Dear reader (and likely email subscriber),
This is the last post that will appear on swombat.com. Of course, this site has been silent for some time, so perhaps this won't be too much of a surprise. I've tried to resurrect it in a couple of ways but they failed, and I no longer have the energy or interest to write a lot of advice to early startup founders. I still care very much about early stage startups, and get involved in helping (e.g. via mentoring and public speaking), but this blog has run its course (a while ago, actually!).
I continue to be very active in "real life", and also on danieltenner.com, where I blog more about culture than about early stage startups (and I am slowly migrating the best posts I wrote here to this more future-facing medium). My business started 6.5 years ago, GrantTree, is very lively, having recently reached the milestone of £50m raised for UK startups (and it's employing over 30 people now!). I also make and mix music that you can find on dantenner.com.
The reasons for sending this announcement are pretty simple:
- I wanted to end this cleanly and explicitly.
- I needed to migrate the site off its current DigitalOcean droplet, where it's costing $100/m (other sites were hosted there but they're no longer there and so this is the only site taking up cost there) onto Heroku, where it will cost a mere $10/m.
- In migrating to Heroku I have cut down the functionality considerably - for example there will no longer be any auto-tweeting or emailing of articles once the migration is done, in about a week. I also did not see it as worthwhile to add the ability to create new posts (!).
- The tweets often referred to very old articles, and often the linked articles were themselves no longer available. This required me to go and fix the broken links, which more often than not I didn't (because I'm busy), which seemed a bit pointless.
If you have in the past submitted your email, rest assured that it will not be used for anything. The email database is not present at all in the new site migration. It will probably survive in a backup file on my laptop for a while, until this incarnation of my laptop is replaced (probably in a few years) at which point the emails will no longer exist anywhere. You will not receive promotional spam to the email you signed up with, because I'm not an asshole.
So, in about a week, I will take down swombat.com from DigitalOcean and switch the DNS to Heroku, and there will be no more tweets, emails, or new posts. Every post on here will remain accessible for the foreseeable future, however. Over time, I will be migrating some of my best articles to danieltenner.com, along with writing new ones of course. If you want to read more of my writings, follow me there.
Cheers, and thanks for being on this journey.
Daniel
If you read this far, you should follow me on twitter here.
