23 Aug 2021
Belle

We're working on Exist again

When we announced we were selling Exist in March, we knew we were taking a risk. As someone recently told us, most companies keep the fact that they're selling a secret until the deal is done. But we're not most companies. We've always been as transparent as we can stand to be with Exist, and we like it that way. So do our users.

Unfortunately, but perhaps unsurprisingly, many of our users are uncomfortable with the uncertainty of knowing we're selling. We've seen sign-ups drop, and higher numbers than normal of account deletions and suspensions. Many users have specifically told us the reason they're leaving or putting their account on hold is because we're selling.

Selling is hard

We didn't expect to still be looking for a buyer in August. We'd hoped to be at least partway through handover by now, if not close to completion. We were probably naive about our timeline, especially since we're set on finding a new home for Exist with people who share our values.

While we've had a lot of interest and many discussions, we're still looking for the right people to take over Exist. If you know anyone who might be interested, please send them our way!

We're back... kind of

While we've been spending our time on calls, emails, and paperwork in order to sell Exist, we've not been spending time on new features. This was our plan, but we didn't expect the sale process to take so long, and we're sad for Exist to have not seen major updates for so long. We want our users to feel confident in using Exist and know that we still care about improving it.

So our next step is to put our time and energy into continuing the work we'd already started on manual tracking. We're cutting down the scope of this feature initially, so we can get something new launched as soon as possible. We don't have specifics to share yet, but we'll be making a lot of noise about this once it's ready, but it's the most exciting (and hardest, and biggest) change to Exist since custom tags.

What does it all mean?

Well, we're still looking for a new owner for Exist. We have some discussions ongoing, and we're open to new ones as well.

While we do that, we're going to work hard on getting manual tracking released as soon as possible, in some form.

As always, we'll continue to offer support to all Exist users.

We still care about Exist and all our users, and want the best for everyone from the change of ownership. We'll keep looking for a new owner that feels like a great fit, and do our best to keep improving Exist in the meantime.