaping
hole in group communications.

~~~
moe
_logging, persistence, availability, API hooks._

Skype has all that, except the API hooks (which I'd expect pretty low on
anyones list).

Also not sure what you mean by "availability". Skype is about as available as
it gets - Everyone and their dog already has it installed.

~~~
dasil003
Availability means it's online all the time. A server isn't, people's Skype
isn't. Maybe it works for you if you're all in the same office, but I have
people in 8 different time zones.

------
humbyvaldes
Im glad the team is moving on, bigger and better! But why not keep the site
up. How expensive could it be to show your commitment to the few users you do
have. If anything it builds a good reputation on keeping your projects going
even if it wasn't the massive success the founders wanted. Im all for progress
but every project doesn't need to die does it?

~~~
pavel_lishin
Even open sourcing it would be good enough for those that really care to self-
host.

------
nkohari
I never quite got Convore. Grove is sort of interesting, but I doubt it'll
displace us from HipChat.

The major advantage of using a non-proprietary protocol like IRC is that
people can choose their own clients... but the state of most IRC clients
nowadays is abysmal. Colloquy on OS X, for example, hasn't been updated in
years.

If I was going to use IRC to communicate with my team, I'd just create a
private channel on Freenode. We'd miss out on archiving, but I don't think
that that feature alone is worth $2/user/month.

~~~
technomancy
Freenode is for free software. It's not "free as in someone else runs our
private chat for us." Hosting business chat via terms of service abuse is
inadvisable to say the least.

~~~
jenncom
Many companies have used private and/or secret channels on efnet for decades
without complaint.

------
instakill
I still get a weekly email from Convore telling me about new posts in the
groups I belong to, and when I try to click through to them, I get sent to
arbitrary pages. How can one unsubscribe from the mails?

~~~
leahculver
You can unsubscribe from all Convore email here:
<https://convore.com/settings/notifications/>

Just make sure that you sent "Send me summary e-mails" to "Never". Hope that
helps!

------
Aaronontheweb
Honest question: why would I use Grove over HipChat?

~~~
phzbOx
It's not really about Grove vs HipChat but more IRC vs HipChat. IRC is a
really old and open protocol, meaning that hackers built lots of tool around
it and already love it. But it's a pain to configure and maintain it if you've
got more important things to do. (Like building your app). A couple years ago,
I believe grove wouldn't have stand a chance against the hacker mentality of
"I'll do it myself", but now that more and more companies need to go as fast
as possible, it makes sense to pay a little bit to have a service that's
stable and just work out of the box.

And, for me personally, I hate HipChat clients (IIRC they run on a crap adobe
version?) and I like using the existing tools I have for IRC. For instance,
I've already setup everything to work on my vps with irssi, with the plugins I
want, the theme I want, etc. I don't want a "new and prettier" solution to a
solved problem.

~~~
herval
I'd say it's about "the chat tool you use" vs grove. In my case, it's also
HipChat/Campfire.

Unless you're focusing SPECIFICALLY on "hackers that love IRC" - in which case
your market is quite small (compared to the whole corporate chat market),
imho...

~~~
phzbOx
Well, "hackers that love IRC" is still a huge market if you think about all
the software companies. And, even if it's a smaller one, sometime it's better
to create a product that'll be used by less people rather than trying to build
something for everyone and ended up with nobody using it. But I feel your
concern, Grove might become a successful small business but they'll have to
attack other market or build different products to continue to grow.

------
rhizome
Looks like they gave it a year:
[http://eflorenzano.com/blog/2011/02/16/technology-behind-
con...](http://eflorenzano.com/blog/2011/02/16/technology-behind-convore/)

I'm not trying to dance on their grave or anything, but from reading this
article it appears a company I worked with last summer had read it as well,
and that level of -- let's call it "sophisticated" -- messaging architecture
was _beyond unwieldy_ for an early-stage company. I can understand wanting to
avoid Michael Arrington calling you "amateur hour" when things fall over under
popularity, but there's a such thing as overengineering.

I realize my opinion might be based on a red herring or strawman, but when
chat is the "Hello World" of server-side JS I'm just not sure there was enough
_outside of the architecture_ to hang a company on.

------
shingen
Grove looks really interesting.

The pricing strikes me as a bit odd though.

You're actually charging more per user for more users ($2 per user for 5
users; $2.50 per user for 50 users), rather than giving larger accounts a
discount. I imagine the reason for it is the load it places on your
infrastructure, but I've rarely seen that kind of price stacking work in the
wild.

~~~
leahculver
Past the first plan, the pricing is all $2.50 per user. I like to think of the
first plan as the "startup" plan so we made it cheaper. We do offer discounts
per user past 50 users.

------
no-espam
I still dont get who would use grove? IRC users aren't exactly looking for a
client replacement. Existing IRC clients just work, like Craiglist. Colloquy
on the Mac, etc.

------
startupcto
irc ? 2012 ? .................................

~~~
functionform
Hah, that's kind of what I thought. I think people must be secretly jumping on
their gaming servers.

