Flowdock

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

~ the goodbye ~

Rally Software bought Flowdock on 5 February 2013. Slack opened to the public the following August. Everything worth saying about Flowdock's commercial life sits in those two sentences, and in the order they are in.

Otto Hilska and Mikael Roos started it with Tuomas Silen in Helsinki in 2009. All three had already shipped software together under the names Nodeta and APIdock, so they were building for a team exactly like their own. The pitch was a shared team inbox with group chat attached, which in 2009 was a stranger proposition than it sounds now: instead of a chat room, you got one stream that swallowed your ticket activity from Pivotal Tracker and JIRA, your commits and pull requests from GitHub and BitBucket and Kiln, your support traffic from Zendesk, and your mailing lists, and then let people talk in threads next to it. Threading was there from early on. A decade later, people who had used both were still saying Flowdock threaded better than Slack did.

I am a computer engineer and this is my own professional category, so the honest thing to say is that I know the shape of the problem well and never once had a Flowdock account. Nothing about that is geographic. Flowdock sold to development teams through a European business-to-business funnel, and by the time team chat became a thing every engineering group on earth had an opinion about, the product under discussion was Slack. Flowdock had been bought eight months before that argument started. Being early is only an advantage if you are still the one selling.

~ the chronicle ~

~ six months ~

In November 2011 Flowdock took $650,000 in seed money from Gil Penchina, CrunchFund, Mårten Mickos and IDG Ventures. Fifteen months later Rally Software, the agile development tooling company, acquired it. All nine Flowdock employees went along and Rally stood up a research and development site in Helsinki around them, which was a genuinely decent outcome for a nine-person company in Finland.

Then Slack shipped. The two products were aimed at the same rooms, and one of them now belonged to an agile project management vendor that sold to procurement departments while the other was being passed around between engineers for free. Flowdock kept its existing customers and kept working for another nine years. It stopped appearing on anybody's shortlist.

~ the ownership ladder ~

Rally was bought by CA Technologies in 2015. CA was bought by Broadcom in November 2018. At each step Flowdock moved one level further from anybody whose job depended on it. Somewhere in there it was renamed CA Flowdock, which is what a product gets called once it is a line item on a larger invoice.

The end-of-life notice went up on the Flowdock blog on 3 April 2022, signed by Ben Rimmasch, whose author bio read "Doer of things." It opened with "Since 2009, many people and organizations have turned to Flowdock," and set the shutdown for 1 October 2022. After that date the website would stop working, and so would every client and integration hanging off it. Users were advised to migrate and to export their data first. There was no offer to convert anybody to another Broadcom product, which is unusual for a business walking away from recurring revenue, and it is the detail the Hacker News thread fixed on. A separate enterprise arrangement maintained by Rego Consulting limped to 31 December 2022. Today flowdock.com answers with 94 bytes of HTML: an empty title tag and an empty body, with one meta element between them reading revised 1.1.7.

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