Sprouter is Shutting Down

Update: Sprouter was acquired in October 2011 and will continue its service.

On August 2nd, Sprouter will be closing its doors and shutting down.

We’re devastated to have to shut down the service but unfortunately, due to capital constraints, we’ve simply run out of options.

It has been an incredible journey and we’re heartbroken not to be able to continue on.

We’ve demonstrated that there is significant demand for this type of service. We have an incredible community of members so enthusiastic that they actively encourage others to join. Sprouter has grown almost entirely on this type of evangelism and our membership has continued to grow by considerable amounts each week.

The Sprouter community spans the globe and we’ve been privileged to participate in so many local startup scenes. From Toronto to New York to London to Mumbai and Sydney – we’ve been humbled to meet so many incredible entrepreneurs and be a part of so much early stage innovation.

We’ve been blown away by the amazing thought leaders who have come forward to lend their time and expertise. We’re incredibly grateful to all of the prolific investors and business leaders who have given their personal time to answer questions from first time startup founders.

We’re currently exploring options for all of our content, including our weekly publication. Sprouter Weekly has been incredibly successful in its own right and if it’s at all possible for us to continue with it, we will.

We want to thank all of our members, our experts and everyone who has supported us along the way.

~ The Sprouter Team

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144 Responses to “Sprouter is Shutting Down”

Erin Bury 26 July 2011 at 10:09 pm #

Good luck with your business Matt, and thanks for supporting us along the way.
Erin Bury 26 July 2011 at 10:09 pm #

Thanks Jason, we’ll keep the community posted on future content.
Erin Bury 26 July 2011 at 10:09 pm #

Thanks for the comment and for the support.
Erin Bury 26 July 2011 at 10:09 pm #

Thanks Rohan, we really appreciate your support over the years, and your friendship. All the best.
Erin Bury 26 July 2011 at 10:10 pm #

Thanks Bill, we’ll let you know if there’s any way you can help.
Erin Bury 26 July 2011 at 10:10 pm #

Thanks for supporting us, however briefly! Appreciate it.
Erin Bury 26 July 2011 at 10:10 pm #

Thanks Kevin. Appreciate the support!
Erin Bury 26 July 2011 at 10:11 pm #

We have one out tomorrow, and we’ll keep you posted on any future content.
Erin Bury 26 July 2011 at 10:11 pm #

Thanks Cindy, it was so great getting to know you in Brazil, and we appreciate the support.
Erin Bury 26 July 2011 at 10:12 pm #

Thanks Flavian, appreciate the support. It’s nice to hear that!
Erin Bury 26 July 2011 at 10:12 pm #

Thanks for the ideas Sammy, we’ll let you know if there’s any way the community can help.
Erin Bury 26 July 2011 at 10:13 pm #

Thanks Chris. Don’t have any more information at this time but I’ll keep you posted.
Erin Bury 26 July 2011 at 10:14 pm #

Hey Chris, we actually have a team of four people working on Sprouter. I’m the Community Manager, so was in charge of PR and all of the community building efforts. Sorry you didn’t feel that it was useful for you – I don’t have to prove you wrong, the other commenters here are doing just fine. Cheers, Erin.
Erin Bury 26 July 2011 at 10:14 pm #

Thanks Dev, we’ve really enjoyed having you along for the wild ride! Thanks again for all your support. Truly appreciated.
Erin Bury 26 July 2011 at 10:15 pm #

Thanks for the note Adele, and for the support along the way.
Erin Bury 26 July 2011 at 10:17 pm #

Thanks Tom, glad you learned something from Sprouter along the way! Cheers.
Erin Bury 26 July 2011 at 10:18 pm #

Thanks Chris, appreciate it.
Erin Bury 26 July 2011 at 10:18 pm #

Hey Sasha, nothing to report on this right now but I’ll keep you posted.
Erin Bury 26 July 2011 at 10:18 pm #

Thanks Gary, glad you feel that way. Best of luck to you as well.
semmond 26 July 2011 at 10:19 pm #

Sorry to hear that these are Sprouter’s last days! All the best, and thanks for the help!
Erin Bury 26 July 2011 at 10:20 pm #

Thanks so much, watch for a new issue tomorrow!
Erin Bury 26 July 2011 at 10:20 pm #

Thanks for the support – we’re familiar with those services but no plans to use them right now.
Erin Bury 26 July 2011 at 10:20 pm #

Hey Janet, thanks for the comment. We’ll keep everyone posted on our future plans.
Erin Bury 26 July 2011 at 10:21 pm #

Thanks, and thanks for supporting Sprouter along the way.
Erin Bury 26 July 2011 at 10:24 pm #

Thanks Jeremy, we’ve always appreciated your support!
Erin Bury 26 July 2011 at 10:24 pm #

Thanks so much Kevin. Appreciate it!
Erin Bury 26 July 2011 at 10:24 pm #

Glad you liked Sprouter, and thanks for the support.
Erin Bury 26 July 2011 at 10:24 pm #

Thanks, we definitely will.
Erin Bury 26 July 2011 at 10:25 pm #

Thanks Paul, appreciate your comment and your support over the years. I’m so proud of everything we accomplished. I’m sure we’ll see each other soon, and best of luck with your projects.
Erin Bury 26 July 2011 at 10:26 pm #

Thanks Michael, and thanks for your unfailing support over the past few years.
Erin Bury 26 July 2011 at 10:26 pm #

Thanks Kirill, appreciate it. We’ll keep you posted on any post-mortems or outreach to the community.
andresss 26 July 2011 at 11:33 pm #

noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!! anything to do with mayor ford????
ffcode 27 July 2011 at 4:47 am #

you should have started premium service or something and as for hosting loads you should have used your own servers! it is still a viable solution!
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Obed 27 July 2011 at 8:07 am #

What lessons have your personally learned from this venture?

Am in the pursuit of starting a similar website, your advise will be much a appreciated.

thanks
petef 27 July 2011 at 9:44 am #

I am sorry to see you go. Given the chance to help keep Sprouter afloat I would have considered donating or signing up for a premium membership. I am curious if you entertained such ideas and, if so, why you didn’t implement.

Best of luck to all,
Pete
Dan 27 July 2011 at 10:00 am #

Something doesn’t add up. A “Top 30 Under 30″ award-winning start-up can’t figure out how to monetize a website, a newsletter and a very popular monthly event?
Seriously? With all due respect, how does any other event-planner, journalist/blogger or online community make ends meet?
You keep saying that Sprouter is a startup, but I’ve never understood how Sprouter was a start-up because there were never any clear efforts to earn revenue, except maybe from the Sprout Up bar tabs. If Sprouter was a business, then it must generate revenue to survive, plain and simple. What am I missing? Are you borrowing a business plan from twitter?
You have four people on staff and a fairly simple website (really could just be a phpbb forum). If you have some kind of office space, I’d estimate your monthly cash flow needs to be somewhere in the neighbourhood of $20k.
Every event I’ve been to is swimming with people who could/should be paying more to be there. There are all manner of what I’d call tertiary attendees — people who are not actually involved in start-ups but are there to offer services to start-ups — there are SRED consultants, marketing consultants, mobile app dev shops, advertising firms, bankers, social media d-bags, lawyers, and more. Oh, and let’s not forget the VCs and angels.
If you shake 25 hands, 15 of them are people who should be paying a sponsorship-level fee to be there and could write it off as a marketing expense anyway. There is proven demand for the Sprout Up events. I don’t understand the failure to generate sufficient revenue from them. Each event should pull $5k from the bar tab and at least another $5k to $10k from ticket sales and sponsorships.
Then there’s the website. A PR 5 website with high-quality niche traffic is ideal for advertising. Give Shiny Ads a try.
Why not offer a package to the event sponsors? They could attend the event, get a profile on sprouter.com, and have the option to buy a spotlight at the Sprout Up event. This could mean logos on screen before and after the talks, swag, their logos on name tags, whatever.
I’d love to know what you’ve tried and why it’s not working. Or is it just time to move onto something new?
Jim 27 July 2011 at 12:15 pm #

Very surprised with your announcement. All the best with your future endeavours.
SampleJACK 27 July 2011 at 1:05 pm #

Sprouter Team,

In spirit of the Sprouter concept of sharing entrepreneurial knowledge and experiences as a community, I wish you guys would tell us the whole story of Sprouter’s rise and current fall. Why exactly are you guys shutting down? I know this is a bittersweet moment for you guys, but it would be great for other entrepreneurs to learn about this failure as we are all planning to fail many times in pursuit of our ambitions.

Best regards!
Nico 27 July 2011 at 1:21 pm #

What a bad news.
I was not a strong Sprouter user, but on contrary I was a strong reader of the Sprouter Weekly.
It was my favourite newsletter, I read it every week!
Hope you won’t stop its publication…
I am sure you already thought to transform it in a business, like http://startupdigest.com/2010/07/28/email-mafia-paypal-mafia-email.
Anyway, I wish you the best, and even if you shut down, you have done something great!
Nico
topicssocialmedia@gmail.com 27 July 2011 at 3:02 pm #

We could save it or take it over. We have 160 sites we operate today. Yes I agree what happened? We have the financial and web traffic ability to keep this running. Let us know.

Jim
Viktor Nagornyy 27 July 2011 at 4:09 pm #

Why not make Sprouter a community run website? Let community control it and manage it if you can’t.

You can always make some revenue with ads, which we never saw on the website.

There are many ways to keep Sprouter alive and helping other entrepreneurs!
Nui 27 July 2011 at 4:15 pm #

Very sad. I just got to know about it.
Sam - TheRedPin.com 27 July 2011 at 5:19 pm #

Very sad news indeed. We all appreciate your efforts over the years.

Good luck on your future endeavours!
hyokon 27 July 2011 at 9:40 pm #

Sorry to hear this, as I liked the newsletter. The articles recommended were of high quality. Perhaps you could try to make at least some pieces alive. Otherwise, good luck for your future!
joseph 28 July 2011 at 1:08 pm #

Dan,
What you wrote on the Sprouter comments page was spot-on. Most people will write “awww too bad so sorry” but you identified the business facts and some of the questions I had regarding Sprouter. In Canada, we DO have problems turning a great idea into a businesses. This was identified in a recent state of the nation study http://www.stic-csti.ca/eic/site/stic-csti.nsf/eng/h_00038.html
Thanks for your candid comments!
dmeharc 28 July 2011 at 2:03 pm #

How much money do you need?
iancarnevale 28 July 2011 at 3:20 pm #

So sad to see you guys go. The world needs more people like you.
Thanks for everything!
Derrick_Peters 28 July 2011 at 8:07 pm #

I was just introduced to your site just two weeks ago and jumped on the other day to share it with one of my entrepreneurial friends, saying “This is my new favorite site for startup/business information.” I was awestruck!

I do wish you all the best and know that since you were able to make such an inspiring website with Sprouter, you will be successful again in the future. However, I do wish to echo some of the other comments; as I too would love to hear the full story about this transition in true Sprouter candidness.
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