Manymoon

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

~ the goodbye ~

this one lived in a part of the internet i only ever visited for work, the world of team-productivity software, the apps a company signs everyone up for so the whole office can see who is doing which task. i ran my own work out of email and my own head in those years, in Ankara, and the American SaaS team-tool boom mostly happened without me. Manymoon was a small star of that boom for about a minute.

Manymoon started in 2009 in San Francisco as a shared to-do and project tracker, and its real trick was distribution more than features. when Google opened its Apps Marketplace in 2010, Manymoon was one of the first big hits inside it, the task app that showed up right next to your Gmail and your Docs. more than fifty thousand businesses signed on, a thousand new ones a week at the peak, the kind of growth curve that gets a startup bought.

and bought it was. Salesforce paid somewhere between twenty-five and thirty-five million dollars for it in early 2011, and renamed the whole thing Do.com, a clean short domain that must have felt like a trophy. for a couple of years Do.com was Salesforce's friendly, well-liked little productivity app, the one people actually enjoyed using, which in enterprise software is rarer than it should be.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the actual end ~

then, in late 2013, Salesforce just... closed it. it stopped charging on the first of November and shut the service on the 31st of January 2014, with no real explanation offered. the product had a loyal base and a good name and got killed anyway. this is what an acqui-hire looks like from the customer's side, the team and the technology were what Salesforce wanted, and the app that thousands of people relied on was overhead to be cleared once the people were absorbed.

~ the funny part ~

the do.com domain, that trophy, outlived the product it was bought to crown. a couple of years later the name got recycled for a completely unrelated meetings app, because a two-letter dot-com is worth more than whatever you last ran on it. meanwhile the old Manymoon customers got pointed at other tools, with Zoho among the ones offering a migration path. bought for tens of millions and renamed for a vanity address, then switched off inside three years. the domain got a second life. the app did not.

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