Today we shutdown our oldest product, WebCollaboration.com, after 6 years (!) of operation.  It survived several business model iterations (corporate, free, freemium), a corporate restructuring, and many partners, employees, and friends who helped it along.  It was the first “web app” I ever built outside of a corporate client, and represents one of my deep-rooted philosophies on how the technology should make it easier – much easier – to enable people to collaborate with less friction beyond geographical, language, and social barriers (still a BIG problem).

Below is the letter that I just sent out to over 10,000 users.

Running a startup is hard.  Sometimes you wake up and the wind is at your back and all you see is opportunity ahead.  And other times you wake up and realize you gotta take one of your projects out back and say goodbye.  And (almost) everyday you have mixed emotions about which one you’d rather do.

Thanks to everyone who helped make webcollaboration.com what it was and I’ll see you in the future.

Dear WebCollaboration.com user,

After several years of collaborating, today we are shutting down webcollaboration.com to pursue an exciting new project that was inspired by our original vision of webcollaboration.com.

Our goal in creating webcollaboration.com was to make it easier for distributed teams to create epic things. We wanted to simplify communication, document sharing, and task management so that team members could collaborate asynchronously no matter where they worked.

A year ago we started studying what makes teams successful. We started interviewing dozens of very successful teams on specific activities. And we started capturing their process, including their file templates, pro tips, and sometimes videos. And we decided that if we could get those successful processes into the hands of great teams that we would be much closer to achieving our goal of helping you create epic things.

So we modified webcollaboration from being a collaboration platform to a resource library of very successful processes in an easy-to-use, step-by-step format.

And we called it accel.io.

It is the essential handbook for any company – whether you’re just starting out or trying to grow faster.

Although we’re sad to close this chapter of our company’s growth, we’re excited about this new direction and have already received some very positive feedback.

Thank you for trying out our collaboration software and all of your help evolving it over the years. I really hope you check out our new project at http://accel.io and signup for our launch in the next few weeks. As an added incentive, we’re giving away three brand new iPads that are pre-loaded with all of the guides we’ve produced so far (over 25).

Sincerely,

Scott Annan
Co-Founder of WebCollaboration.com