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Comment by notpushkin | Hacker News Reader

> On November 15, 2024, the Fable product will be shut down. All users will no longer be able to sign up, log in, or access files. All customer data and project files will be permanently deleted [...]

> We recommend you look through your Fable files and export your projects off the platform (e.g. to mp4, gif, lottie… etc).

I genuinely am at a loss for words here. Somebody sat down and decided that giving you your project sources in some form is too much work, just a GIF export will do.

(For those looking to save their data: go for Lottie, it’s a bit more versatile and you can preserve vector data at least.)

EDIT: the ideal way to go here would of course be open sourcing the whole thing!

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This shouldn't be surprising anymore. This has happened every week since 2010. This is the VC cycle, and it happens over and over and over and over and over again. In fact, I'm sure there's some flashy new thing on the front page right now that will have its own corresponding "goodbye" thread in 2-10 years, and everyone will get screwed by that, too.

We can lament the current state of affairs, but let's not pretend it's abnormal.

I run a solo bootstrapped SaaS. When people sometimes ask me whether I think this is a stable business, I tell them that with a VC-funded company, it's almost certain that there will be an outcome in several years that will not be good for customers. VC-funded companies go bankrupt, get acqui-hired, or get strategically acquired most of the time, and all these outcomes are bad for customers. The only outcome which is slightly less negative is going public, but very few companies reach that stage, and even then you get endless feature creep and progressive ensh*ttification (like with Dropbox, for example).

Self-funded sustainable businesses can be much more stable in the long term.

> Self-funded sustainable businesses can be much more stable in the long term.

Can even grow at a progressive pace by expanding into adjacent segments: https://apenwarr.ca/log/20211024

Wouldn’t the low credibility VCs, who don’t care about customers being thrown under the bus, be displaced by higher credibility VCs over time?

Why?

Most people (as in 99.9%) don't give a shit about venture capital and don't follow it at all. I would guess that most people (as in >50%) couldn't even give you a half-way accurate definition of it.

If you're buying enterprise software you're more likely to know that VC exists but you're not any more likely to care about it. None of the people writing 5-7 figure enterprise software checks are tracking which VCs are at which firm when, and who invested in what, and what company had a negative client impact when, and all that. And even if you were tracking it what are the odds that you'll need the same software 5 or 10 years later when it might be relevant to the decision?

Things evolve based on evolutionary pressures only and the VC world is too disconnected from its negative impacts to feel any pressure from them.

Put another way, credibility (from the standpoint of the customer) does not positively or negatively impact a VC in any way.

A lack of credibility is an easy excuse for asking for big enterprise discounts, on well everything offered.

The highly credible VCs should be able to positively influence the negotiated pricing, at least by association.

My whole point is the association is very, very far removed from anyone signing checks. Nobody knows who the VC investors of their enterprise vendors are.

The smart money knows, which admittedly describes only a small subset.

But even if everyone was clueless, the seller will still likely present such information to the buyer to justify not providing discounts.

I think it depends on a lot of factors.

I think the biggest issue would be the most "successful" VCs aka the ones that make the most money, have the most money to invest in other companies.

If they can make the most return on their investment by fucking over customers than they would have a greater impact.

I suppose if we had the ability to "pierce the VC veil" we could see who the main VCs are and choose weather or not to use a product based on their track record.

Even when the product isnt free, the customer is the product. The real customer is investors. Unless there are no investors this is the way things go.

There are no VCs that care about customers.

VCs care about their returns. They get returns by selling the company to the next entity in line — a strategic acquirer, an acqui-hire acquirer, or through an IPO. To maximize their returns, they insist on maximizing growth, specifically user base growth. And when they sell, the acquiring entity usually ruins the experience for users, shuts down the business, or both.

Yeah, this is the “disappointed but not surprised” kind of situation.

Was Fable using a well-known format, or is it a proprietary format specific to the app ? If it's proprietary, would it make any sense to export it directly? Is it even a file format, or is it possible they were simply storing various pieces of data related to your project in various places in backend DBs?

Says in the article “the Fable file format is not transferable to other platforms.”

So export a structured dump of all relevant data and leave it up to someone else to decipher.

I agree. I deciphered a few weird formats, for example the raw format of an old camera, the save files of drawings in WinWord 1. It's easier if you can make a few custom small examples, for example in the drawings use only one line, then two, then tree. They were binary formats, so the trick was to use an hex editor and look at them for a long time and make a few guess. I never deciphered them 100%, but I had enough info to read the files I care about and create new files.

Sometimes you get a riff format and a big chunk of the guesswork is solved.

And most modern formats are just a bunch of xml files inside a tar.gz , so now the first step is to change the extension to .zip and cross your fingers.

Do you know what's less work and less legally fraught? Doing nothing.

I think it says more about us that we are at a loss for words or shocked that a startup goes under and its unwinding is messy. It is neither a big deal, nor is it particularly unethical that this should happen. Caveat emptor. This type of reaction should be reserved for real catastrophes like a cancer diagnosis, a war, the death of a loved one, etc.

Have we all become so fragile that something as minor as a startup with a small number of users shutting down causes us shock and disgust?

This is a website full of startup people, a startup going under with a messy shutdown is something I would expect this audience to be upset about.

> This type of reaction should be reserved for real catastrophes like a cancer diagnosis, a war, the death of a loved one, etc.

Why are you on here lecturing us? Shouldn't you be out saving the world or something important? Or at least lecturing politicians?

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