Fetchnotes

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

~ the obituary ~

Alex Schiff and Ben Jackson were undergraduates at the University of Michigan when they started Fetchnotes, and the product had the clean single idea that undergraduate software sometimes gets right. Notes should not live in folders. You write the thing down and tag it with a hash, and later you find it by the tag. There was no hierarchy to design and nothing to file. You could get a note into it by typing, by text message, by email, even by calling a number and talking, which in 2011 was a careful answer to the problem of capturing an idea while your hands were busy.

It went through TechArb, Michigan's own student business incubator, for two terms, then won a place at TechStars, which in the early 2010s was the standard escalator for a two-person college project with a working app. They raised somewhere north of eight hundred and fifty thousand dollars from Beta Fund and eCoast Angels, got past nineteen thousand users, and by 2014 had started building a second product called Thready, a shared space where small groups could throw notes and files at each other from their phones.

On 13 April 2015 the technology went to Driftt, a mobile collaboration startup founded by two former HubSpot executives. It was the common shape of these deals. Driftt took the product and the code while the five-person Fetchnotes team stayed on only in an advisory capacity, and users were told the service would keep running during the integration. For about ten months that was true.

Then Driftt did what Driftt was always going to do. It dropped the collaboration idea and renamed itself Drift, then went off to become a reasonably large customer-messaging company. On 3 February 2016 an email went out to Fetchnotes users announcing the service would close in thirteen days.

~ the case file ~

~ thirteen days' notice ~

The email is preserved as an anonymous gist, which is how a lot of small shutdown notices survive, and it is more candid than it had to be. Rather than defend the timeline, it went straight at the one decision users were going to question: "We considered selling Fetchnotes to another company, but we preferred to do right by all of you in making sure that you could take your data with you. Even if we left it running, once we handed it off to somebody else, there's no way to know for sure how things would end."

Thirteen days is a short runway for a service holding five years of someone's scribbled thinking, but an export tool shipped alongside the notice and worked. Fetchnotes went dark on 15 February 2016. That should have been the end of the entry.

~ the second life ~

Two days later, on 17 February, the site came back. Members of the original founding team and one long-standing user had arranged an eleventh-hour reacquisition, with the plan of restarting Fetchnotes as a community-funded and community-run thing. The announcement post was titled "A new adventure", which is either brave or ominous depending on how many of these you have read.

The necessary support never materialized. Crowdfunding a notes app in 2016 meant asking a user base of five figures to pay for infrastructure in a category where both Google and Apple shipped something free with the operating system, and the arithmetic was never going to work. On 8 October 2016 Schiff sent the letter closing it for good and set the final date a month out. Fetchnotes stopped for the second and last time on 8 November 2016.

~ what it cost to care ~

I was in Turkey and well out of the US accelerator pipeline when all of this was happening, and a nineteen-thousand-user notes app from Ann Arbor was never going to reach me. What makes it worth a grave anyway is the nine months in the middle. Almost nothing on this site gets a second death date, because almost nobody tries to catch a product that has already been dropped. Two founders and a user did, after the company that bought it had stopped caring, with no money and no obligation. They lost, and the losing took most of a year.

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