Shutting Down My Site
In this postmortem from 2012, @patdryburgh candidly breaks down the dissolution of their startup, examining the fatal assumptions, misallocated resources, and market dynamics that led to its shutdown.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Early signals were often rationalized away instead of prompting an immediate pivot in distribution or pricing.
The psychological toll of running out of capital compounds operational friction in a solo or small team setup.
Key Antidote: Validate paying willingness before committing months to building sophisticated product features.
Community Debate Themes:
Community discussions on HN centered on identifying product-market fit early, avoiding vanity metrics, and the emotional recovery process after shutting down.
CATEGORY Postmortems & Failures →
HISTORICAL ERA Web 2.0 Genesis (2007–2013)
COMMUNITY SCORE 81 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 50 comments
It always makes me a bit sad when any site is taken offline. I haven't even heard of Simple Desks before, but it still makes me sad that it is gone.
Destroying bits is so darn easy, that people do it too much. I don't delete emails (my spamfilter might delete, I don't). Once in a while it's nice to see what you were up to 5 years ago.
My personal homepage is still running. I haven't updated it in many many years, but it still there. Occasionally my friends and I check some photos from there that I posted almost 10 years ago. And I regret that I have deleted all previous version of my homepage.
And it was a sad day when GeoCities was taken offline.
Sure, if keeping your site up and running (even in read-only) costs too much, it's ok to shut it down. But please, try to save as much of the current Internet as you can so our children can see its history.
apparent update:
"Back, and better than ever January 20th, 2012. Many thanks to Pat Dryburgh for his excellent work over the years. Unfortunately, he has chosen to end this venture. We think that is a great shame, and we've decided to bring it back, but in a different form. When we relaunch on January 20th, Simple Desks will return with a more substantial aim: to provide food for thought on the subjects of productivity, minimalism and design and technology (along with some occasionally unrelated musings). We hope you'll join us. In the mean time, we suggest you read Pat's excellent blog post (patdryburgh.com) on his decision. We hope to avoid some of the issues he raises with the new incarnation of Simple Desks."
http://simpledesks.tumblr.com/ ↗
So I appreciate that it's your site and you have the right to do whatever you want with it, but isn't it a tad arrogant to judge what other people may or may not get out of it? To call it "porno" is to make a big assumption of what people are using your site for. And even if most people are just gawking at pretty pictures, isn't it a bit much for only you to decide whether it's a net positive or negative on the world?
It reminds me of the whole "_why" thing. It's totally your right to stop hosting content, but it's also a bit rude.
You can still see all the work via google images: https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=simple+desks+on+tumblr&gs_sm=e&gs_upl=16979l20448l1l20522l13l9l2l2l2l0l182l985l2.6l11l0&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.,cf.osb&biw=1520&bih=683&um=1&ie=UTF-8&tbm=isch&source=og&sa=N&tab=wi&ei=_7YAT-e2JMqQiAL1h4WkDg ↗
I can relate to this so well. I've mentioned previously on this site that frankly I find much of the beauty and inspiration you can find on the web completely empty and meaningless. Technologists love to talk about the social impact the web is having and how it's going to change the world for the better (things which are undoubtedly true), but so much of it is so superficial that I can't help but think about what we're losing at the same time.