Email Header: IMPORTANT: Storipress is shutting down 15 November

Hi {first_name},

We have bittersweet news: After many great years of learning and building with you, we’ve decided to sunset the app.

We know migrating off Storipress may take some time, so we’ve set aside two months for you to prepare — you can use the app until November 15th, 2024, after which all data will be deleted.

We’ve compiled a migration guide here and we’re working with our investor to approve the open sourcing of our codebase for those who want to self-host Storipress.

As for why Storipress is shutting down —

In 2020, Storipress believed owning content and its consumption data would enable better ad personalization. Google’s antitrust behavior prevented it from using this data effectively, presenting an arbitrage opportunity. Prophet and Google’s ongoing antitrust litigation proved this thesis accurate.

However, we mistakenly targeted traditional media at launch, which was slow to adopt new technologies. Meanwhile, B2B companies starting to self-publish were a rapidly growing and more adaptable target customer.

When we launched to traditional media, we accidentally generated too much user momentum in this segment to pivot effectively to B2B businesses. The only way to do this would have been to deprecate our site builder, the most technically complex and expensive part of Storipress; however, we were too concerned with the mission-critical nature of our initial product on our customers’ businesses. Maintaining the site builder consumed over 35% of our development budget, slowing the technical work needed for the pivot.

While Storipress explored how to improve advertising, we’ve begun pondering a new question: “What does the future of information look like?” Not from a page you found on Google but from the underlying bedrock of where information comes from. We think it’s one of the most critical questions in the coming decade, and we believe Consensus is an excellent example of this future.