Signing Off

2010.02.03 in announcements by ryan | 12 comments

We’ve seen the writing on the wall for some time now, with services like Foursquare and Gowalla pushing forward and securing funding, that the outlook for Shizzow and its future was dim.  We’ve had to admit to ourselves, after each of has suffered periods of burnout while attempting to juggle full-time jobs and this startup, that we simply cannot continue to push Shizzow forward with our current lack of resources.

We’ll be shutting down the company behind Shizzow, but Mark Wallaert will continue to run Shizzow as a side project to keep it in service for our loyal users.  He will be running it on his own, and as of now there are no plans for future development on the platform.  Dawn Foster and I don’t have the personal bandwidth to continue contributing to Shizzow, so we will be moving off of the project.

We named our product “Shizzow” because I’ve used that term for 10 forevers as a word to describe elation, and to me that word completely encapsulated the idea of spontaneously gathering with friends.  Shizzow was designed to be a friend finder, and we have met so many wonderful people with this service as the catalyst.

Before signing off, I must extend a heartfelt gratitude to the city of Portland for being our own personal cheerleaders through our beta and public launches.  The memories I will always treasure are seeing all of your tweets and hearing all of your conversations in which you evangelized Shizzow.

I’d like to give knucks to Scott Kevton and Ray King, who served as fabulous advisors; bows of gratitude to the publicity given by Rick Turoczy at the Silicon Florist, Cami Kaos and Dr. Normal at Strange Love Live, Marshall Kirkpatrick at Read Write Web, and Adam Duvander of MapScripting; pint glass clinks to Sue Brown, Matt Gifford, Reid Biels, Bill Jackson, John Nastos, Don Park, Sam Grover, Ken Baer and the other developers who pounded on the Shizzow API; and high fives to Sam Keen, Gus Torres, Carolynn Duncan, Aaron Hockley, Ryan Buchanan, and the countless number of others who have helped along the way.

Finally, we want to thank everyone who used Shizzow. It was a great ride, each of us learned so much during the process, and we look back on our time at Shizzow with fondness and no regrets. Thank you for all of the great times.

Cheers,
Ryan

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2010.02.03 at 10:35

Alex Williams

It’s a fun service. Thanks for bringing it to us and all the work you put into it. Shizzow marked in many ways the vibrancy of the Portland geek scene. I expect we will see a lot more from you and the rest of the group who developed the application.

2010.02.03 at 10:47

Josh McKenney

You guys did a phenomenal job with the funding at hand. Great job guys! You put in the necessary perspiration to see if it could work in an extremely competitive market. A variable or two in your favor and you could have taken over the world of location based micro blogging. Congrats on the hard work and the product you ended up with!

2010.02.03 at 12:24

Ray

You guys did a really nice job pulling it all together and taking a full swing at the opportunity. I’m sure that the learnings will serve as a basis for many successful projects in the future. We, your community, are richer for the opportunity be involved and for that I thank you. Lead on!

2010.02.03 at 13:34

Ryan B

Ryan - awesome Portland community of geo-location early adopters. You should be really proud of what you accomplished. Nicely done. I know your next venture will be a rockin success!

2010.02.03 at 13:37

Don PArk

The amazing, amazing 2008 and 2009 in Portland was absolutely fueled by Shizzow. It made the co-working cafe-hopping scene work to a much higher level than before. I remember being able to check shizzow on any weekday in 2008 and see at least two coworkers in the same cafe. I started my day with shizzow and it pioneered location service on the web for Portland. Thanks to the whole team and everyone involved.

2010.02.03 at 15:09

jnpdx

Congrats to everyone on the team for a good run. As Don said, at it’s prime, Shizzow was a great tool for co-working in Portland. I met some great people while checking out the service, working with the API, etc.

Good luck to everyone on their next endeavors.

2010.02.03 at 17:31

Ken Baer

Sorry to hear the news. Thanks for the shout (pun intended) out. Taplister is proud to have shipped the first iPhone app (Beer Signal) to use the Shizzow API. We wish all of you luck on your future ventures, and we’ll see you at Beer and Blog!

2010.02.04 at 00:10

doc normal

Thank you Shizzow team for all the hard work you put into this great service, and establishing Portland in the geolocation/mobile start-up scene. I’m sure this community will still grow strong start-up ideas in geolocation/mobile and Shizzow will always be the ‘patron saint’ of that scene.

I’m blessed to continue the relationships I’ve developed over time with some Shizzow team members and look forward to seeing future projects from these talented people.

doc

2010.02.04 at 02:40

Amber Case

Thanks so much for being the first location app I really used. It was needed and very useful when it came out, and was wonderfully designed. Plus, everyone in the community was on it. It had a great knack of making one feel at home. I really enjoyed it, and I loved watching it evolve.

Thanks so much for everything you did.

2010.02.05 at 13:56

Matthew Gifford

I learned an incredible amount about mobile dev while working with the Shizzow API. Your outreach to the development community was greatly appreciated.