A big reason we waited so long to shut it down was leaving our customers stranded. Even at such low revenue, we owed everything to them for allowing us to get our first product off of the ground and finding value in our service for so many years. It was a VERY difficult decision.
We did not make a move until we had a very good transition process for all of our customers. We set up a partnership with Campaign Monitor so each customer could easily migrate their lists and avoid any downtime in sending emails. Sure, it is a pain to export and import lists, but there are many good options out there such as Campaign Monitor. If your electric company shut off your service you would surely be screwed, not really the same case here.
Regarding Postmark, this should make you feel even more confident about it. We've seen amazing growth and our team is so passionate about Postmark that we decided it was worth giving up profits on Newsberry to make it even better. That says a lot about our commitment to our other products and our focus as a team.
In the history of Wildbit there were many times when we could have just added a few employees to keep profits going in one area while we worked on something else. A perfect example is when we decided to drop consulting to focus on products. We could have kept it going along side of products, but focus is everything in business if you want to create something that people really love and enjoy to use.
I didn't personally speak to every customer, but many of the customers were understanding and in some cases, very supportive of the decision. The produce hadn't gotten new features or much more than maintenance in over a year. They appreciated our honesty and perhaps more importantly, our empathy for the situation we ultimately created for them.
Outsourcing an entire product like this is a pipe dream. It would also likely screw over their customers, who may then pass word around that they were douchebags for doing it.
I think they handled it well, and very morally.
Way easier said than done.
i understand this was no easy decision, but I do feel the original post was far more about your emotional decisions behind it, and not enough about the existing paying customer perspective.
thank you again.
I'm not sure I'd dig my electric company cutting off my electric service just because they felt they could be more profitable somewhere else and didn't "believe" in my service anymore. Service that I've paid for, come to rely on, and have integrated in to my business.
Selling this or partnering with another company to transition accounts over to them would have been better. Maybe they did that and didn't mention it in the article (or I missed it).
Yeah, I get it. You're entrepreneurs and want to "have passion" about what you do. But.. WTF - people are paying you for something that they obviously want, and you just shut the accounts down - with or without notice, I don't really care. How do I feel now about postmark? Will you still have passion for it in 15 months, or will you decide beanstalk is more profitable, and shutdown postmark? regardless of what is said now, making decision like this is emotional (read the language of the post) - emotions will change next year.
"Selling would have involved a lot of effort and time, and we just needed to focus on our products that were growing. " Don't you think the existing paying customer deserved that bit of respect for you to put the effort in to selling, and ensuring their continued success as well?
Puzzling a best - disconcerting to say the least.
EDIT: http://help.newsberry.com/kb/subscribers/transferring-subscr...
There's a help link to transition to campaign monitor. Fine that's there, but the language of the post still seemed to ignore the needs of the existing users, and focused their decision solely on the feelings of the people running the show. Let's hope they always feel positive about postmark, otherwise you'll be seeing 'transition from postmark to xxxxx' in their help pages in the next year or two.