Grove.io

» see grove.io as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Grove announced its own death, and then took it back. The post went up on 15 September 2012 with a date attached, 13 October, and the reason given was that the team had moved on to other things. Thirteen days later a second post appeared saying Grove was here to stay. Revolution Systems, a Django consultancy run by people who had been friends of the company for years, had bought it and taken over operations immediately.

The company before this one was Convore, launched in February 2011 out of Y Combinator's winter batch on $125,000 of seed money. Leah Culver was chief executive and had co-founded Pownce a few years earlier. Her technical founder Eric Florenzano was a known name in the Python and Django world, and he arrived with Eric Maguire on design, both of them out of Mochi Media. Convore was group chat crossed with a forum, and it did not take.

Grove.io went up in November 2011, first as a side product and then as the whole company by January 2012. The pitch fit in a sentence: a private IRC server for your company, hosted, with archives you could search. Nine months later it was already writing its own obituary, and the acquisition pulled it back off the pile. It ran another four years under Revsys, shipping real features into 2014, before the 10 October 2016 post titled "Closing up shop" set the final date at 10 November and pointed everyone at Slack on the way out.

I am a computer engineer and this was a product for people like me, so the distance here is not about category. It is about who had a budget line for chat. Grove sold a service to companies that had already decided team chat was something you pay a vendor for, and that decision arrived in Turkish engineering offices later and arrived wearing a different name. What we ran on in those years was Skype, and then Slack, with nothing between them.

~ the chronicle ~

~ selling something that was already free ~

IRC dates to 1988 and has never cost anything. The protocol is open and so are the servers, so any engineer at any company in 2011 could have stood one up in an afternoon. Grove's entire business rested on the gap between could and did.

What you actually paid for was the boring half: somebody keeping the daemon up, holding the logs, indexing them so you could find the thing your colleague said in March. IRC has no memory by design. If you were not connected when a message went past, it did not happen for you. Grove bolted persistence onto a protocol built to refuse it, which is most of what HipChat and Slack were selling as well. Slack just did not tell you it was IRC underneath.

~ the shutdown that got called off ~

The September 2012 notice is worth reading as an artifact. It told customers how to get their data out, gave them a Python script against the API, explained how to pull each day's channel log down as JSON, and offered to help by email if any of that was too much. That is a considerate shutdown, done by people who knew their customers were programmers.

Then it did not happen. Revsys were Django people who used Grove and did not want to lose it, so they bought it rather than migrate off it. The customers got a reprieve nobody in this position usually gets. What the episode really shows is how small the whole thing was: a business that could be rescued by a consultancy buying it as a favor was never a business at scale, and everyone involved seems to have known that.

~ four more years on someone else's dime ~

Under Revsys it did not coast. The blog carries a run of feature posts through early 2014. Better search for languages other than English came in February, and April brought both popup notifications and the @all and @here mentions. Somebody was still doing product work on a hosted IRC service in 2014, which was already the year Slack went from launch to everywhere.

The final post is short. All operations ceased one month from the day it went up, paid plans were converted to free accounts for that last month so nobody was billed for a service they were leaving, and the recommendation was Slack. There is no complaint in it and no attempt to explain. By November 2016 the argument had been over for two years.

~ the front page is still up ~

Ten years after the service stopped, grove.io still answers, and it still serves the marketing site. The title tag reads "Grove - Hosted IRC and so much more". The meta description still offers you your own private IRC server for your company with archives and search. Nothing on it acknowledges that there is nothing behind it.

Most dead startups end as a parked domain or a squatter's ad page. This one ended as a sales pitch left running with the product removed, which is a rarer and slightly worse fate. Somebody is still paying the registrar. The blog is still there too, so you can read the shutdown notice and then the retraction that cancelled it, in order, four years before the ending that stuck. That sequence almost never survives anywhere.

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