Andy Baio reflects on his decision to shutdown the quirky and cool Skittish:
I always knew there would be risk building something like this during the pandemic. Fortunately, I built it in a way where nobody would be burned: we fully honored the terms of our grant funding, it never had investors, never took on debt, never had employees, and I’ve made sure no paying customer will be negatively affected.
It is extremely difficult to build something of any scale without taking many risks. I think Andy did the right thing by building something with extremely constrained resources and keeping all the risk to himself. I wish I had done the same in many situations in my career. Bootstrapping a company is the way to go.
Skittish was really fun to use. I never attended a full event in it but I did play with it many times as they released updates. What a fun project! I’m glad it existed how ever short lived.