Pixelcloud is Closing
After a year of building Pixelcloud, we are shutting down. Some thoughts on what it meant.
Today is the last day for Pixelcloud. We put up the goodbye page a few weeks ago and have been helping users export their data since. If you haven’t requested yours yet, email us at support@pixelcloud.com before it goes dark.
It has been a real year. Chris had the original vision and held the product together from start to finish. I handled the back-end architecture and kept the infrastructure running. @juliomenendez came on later and built out the sharing and collaboration features that carried the second half of the year. We were a small team but it never felt that way.
We got good coverage and had real users. Startups, large creative teams, agencies, and companies like Disqus, Adobe, Yobongo and Zappos were in the alpha and teams were actively requesting to pay. The hard part was never the product. Payments were still a pain. Getting a designer-focused SaaS off the ground with the tooling available required a level of overhead that just wore us down.
Beyond the product, life was pulling in different directions. Chris and his wife were starting a family. I had just gotten into the first batch of Zappos Z Code, a coding internship program out of Las Vegas that Zappos put together to find and grow local engineering talent. It was a big deal for the Vegas tech scene and an opportunity I couldn’t pass on.
We’re recommending users head over to LayerVault as their next home. They’re doing excellent work in this space.
Pixelcloud was my first real startup and one of the more formative things I’ve been a part of. I’m proud of what we shipped. Thanks to everyone who used it and gave us feedback along the way.