June.so Acquired by Amplitude
june.soWe were enthusiastic users on the free tier. This year there was a big push from June to move all free users to paid and shut down the free tier.
We hesitated about pulling the trigger, and now they are shutting down with only a 1-month notice, so I'm assuming the push to paid was their last valiant effort to make it work? Or maybe maximize value for a sale or acqui-hire?
I hope we'll get a post-mortem debrief on HN one day (there is not much to learn from the blog post, which has a very distinct ChatGPT feel to it), but I wish Enzo and his team the best. They built something intuitive, enjoyable to use, and I hope they get to do even bigger things in the future.
As an early June customer, this is a big disappointment. We specifically selected June over Mixpanel and Amplitude and were happy with it.
I wish there was more honesty in the post about what happened. When you boil down the details, it basically just seems to say the founders decided they would rather become (the X-hundredth) engineers at Amplitude.
Unless they were running out of money, I don’t see how they’ll have a “bigger impact” doing that instead of building a fresh take on the B2B analytics space.
I was quite surprised to see the acquisition! I think they never found PMF because they pivoted upmarket and were trying to do too many things.
Even though I'm not a customer of June, I've always rooted for them from the sidelines. They were a different kind of YC company; these days, you only see AI slop companies coming out of YC.
Seems like the founders lost hope in it and probably sold it to Amplitude to have a soft landing instead of a complete crash and burn. Since both are YC companies, i think this was an internal nudge towards a sale. But can't say for sure, i think the founders will share what truly happened in a few years once they're contract expires. Anyways, good luck to the founders!