Shutdownify

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

~ the obit ~

Shutdownify sold shutdown notices. The premise, laid out with complete seriousness, was that a company winding down has to replace its entire website with a farewell page on almost no notice, and that these pages are therefore written in a hurry by people having the worst week of their professional lives. They leave out the things a visitor actually needs, starting with whether the card on file gets charged again and what becomes of the data. Shutdownify offered templates for more than three dozen industries and promised to get a decent notice online in about ten minutes.

The website went up on 19 August 2015. Shaun Gallagher, a software engineer who had previously written a book about running experiments on babies, posted it to Hacker News, where it reached number one the same day.

Here is the part that most of the coverage got slightly wrong. The two-day version of the story, launch on Wednesday and collapse on Friday, does not survive the archive. The earliest capture of shutdownify.com, taken at 20:42 UTC on 19 August, is already the farewell page, headlined "Shutdownify is shutting down" and datelined that same day, under a subhead explaining that the "Shutdown Notice as a Service" startup would cease operations by year's end. There was never a product page. The company's first and only published document was its own obituary, written to its own template, and the joke only works because the document is a careful piece of writing.

The notice has the full apparatus. It opens on "It is with tremendous regret that I must announce the shutdown of Shutdownify." It explains the founding insight, thanks the staff and the investors, points existing customers at the Control Panel to export their notices, and answers the frequently asked questions. The diagnosis Gallagher gave himself is the best line in it: in retrospect, he wrote, they should not have built a business model that depended so heavily on people who had no money to pay them.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ eating the dog food ~

Archive Team, who collect dying websites for a living and have no particular sense of humor about it, filed Shutdownify alongside the real ones and recorded the line that it ended on: Shutdownify's last meal is its own dog food. The year-end date in the notice became the date in their records, which means a joke about shutdown announcements is now preserved in the same index as the announcements it was parodying.

The page kept serving. Captures from January and March 2016 return the identical document, unchanged, still dated August. After that the domain drifted through other hands and picked up a run of 502s, and today shutdownify.com resolves to nothing. The notice outlasted the company by a factor of roughly sixty.

~ why it landed ~

August 2015 was deep into a stretch where the genre was everywhere. Companies were posting the same farewell letter with the same incredible journey in the first paragraph and the same gratitude to the team in the last, and readers had learned to skip to the part that said when the service actually stops. Gallagher's contribution was to notice that a form this rigid is really a product category, then demonstrate it the only way a one-person joke could, by using it on himself.

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