How to Handle a SaaS Product Shut Down
Adobe has just announced they are shutting down FormsCentral. Here is how they are handling it.
Adobe just announced that it is closing down its forms solution, Adobe FormsCentral. We became aware of this when out of blue, tens of FormsCentral users contacted our support to get help migrating their forms to our forms service, JotForm. We are currently implementing tools to help them seamlessly migrate to our service.
A healthy thriving market for a small company like JotForm can be too small for a large company like Adobe, so these things can happen. It is important to handle them smoothly so that both your company branding, your personal reputation and the trust to SaaS businesses in general does not take a hit. Overall, Adobe has a done a great job with the shutdown announcement and planning.
Let’s take a look at what they have done well and what they have not done so well.
Give Users Ample Time to Migrate to Another Solution
I have seen many services just shutdown out of blue without giving any warnings. This is the worst thing a service can do. Your users will be traumatized and they will never trust you again.
Fortunately, Adobe is giving users 6 months:
Adobe has done a great job with giving users an abundance of time to prepare.
Keep Things Running for Existing Users
This is one of the cardinal rules of the SaaS business. You cannot suddenly change things for existing users. You made promises to your users and you have to keep them. All changes should be applied to new users only, and existing users should be able to stay with what has been promised to them. This usually applies to pricing changes, but it should also be applied to product closures.
An option for Adobe would have been to keep the service for existing users and simply stop getting new signups. That’s probably the best possible scenario for users. In this age of automation, many services can be kept running with very little overhead. You just have to communicate well to your users that the product is being phased out. That is, they can use the service as long as they need to but there will be no updates or improvements to it. We usually do that for features we want to remove from our product.
If your business has run out of money, you probably can’t do anything like that. You are out of options. So, it is understandable that you will not be able to accommodate your users any more. But, if you are a company with deep pockets like Adobe, and if you are serving many different products to the same people, (webmasters, web designers, web developers) you should choose to accommodate existing users.
Adobe has not taken this approach. Now, users of their other subscription services might feel like the product they use might get pulled off under their feet at any time.
Provide Next Steps
When users are shocked with a bad news, it is important to tell them what they can do next. Adobe has done well on this front. Their announcement included links to other form building solutions like JotForm, and provided instructions on how to export their data.
They have linked to their competitors which is admirable. It is not only admirable, but it is also very useful for their users.
One option they had was to contact their competitors and give them some time to prepare tools for migration. If they had reached out to us a week before the announcement and let us know, we would have had more time to build the migration tools so users can switch to JotForm more easily.
Provide a Good FAQ
Your announcement might leave out many important details. An FAQ can be useful to answer common questions you receive. Some users will contact support and ask similar questions, and many others will not bother to wait for a support response. An FAQ gives you a chance to reach out to those people.
Adobe has done an excellent job with their retirement FAQ.
Explain Your Reasons Well
Another thing Adobe has done well was to explain their reasons for closure in a candid short paragraph. They have explained it well on both the initial announcement blog post and on the retirement FAQ. The reason is that they simply did not receive the traction they expected.
Adobe has a pretty experienced team and they are handling this closure well. There are things they could have done better, but these things are never easy.
Hopefully, none of you readers of the Design of a SaaS business will have to experience anything like this. But, we can still learn a lot from how Adobe has handled this product shutdown.
Looking from the unique perspective of a competitor of the closing product, my biggest suggestion would be work with your competitors before the announcement. Your users are probably very valuable to your competitors, and they might be willing to do the work to get them. So, you should work with them to make the process easier for your users.
