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Skiff: you have 6 months to move out. They are being acquired by Notion
Needless to say, I won't be recommending them to anyone anymore. What an about face. Last time I ever trust VC-funded startups like this. I became complacent, I let down my guard, I should have remained more skeptical of them. They always looked like they were burning through their VC money too fast. In the last year I have been recommending them as a potential alternative to other privacy-oriented email providers... well, they sold out and are joining Notion. Silicon Valley money is Silicon Valley money. And here we are. You've got six months to move out.
From Skiff:
Thanked by 11nick_ neverain SLMob Cabbage _MS_ fluffernutter Void MannDude Plioser hyperblast nopingpong
Comments
I honestly think that they massively miscalculated their potential short term value. It's the kind of brand you grow over time, and they probably at some point recently tried to pass off their user numbers as potential revenue and then realized most of them were just trolls trying to be anonymous with their privacy focused service.
Their software suite is simple and beautiful, it's a shame they're cutting it down so soon.
Agreed, their suite was rapidly becoming a really impressive and attractive set of tools, for the privacy market or not, it was really nice. They finally even introduced full PGP support in DECEMBER! And now here we are in February. That's very disappointing. Maybe their PGP feature was their last-ditch effort to bring over Proton people. And apparently it didn't do the trick.
Anyway, it's a real bummer for the privacy community because we lost what some of us thought was going to be a real alternative. It is a shame.
And as for Andrew Milich, the CEO of Skiff, I'll never trust a product he develops again. And that goes for any Sequoia-backed privacy startup for sure.
Very disappointing.
Why is it so bad to be acquired? Finally you can buy ferrari and enjoy your hobbies at 30.
When it comes to privacy it's hard enough to trust somebody. Doesn't get any better when you'll be forced to trust a random new somebody who's main qualification is having money and probably some interest to get something back on their investment.
It is a shame, it was a decent product with some unique functionality.
Also sad that they are not willing to provide longer term email forwarding, it would have been a nice gesture and not too much effort. They could for example donate the domains to an existing forwarding provider.
Been recommending them to people myself and now I feel like an idiot. Anyway, as per the announcement, “all skiff services will be sunset”. So what else are they selling to Notion ?
It was kinda expected already. This business model was too unsustainable. The difference with Free and Essential plans made upgrading literally negligible.
Oh, wait, they're handing out Ferrari's to former paying customers?! Sign me up!
Yep. They were on track to be really competitive with Proton, which would have been great to have in the limited privacy-oriented market.
Well, at least Proton and Tuta and a handful of others will be picking up a bunch of new customers in the coming months.
Agreed 100%.
Their souls.
Yeah, you are right... that was a big red flag that I missed. Thanks for reminding me... I'll note that for future companies to watch out for.
When they allowed Free users to add domains, not too long after introducing them to Essential users in the first place, that should have been a wake-up call.
At the time, I just thought they were trying to rapidly gain marketshare... and I was waiting to see what they would give to Essential users to compensate for the lack of a difference. But you're absolutely right that the model was not sustainable. I wonder if they were getting pressure from their VC people to pull in more subscriber numbers at the time.
Oh well. Lessons learned.
or skills
It sorta was to be expected, yet stilm sad. I've pretty much migrated everything a while back already, still have one support ticket open, I'll hope they'll reply wirhin 6 months.
You're probably right, my impression is that many, perhaps all, of the Skiff devs are joining the Notion team. Apparently, they really "impressed" the Notion leadership. So why not buy Skiff, kill all the Skiff products, and then hire all the employees? Something seems off about this, but I don't have any more info of what the actual deal was.
Now I wouldn't be surprised if this was a graceful exit ramp for Sequoia Capital's investment in Skiff... and therefore wouldn't it be interesting if Sequoia has a new deal with Notion too? Hmmmm... looks like Sequoia led Notion's 2021 round of $250 million.... well... given that info, my bet is that it's actually Sequoia that is folding Skiff into Notion... and the choice of Notion makes a lot more sense now considering who has been backing/funding both companies.
Anyway, it's sad for several reasons. But it is what it is. And from here forward, I'll have to be paying a lot closer attention to specifically where the funding is coming from for these kinds of startups.
Ironically I found it from LET myself a while back, like a year or so ago. Shame it turned out this way, the design was simplistic and functional.
I honestly don't think that's 100% true. It's rather just people always chilling on their amazing free plan or people who create temp accounts but don't delete them nor support skiff on another account.
I was just basing that off of three things that are usually good indications of it but could be wrong:
Sure, yeah. You probably recieve a lot more mails so based on that your experience is more realistic. I have only ever recieved spam(no trolling though) from gmail/aws or outlook, most big-ish privacy respecting email providers which work without invites etc. have only been legit - for me. :^)
@jar I personally know a bunch of people who have Skiff accounts, including paid accounts. (Some of them got the accounts based on my recommendation!
) Not one of them is the kind of person who would engage in trolling of any kind. They all just want a privacy-focused version of Google Workspace, which Skiff was well on its way to achieve before Sequoia they pulled the plug.
I've used Skiff to collaborate with people, and it worked quite well. I've never received one single spam or nasty email from a Skiff user myself, and I've had an account for a while. Even their tech support was nice and responsive. Their apps were great. Just a shame, really.
Anyway, I'm sure there ARE a lot of trolls and leeches on Skiff, and you're likely to see more of them due to your specific business, etc... but there's no way we could know the metrics of what the actual dud rate of the userbase is. I'm not sure even SKiff would truly know, since in theory, everything was end-to-end encrypted, if we are to believe the marketing hype and "experts" out there. But even if they did have some good analytics about their userbase, the bottom line metric is that they clearly couldn't figure out how to monetize it to satisfy whatever their overlords wanted.
BTW, very interesting thread below for those that follow Privacy Guides -- looks like they've been debating removing Skiff from their list for a while, and you can see red flags all over this thread... seems like they were about to remove Skiff from Privacy Guides and then boom, we get the shut down/Notion news. IMO it's a coincidence, but the red flags that the Privacy Guides was bringing up showed a pattern that Skiff was perhaps not nearly as great as it said it was:
https://discuss.privacyguides.net/t/remove-skiff/16228
20/20 hindsight being what it is, but it's clear now there have been a number of red flags.
These red flags are quite interesting to be honest. Only thing I ever thought about was okay, they probably loose huge amounts of money and they're based in the US (The second not being a huge thing, just makes it a tad easier for the biggest law enforcement and spy agencies).
Yep, lots to learn from this episode of Silicon Valley Venture Capital drama. I will be paying closer attention to these kinds of details in the future. Normally I'm pretty good at spotting the red flags, but I missed too many on this one.
... but, on skiff site still accept new registration
This is the first time I saw this product and it looks awesome. Too bad it is going away soon.
One of the bigger red flags for me was that they kept claiming they had an audit done, at least once, but never once published any proof that it ever happened. It was just weird.
@kvz12 - Indeed, their delay in releasing audit reports was concerning, and now I wonder what was in those audits! I guess we'll never know. But I'm starting to think that perhaps there was some unflattering info in those reports... again, we'll never know.
Damn, I still have to migrate stuff out. Kinda pissed right now.
Then I'm going to try to get a partial refund.
Why you are sure it did took a place? AFAIK audits are extremely expensive and without generous sponsors are very unlikely.
Fair point. I suppose it's possible they never got audits done. But I think that Sequoia their overlords would have wanted the audits, and I also think Notion execs would have wanted to see the audits too. Basic due diligence in multi-million dollar business... but yes, I suppose it's possible they didn't get any audits done. Either way, we ain't gonna see nothin'!
The rate at which they rolled out new features, wrinkles and entirely new services was shocking, in a good way. But it seemed like the clock (money) was running out, and it felt panicky. I could not imagine paying them a dollar for anything, myself, even though the UX was very nice. Be happy they are giving 6 months, if it weren't a service mostly used by savvy industry people, they would have given 30 days at most, or just disappeared. Seems like they had great developers but short-term investors trying to spend a mere $12 million or so to become a Proton killer, or the next Slack. It probably isn't even a real acqui-hire, Notion may just offer a few jobs to the killer UX and Marketing people. And Sequoia avoids an insolvency occurring in a portfolio company. I mean, who ever heard of an acquisition where the acquirer does not even bother to take the customer accounts? (Of course, most of us had more than one account, they made it SO easy you might think that was part of the plan to goose the subscriber figures.)