Thinkfuse

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

~ the eulogy ~

Brandon Bloom and Steve Krenzel came out of Microsoft and Google with a complaint rather than a product idea. Every week, in every company either of them had worked at, a large number of competent people sat down and wrote a summary of what they had done, sent it upward, and never heard about it again. The documents went into inboxes and stayed there. Nobody searched them, nobody connected one week to the next, and everyone kept writing them.

Thinkfuse came out of the first Techstars class in Seattle in 2010 to fix exactly that and nothing else. It collected the weekly updates and threaded them so that one person's reports read as a continuous searchable record instead of forty loose emails. Narrow and unglamorous, and immediately legible to anyone who had ever had a manager. It raised a bit over half a million dollars from backers including Techstars and SV Angel, and reached roughly a thousand users.

A thousand users is a product that works and a company that does not. The status report is a problem every office has and no office has a budget line for, which makes it a terrible thing to sell and a very good thing to have built, if what you want is for somebody to notice how you build things.

~ the dossier ~

~ thirty days ~

On 25 June 2012 Salesforce bought Thinkfuse. The price was not disclosed and the local coverage filed it under acquihire of the day, which was accurate: the two founders went to Salesforce to work on the social enterprise products around Chatter, and the product they had spent two years on was not going with them.

Users got a month. The service was switched off on 25 July 2012 and the suggested replacement, for a tool about structured weekly updates inside a company, was Mailchimp. That is a mailing list product. The advice amounts to telling people to go back to sending the email, which is what Thinkfuse existed to stop.

~ the note on the door ~

The archive caught thinkfuse.com on 2 August 2012, a week after the lights went out. It is 830 bytes and the entire text is this: "We're sorry, Thinkfuse is no longer available. The Thinkfuse team is now advancing our mission to promote open communication and transparency in the workplace as a part of Salesforce.com. We encourage you to try Salesforce Rypple to manage updates on objectives and track key results. Please contact [email protected] if we can be of assistance in any way."

Rypple itself had been bought by Salesforce only seven months earlier and was renamed Work.com within the year. A dead product's farewell page recommending another acquisition that is mid-rebrand is a fairly precise snapshot of enterprise software in 2012. The domain today is a 114-byte script that bounces you to a domain broker's lander.

~ the document nobody reads ~

The weekly status report crosses every border intact. I have written them in Turkish and in English, for managers who read them and for managers who did not, and the short ones got read while the long ones did not. Thinkfuse was an American SaaS product I never saw, sold to American companies, dead years before I ever heard the name. The problem it picked is still in my inbox this week.

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