Noteable.io is shutting down (opens in new tab)

No knowledge of the specifics here, but usually the underlying cause is the same: we are running out of money, the business model doesn't work, and we don't have enough time, ideas or both to try anything else - at least no with any confidence of success.

> To me, it only communicates that the issues were embarrassing, inconvenient, or otherwise do not shine a good light.

> Am I reading too much into this, or does this kind of pithy announcement usually hide skeletons? Genuinely curious here.

This line of thinking bothers me. It reads as if you feel like you're owed something from the company. Why does it matter?

If it's fundraising issues, lack of product market fit, founder disputes, team member stole the entire bank account, the end result is the same. They can't run the business. As long as there's a clear message and a path to EOL for active customers, what possible reason could help?

To me, it actually highlights the praise of the team and the products they built together instead of focusing on the details of why they're no longer operable. And reading the other threads here, they did a great job but there simply wasn't large enough captive market.

You’re not entitled to see the skeletons. The people shutting down their business owe their customers a notice. They don’t owe the world an exposé of their (possible) flaws.

A business can fail just because it’s the wrong time or they were unlucky or many other reasons. If the issues were embarrassing? They don’t owe you those details.

Having been around when one of these was written, it could be:

- this is a very difficult time emotionally for the author, so they aren’t thinking entirely rationally

- the author is exhausted

- the author is ashamed/embarrassed about having lost money for all their friends and family

- they don’t want to expose themselves to liability

- the message was vetted by a risk averse lawyer, aka a lawyer

- the message has to satisfy a bunch of different audiences, so it is generic

- it is almost an afterthought amongst all the other stuff that has to get done shutting down the business

And most importantly, they may not explain why the business failed because they don’t really know. If they knew why they didn’t find product market fit, the business wouldn’t have failed.

I followed this company since there beginnings out of Netflix. The original founder Michelle Ufford left with no detail and no explanation. I'll bet there's more to dig into.

Can you elucidate why specifically?

I'm imagining something like an GPT-4 agent that has connections to your Databricks, Snowflake, Salesforce, etc.

You ask it a question and then it iteratively queries your data and produces some an answer/some code/ a graph. Or it generates a plan that you can edit a bit and then it executes.

That sounds like it would be pretty useful copilot for me? I'm not very familiar with the intricacies of analytics work though.

I think it's real. When I sign into my account, kernels don't run. Noteable is one of a couple of realtime collaborative Jupyter notebook environments, including Deepnote and Cocalc (my site). I know from chatting with Kyle Kelley earlier this year that they were investing strongly in ChatGPT integration, but evidently this didn't fully ship, since their "Upgrade to Pro" dialog says "COMING SOON: NoteableAI!" in bold. Kyle regularly posted a lot of exciting work they were doing on AI integration on Twitter (e.g., [1]).

[1] https://twitter.com/KyleRayKelley/status/1727430546354233763

Its an American company so I would assume January 5th. An important date like this should be more explicit.

And I was confusing it with https://notable.app/

Wonder if they were really cutting it close with funding, were in talks to raise another round, and then the conversations all fell through.

Shutdowns are rarely sudden. Companies aren’t going to be public about their financial struggles unless they’re legally obligated to do so. I imagine that Notable have been facing the same slowing investor interest and increased interest rates that most of has for the better part of at least a year.

So it’s likely that the only sudden thing about this, is that they now failed to secure anymore money after a long struggle. Some companies may give customers a little longer to get off the sinking ship, but if you’re just looking at the cost, it probably wouldn’t make much sense to do so instead of running on fumes (and hope) for as long as possible.

Sucks for the employees though.

But it's not immediately, they say January 5th

Beautiful pages alone don't bring money. Sometimes ugly pages bring money. It's whacky.