We never thought shutting down of Posterous will touch us so emotionally & change our startup course. We started building JustMigrate as a hackathon project back in January. We were barely ready when Posterous announced shutdown, but we launched the very next day on HackerNews. We were literally stoned (yes) that evening and twitter was pouring with our mentions, everyone recommending our service. That night we somehow managed to solve bugs and handled customer support. We forced our engineer to sleep who was awake since 3 days while me and my cofounder handled support, I will never forget that night. Very next day just an hour after we fixed bug & resumed migration we got TechCrunched.
Marketing any product is not easy, luck plays a role but soon dies off, I should say our team is very aggressive when it comes to growth, we were most talked about even though we were not first to offer this service. Apart from making ultra simple tool we focused our user flow to make the service go viral, ideally it should end up as tweet, each tweet was goal conversion. Someday I will cover the little things we did that created action out of each tweets. When world started using our services everything fell apart, all the migration failed and we almost cried. We solved each one of them and in some cases manually ported to Tumblr. Sometimes Posterous api was down and sometimes Tumblr limitations hit us bad. Limitation was a big problem in the beginning, users were not tech savvy enough to understand incompatible list, however we soon realised this was a problem and we made some bold arrangements to support it.
5-10 days into migration things were different, we started realizing the gravity of what we are doing, we were playing with user's personal data created over years, this is precious data. We all realize the importance of data only when it is not accessible. If you observer any product / service, usability, experience, value etc all fall apart in front of data, loosing one post was like a crime for us. I cannot emphasis any more.
On the way we learned how to be better at customer support. I think our team did a great job, we tried our best to keep minimum response time. At times we went out of way to put a smile on our user's face. Due to limitations we failed to deliver and surprisingly they were very encouraging & supported us with patients. We were scared but consistently got numerous thanks mails and tweets. Before we knew it for us shutting down of Posterous was beyond a simple business opportunity.
Shutting down of posterous was launch of JustMigrate and with this lot of things changed for our small bootstrapped startup. While the initial objective was to pay off our debts but it soon turned out to be something wonderful. It changed our business perception, essays from Paul Graham made more sense. We slowly extracted the big picture out of this mess and our team quickly pounced on the next opportunity, we are very excited.
Today is last day of Posterous and we are already feeling sad about the shutdown. We will soon continue to support migration using Posterous backup files.
I feel sad that a lot of developers build migration tools but fail to build business around it. They just disappears when the purpose is lost. We hope to change that and continue to give a purpose, starting with listing down all the small migrations developers have build that can mean a lot to a user. Simply list here migration you have created or found interesting. Could be aws <--> rackspace, instagram --> Flickr : Dropbox and more.
We are expanding our small passionate hacker team who believes in the power of data & build business around it. Join [email protected]
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