Yea that's pretty painful. I recently had to shutdown a service for my startup but I left the infrastructure running. People will gradually transition out and the traffic will go to zero. Not everyone can afford that luxury. I just made it explicitly clear there's no ongoing maintenance or support.
I once heard a guy say the best way to get people off your platform was to just keep raising the price. Make a fortune off the few that stick around with fewer customers to keep happy.
I wish that was the case. It never formulated like that. If you raise prices your support burden also goes up. Your need to innovate increases. The gap between profitability and the funding needed to get there is wide. Hence most startups die.
He’s saying, when you’re ready to shut your business down, keep jacking up the prices, and eventually your customers will leave. In that scenario, you don’t need to innovate or provide good support. The whole point is soft-kicking your customers to the curb while making some money.
They recently announced they were shutting down their cloud hosting and gave just 45 days notice to move sites.
Funny part was that the way they gave their customers notice was flawed and most customers didn’t receive any email from them.
I wish a sense of deflation was the only issue I’d had!