Winding down Muddy
Closing the company, keeping Muddy and Nototo around on a free tier.
Some sad news. I'm writing to let you know that at the end of August, we're ceasing operation of The San Francisco Sailing Club, Inc, maker and maintainer of Muddy, Sail, and Nototo.
We will keep Muddy and Nototo active for existing users, but do not expect any future updates or large maintenance work (breaking bugs, chromium updates, etc). There are no updates to the terms and conditions, and all our products are now free.
I'm humbled by the thousands of you who tried, learned, and supported our products. Please reach out if you're interested in continuing our work or anything piqued your interest.
We will keep you posted on whatever comes next. If you're no longer interested, please unsubscribe!
Some personal thoughts, crossposted from my twitter X.
Failure is failure, and I'll have to live with that and move forward. Our country and the valley was built by greater fools. I'm glad to be one, and more fulfilled that I got to work with the best fools. We will never get our time back, so I'm thankful I spent it with them.
Grateful to Niko Bonatsos, Quentin Clark , Lachy Groom, Naval Ravikant, Charles Hudson and many others for giving us the space and patience to pursue weird. If you're brave enough to explore on the edges, I highly recommend working with these people. We need more of you.
I started to write a longer postmortem, but the story was simple. We built 3 products that found varying degrees of traction. Each time we reached real scale, our users actively rejected all of our multiplayer features. This forced us (a collaboration company) back to square one.
The wildest part of this wall: It was completely agnostic to however we positioned the product. It could be that the shape the app took lent itself to "knowledge management." It could also be people really just don't want to break silos. Great explanation here from Merci.
Last month, we just ran out of ideas on how to solve the lack of adoption on multiplayer. Muddy was still growing, but we didn't feel that it was right to take on cash offered to build a product we didn't believe in. We decided to return capital and close shop.
We compiled a more expansive retrospective on each of our products here, but please feel free to reach out if I can expand. I hope you pick up where we left off with the energy and curiosity these problems deserve.
For what's next, Jimmy and I are going to catch up on our twenties. See the world, spend more time with loved ones, and take care of our bodies. Working with Jimmy over the last seven years has been the great joy of my productive life. Pick people over ideas or things!
Embracing the fallow, excited for whatever may come.