
Fieldbook is shutting down - mjirv
https://medium.com/the-fieldbook-blog/what-happened-at-fieldbook-d70bf25b3968?source=linkShare-5a719c162c16-1526095762
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sho
Very good post-mortem but left me with questions:

1\. Raised $2.9m, 4 employees, 5 years. Let's say 2/3 of overhead was salary,
which seems reasonable. So that's 500k each, or 100k/yr. This seems excessive?
Were the founders paying themselves too much? Or where did the money go?

2\. Difficulty in hiring. This seems very much attributable with the company's
proximity to the SF black hole. Was relocation never even considered? And why
was remote not considered? I would have liked to hear the reasons for those
decisions.

All the points about potential recruits demanding "sexy" jobs or wanting to
see high growth and large rounds seem pretty much exclusively SF problems. It
seems like moving literally anywhere else would have solved this.

3\. What is the actual reason for closing down? Out of money, or out of
confidence? If my salary numbers above are wrong - and I should hope they are
- maybe they still have a mil or so left, which seems like enough runway to
take a stab at least some of the problems.

There were two seemingly contradictory considerations: lack of ability to
iterate fast enough, and a realisation that the product was not viable. I
would have liked to hear more about this too - iterating faster on the wrong
thing would not have helped.

4\. I know it's too late but even as an IT type when I look at the landing
page I have very little idea what the product even does. A lot of features and
use cases listed but what is the product and how does it solve any problem?
There's a single screenshot four page heights down which looks like some kind
of spreadsheet. It's not nearly enough.

Still, an honest, insightful and heartfelt piece and I wish the team good
luck.

~~~
cdsboy
The actual reason for closing down was laid out in the article. They got a
talent acquisition offer and took it.

~~~
cpeterso
Flexport is an interesting place for Fieldbook to land, but I do see some
synergies. I wonder if the team will focus on improving Flexport's internal
operations or building a platform for Flexport's customers.

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user5994461
> we recruited a head of growth quickly, but couldn’t close a designer or
> another engineer.

A company with two employees recruiting a head of growth while there is noone
to do any of the work that needs to be done.

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pbowyer
> But at a time when every engineer wanted to work on AI, self-driving cars or
> cryptocurrencies, a SaaS startup with modest, sporadic growth wasn’t very
> attractive.

Were they looking to hire in the SF/SV area only? I enjoy these kinds of
projects (though wasn't & am not looking for a FT role), and I know a few
others who do — but because we’re not driven by the hype train, we don’t live
in the normal ‘tech’ areas.

Further down the article I see they were on the 'peninsula' (not sure where
that is) and didn't want to become a remote team. But if they weren't in SF,
there must be programmers around who enjoy data work, not buzzword-tech?

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asavinov
Sad to see it go. I had professional interest to Fieldbook because I had been
developing a similar "spreadsheet"-like application intended for radically
changing the way table table is processed -
[http://conceptoriented.com](http://conceptoriented.com) \- and failed.
Finally, I decided to move this (quite unique) technology to completely
different area and re-implement it as a kind of major alternative to MapReduce
focused on general-purpose batch and stream processing (mainly IoT and edge
analytics):
[https://github.com/asavinov/bistro](https://github.com/asavinov/bistro)

I am curious to see what happens with other apps like airtable, rowshare or
zenkit and the whole market. Will they be able to survive as independent
companies (like Tableau or Qlik in self-service BI)?

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liberal_098
> The flagship feature was a way to link sheets of data to create a relational
> structure.

It is also the most difficult feature to implement from the theoretical point
of view and non-obvious feature for the users to understand. Therefore, we
still have the relational world and the spreadsheet world existing separately
almost in isolation.

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kvdmolen
I'm founder of [https://www.fundo.co/](https://www.fundo.co/) and some things
sound terribly familiar. However, I think it starts with deciding who you make
your product for in this case, as application of this kind of product is
tremendous (imagine making a list of things you can do with Excel).

As mentioned here, I don't see this razor-sharp focus in Fieldbook, which
could be the reason of missing traction?

Fundo is about to undergo a major transformation, exactly for the reason of
simplicity..

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swyx
appreciate the openness. honestly being acquihired by flexport isn't the worst
outcome. i think Jason's next venture, should he have one, will benefit a lot
from his learnings from Fieldbook.

any users of airtable (i'm not one) can comment on what he thinks Airtable got
right?

>In contrast, our closest competitor, Airtable, seems to be getting more
traction. Early on, their product focus was subtly different, with more
emphasis on mobile experience and collaboration features than on data modeling
or formulas. These aren’t the features that were most important to the users
we talked to, but they’re easier to understand, and I suspect they made both
marketing and onboarding easier for Airtable—maybe just enough to make all the
difference.

\---

Edit: here's their most successful Show HN from 3years ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10752570](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10752570)

and a month before that:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10508038](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10508038)

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kalleboo
I miss the days when this would be a humble Shareware product

~~~
sleepychu
Give away all the value you create at home while you toil away creating value
for someone else at work? Why do you miss that?

~~~
icebraining
I think you're confusing shareware with freeware.

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phrz
So, are they open sourcing this then? Or just burning this all down to make a
point? Something notably unanswered.

~~~
RoiDuSilence
I am curious as well.

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oron
The product could be improved, look at Monday.com for an example of what this
product could have been. The difference is in the details ... small UI / UX
details but very important.

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modeless
Too bad. I thought this product looked really great, but I didn't have a
reason to use it.

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g105b
Damn it, I read that as "Facebook is shutting down".

