"Instead, a new venture that we’ve been working on as a side project has recently gained traction. Given the potential of the opportunity, it makes far more sense for us to shift our limited resources away from Harborly to focus on this new project."

Wow.

Founders tend to have insider info on when a company is headed for death. Side projects are essentially an internal acknowledgement of that, but the "official" death of the company or the publicizing of the side project only takes place once the project has gained enough momentum that they know it's worth pursuing full-time. Mattermark/Refer.ly is a perfect example of that.

Actually, we announced the Referly shut down in March 2013 (1) and played with several ideas after that. Based on our most popular content, we thought we would be a tech blog for about 4 weeks... code named "Cursive".

The first commit for Mattermark was made Apr 22, 2013 and we didn't buy the domain for more than a month after that.

(1) http://www.daniellemorrill.com/2013/03/zombie-startups/

That's gotta make your "founding" customers happy.

Indeed. I wish they'd tell us what that new venture is so we can know to avoid it as well. Some of these announcements read like parodies ("incredible journey", yada yada)

Here's a collection of them: http://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/

Interestingly, even though I follow Bitcoin pretty closely (I regularly read/troll r/bitcoin) I'm just now hearing about this company.

People often make comments like yours, and my reaction is that there's very likely cause and effect going on here, they might not have failed if they'd gotten the attention of people like you.

Yeah, I think the idea applies to many startups: if the first time someone heard of you is when you're writing "the announcement", it speaks volumes. I only qualify the Bitcoin part given that it's fairly niche.

Wouldn't it make more sense to wait for an acquirer to be found to release this statement?

Or one conclude from this statement's release that an acquirer could not be found. That comment could be just a last ditch attempt.

I would expect potential acquirers would be a lot less interested anyway given the founders are moving on.

As user said 650REDHAIR said

>Instead, a new venture that we’ve been working on as a side project has recently gained traction. Given the potential of the opportunity, it makes far more sense for us to shift our limited resources away from Harborly to focus on this new project.

What does this even mean? And if it's gaining so much traction why didn't you mention the name or link something about the project.

Seems to me they are running from it. I remember seeing this a few months back and didn't know why it wasn't talked about anywhere bitcoin related. They never really marketed themselves; fair is fair though the product looked pretty beautiful. We call this a ditch...

Sorry the original idea didn't pan out. Good luck on the new endeavor!!