Divshot

» see divshot.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Michael Bleigh and Jake Johnson built the first version of Divshot at a Startup Weekend in Kansas City in April 2012. What they demonstrated was a drag-and-drop builder for Bootstrap layouts, which was a reasonable thing to want in 2012 and a hard thing to sell. They moved the company to a loft in downtown Los Angeles and came out of the Launchpad LA accelerator with a seed round of 1.1 million dollars, announced on 18 March 2013 and led by Rincon Venture Partners with 500 Startups among the others.

The product that actually worked was the layer beneath the builder. Front-end applications had stopped needing a server: a single-page app was a pile of static files that talked to an API somewhere else, and the deployment story for that pile was still a 1998 story involving FTP clients and someone else's Apache config. Divshot took the folder and gave you a URL, with version history and rollbacks handled, off a single command in a terminal.

By March 2013 it had more than 40,000 registered users and around 9,000 people still on a waitlist. The category it had a corner of is now the ordinary way the front end gets shipped. Every engineer I know deploys this way now, under some other company's brand, and Divshot's own name stuck to nothing at all.

~ the record ~

~ 62 days ~

On 13 October 2015 Bleigh posted on the Firebase blog that Divshot had joined the Firebase team at Google, and that the team would be "fully focused on making Firebase Hosting a fantastic developer experience" from then on. The same post said the existing products and services would shut down on Monday 14 December 2015, with a migration guide waiting at docs.divshot.com. That is 62 days of notice, which by the standards of acquired developer tools is generous.

~ what went into Firebase ~

Divshot had open-sourced the small static web server it used for local development, called Superstatic. That code went into the Firebase command line tool, where it served as the local preview of a Firebase Hosting site with the same rewrite rules and redirects the real thing used. Bleigh stayed at Google on the Hosting team.

So the technology was not thrown away, which puts Divshot in a better position than most of its neighbors on this site. The brand was thrown away completely. In 2026 divshot.com has no DNS record of any kind, not even the broker lander most dead startups decay into, and the static-web hackathon the company used to run went with it.

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