In Closing
We have decided to close Uproar. This decision was a long time coming, but was not easy. It’s commonplace in the tech entrepreneurship world to say “fail fast and fail often,” which sounds easy enough. The hard parts are actually recognizing when something is failing and then deciding whether to double down or let it fail. We’re all familiar with Techcrunch-headline style implosions, but most of the things you start are simply going to fizzle out and it’ll be up to you to call it.
Uproar has been fizzling for quite a while now. Although we didn’t keep official score, I think we gave ourselves an ultimatum at least 3 times. For a variety of personal and professional reasons, we simply did not give Uproar the attention it needed in order to gain launch velocity.
Uproar was not losing money; we’ve run the business as lean as we could and it became profitable almost immediately after launching Gratuitous. So why close it down completely? We could have kept floating and maybe eventually Uproar would have picked up more steam—right? It’s simple: splitting our attention between Uproar and other important opportunities was producing less-than-best efforts on all fronts. It was time to choose and the choice finally became obvious.
This is part of the beauty in bootstrapping a venture. You are free to pursue the best course of action without worrying about staying the course or asking permission.
Rick will be concentrating on his freelance business, creating iOS and web projects for his clients.
Kevin will become a father this fall and will continue to develop iOS products for the App Store. Ownership of Gratuitous will transfer to Kevin and will be available for free in the App Store once the transfer is complete.
We’ll keep the blog and podcast around for at least a few years since there are inbound links here. We’ve updated the homepage and, as usual, you can follow us both on Twitter:
