The following is a duplicate of the "official" post on the Geemo blog. I'm posting it here so that those who follow along with my journey (now or in the future) can learn from this decision.
Carl and I have made the tough decision to shut down Geemo. We will continue to keep Geemo operational until Wednesday May 27 2020, at which point we will turn off the service permanently and delete all customer data from our database. All community mangers will have the opportunity to export their community data from Geemo prior to shut down.
For the past 18 months, Geemo has been bringing together communities from around the globe, enabling them to collaborate and inspire action amongst their members. Geemo has seen many successful use cases: connecting university students with startup mentors, fostering international business relationships, inspiring humanitarian efforts across continents, and more. While Geemo has played a small part in the inspiring actions of our users, we are confident that without Geemo these communities will continue to thrive.
At the core of the communities that Geemo works with are some incredibly talented community managers that Carl and I have had the privilege of getting to know well. These community managers work tirelessly to drive the development of meaningful connections within their organisations, and to make a positive impact in people’s lives. To all of you who we were able to work with over the past 18 months, thank you for the passion you bring to your work.
Geemo was started as a university project and quickly grew into something much more. We had thousands of users from over 35 different countries, we traveled to China to compete in the world’s largest competition for startups, and we worked on Geemo full time over the 2018/2019 summer break while paying ourselves wages. We are very proud of what we have accomplished.
Managing a university workload while also being a founder was challenging. While we had early market interest, our limited ability to invest time and energy into Geemo resulted in a slow iteration cycle which prevented us from finding product–market fit. As a result Geemo remains a slow growing company, not the rocket ship that both Carl and I set out to build.
Now that both Carl and I have finished university it is time to reassess what our priorities are going forward. Carl has plans to travel the world visiting family and friends while continuing his role as Dev Lead for a New Zealand-based software company: Out There Business Solutions. Personally, I’ve moved to Sydney, Australia to begin a new role as an Associate Product Manager with Atlassian.
Carl and I both agreed that we are no longer able to give Geemo the attention that it requires. Support tickets are going far too long without a response, we haven’t released new features or bug fixes in months, and we struggle to find the time to talk to our users and understand how we could be improving Geemo — something that has always been very important to us. In the long-run we believe that shutting down Geemo now is the right decision for us as founders and for our users.
Geemo has been a major part of our lives for the past two years and it’s challenging to let go of something that so much energy and passion has gone into. Carl and I leave Geemo proud of what we were able to build and the communities that we were able to impact. We learned an immense amount about how to (and how not to) build product. Most importantly though, we built relationships with some of the most incredible people from around the world. We couldn’t have wished for anything more from this journey.