Some sad news from Dalton Caldwell and Bryan Berg:
The bad news is that the renewal rate was not high enough for us to have sufficient budget for full-time employees. After carefully considering a few different options, we are making the difficult decision to no longer employ any salaried employees, including founders. Dalton and Bryan will continue to be responsible for the operation of App.net, but no longer as employees. Additionally, as part of our efforts to ensure App.net is generating positive cash flow, we are winding down the Developer Incentive Program. We will be reaching out to developers currently enrolled in the program with more information.
Like many of you reading this probably, I was one of the original backers of ADN and I used it quite a bit in the early days. In fact, I even moved Tweetbot out of my Dock and replaced it with Riposte. ADN is so much more than “Twitter without the ads”, but Alpha (the Twitter-like part of ADN) was my biggest reason for using and paying for the service. Over time, most of the people I followed on ADN began simply dual-posting between ADN and Twitter. And I only know of two people who actually quit Twitter to use only ADN. So that’s why it just wasn’t worth it to me to renew my annual subscription. And clearly I wasn’t the only one.
Dalton and Bryan and the whole ADN team truly did build something amazing. Congratulations to them for doing the work and shipping something great.