Dear Customers and Partners,

I’m sorry to share that Convictional will be shutting down. Our last day providing platform access will be August 27th. Users have been notified of the migration timeline, and provided a path to downloading data for use in other systems. For practical answers to questions about migrating your data out of Convictional, you can read more in our Migration FAQ Page.

I’d like to take the opportunity to share why we’ve decided not to continue, especially since it comes so quickly after our launch. To be clear, the company is not shutting down for lack of resources. We still have several years of runway, which will be returned to our investors. The reason I’ve decided to shut down the company relates more to my original motives for founding it.

My goal in our new work to enable teams to be mission-aligned by design was to help companies make better decisions, faster. The team and I were early to the idea that AI will increasingly be used to automate task work, and what remains will be exercising human taste and judgment. We’ve been working on and researching related ideas for almost two years now.

As we’ve worked with early customers, we’ve seen a consistent pattern of interest and polite encouragement. What we haven’t seen is a lot of adoption and retention of paying, satisfied users among the ideal customer we’ve focused on. We saw sporadic adoption, and more so among smaller companies looking for cheaper alternatives to tools like Slack. Put simply, the customers who adopted did so for straightforward economic and tool focused reasons, not because the ethos was aligned with ours. The people who aligned with our ethos at larger companies couldn’t seem to overcome status quo IT decisions in order to adopt.

Past a certain point, it’s not a great use of investor funds chasing product/market fit somewhere where customers behavior suggests they are satisfied with the status quo. This isn’t to say we haven’t met our share of true believers, we had support, adoption and paying customers through this process. But we haven’t seen enough adoption, revenue and belief in the ethos of the work to justify continuing. I’d rather return the rest of what we raised to investors, enable the team to move on with their careers, and continue to think and write about topics emphasizing human judgment - focused more on the effect I can have.

I don’t think I am done with this general emphasis on empowering human judgment - I’ve called it my life’s work and I meant it. But I am no longer confident that it takes the form of a fast growing venture capital backed software company. I think for the idea to win, there needs to be easier ways for people to adopt these ideas across stages and scales of company. I’m going to keep thinking about and working on that with anyone who wants to continue to push those ideas forward. Our product might not have been successful, but our research and the example we set has had a significant impact through the course of our work.

Please join me in recognizing the great team that we have and all the work we’ve done. We recognize this impacts our customers and partners, and have a plan we are implementing to ensure they have the continuity they deserve. Thank you for being a friend of the company. While Convictional is going away, there is no reason the ideas and our spirit have to go with it.

Thank you, Roger Kirkness Founder of Convictional