“It is with great regret that I am writing to inform you of the closing of Ziptr, Inc. and the discontinuation of all Ziptr products,” said Bhathena. “Your sense of innovation and willingness to believe in a solution that offered both security and ease of use was a source of energy and inspiration for our company. For that, we are immensely grateful.”
Bhathena and other Ziptr staff did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
This doesn't sound a whole lot different from any other un-graceful startup shutdowns. Did this service have a lot of users?
Also, is the characterization of Ziptr as an "encryption provider" accurate? Or were they just a secure document storage company? There are a lot of companies that do "document encryption" and "email encryption" for enterprises that are not, as HN privacy enthusiasts understand the term, really crypto products.
"You need to export all of your data from your Ziptr account by 12:00 noon Eastern on Friday, September 27, 2013. After this time, we cannot guarantee access to your data."
http://www.ziptr.com/ziptr-closing-92713
That though from Ziptr's 9/24 blog post is unusual: both the ridiculously short time period of 3 days, and the phrase "cannot guarantee."
Also, I find it hard to believe that such a serious serial entrepreneur with such significant backing (approx. $7M) would close up shop so suddenly and unprofessionally. Why burn bridges like this?
That's also what you'd write if your enterprise software company was betting on last minute hail-marys to keep the lights on, didn't want to admit the bind they were in, and literally ran completely out of money.
Also, if they were concerned about complying with an NSL, why would they offer even 3 days? During those three days, their users would all be surveilled as they pulled their data off the site.
It's not entirely mysterious: because of the way votes are weighted, the timing of the first two or three really matters. If you manage to get them while you're still on the new page, you have a good chance of getting on the front page which is the only way to get much exposure. If you fall off the new page without that, your article is essentially forgotten.
This means the success of your article falls down to the whims of the few people browsing `new' at any given moment. If you're lucky, there are people interested in your topic there; if not, your article might easily fall through the cracks. Moreover, since `new' has a very bad signal to noise ratio, most people do not spend very much time there. I certainly don't! So this means it's even more likely for an article to fall through the cracks there.
For better or worse, this means HN misses out on good articles as they fall through `new' without getting votes. To get anywhere your article needs to be both good and lucky.
Or have friends. The first few votes matter a LOT. So as soon as you submit you ask 3 friends to vote it up (make sure they vote within a few minutes of each other).
That gives a chance. If the community doesn't like it it won't stay up, but it gives you at least a chance.
Actually, you're describing a voting ring, which is against the rules and is bannable. Luckily the software is intelligent enough that it detects people who do such things and automatically nullifies the effect of those votes.
I guess so. I should clarify I've never actually done this, just seen other people [say they] did it. And watching the vote patterns correlated with homepage position on my few submissions tells me it would work.
A while back, I wrote a little app that tracks the relative scores of new submissions and the front page, which tries to tell you when would be a good time to post: http://hnnotify.leknarf.net/
The twitter notification part broke at some point (I haven't had time to fix it), but the main chart is surprisingly accurate. It shows that it's been a good time to post for the last hour or so, so this submission was very well timed. That other submission was sent at a particularly poor time (about 2 hours ago), when few people were upvoting on the new page.
This company also seems pretty low risk, unlike, say, a consumer privacy messaging or VPN service.
Consumer privacy services have very low revenue per customer, so if you attract a few customers with huge attached legal costs, you probably just shut down. I think if you're not a dick, you shut down and offer to pay your existing customers to use an equivalent (if available) service elsewhere for some transition period, since you can't continue operating your service directly.
True, but there's also arguably more demand for encryption now than ever. An experienced entrepreneur like Ziptr's CEO should have been able to play this to the company's advantage with customers, investors, etc. Unless of course they got shut down.
Nonsense. There are many reasons to shut down a service suddenly and almost none of them are things you'd want to brag about. Nobody wants to admit they failed as an entrepreneur.
I know these guys ... I doubt they ran out of money, they're really good at executing. If the business wasn't panning out, they would've sold to someone.
It could be anything embarrassing or that would be dangerous/costly to talk about. Government interference is only one possibility. Maybe a competitor paid them to shutdown. (probably not, but it's possible)
Bhathena and other Ziptr staff did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
This doesn't sound a whole lot different from any other un-graceful startup shutdowns. Did this service have a lot of users?
Also, is the characterization of Ziptr as an "encryption provider" accurate? Or were they just a secure document storage company? There are a lot of companies that do "document encryption" and "email encryption" for enterprises that are not, as HN privacy enthusiasts understand the term, really crypto products.