Goodbye, Chipmunk

To our amazing users, teams, and supporters,

First off, I’ll get right to the important points, with more info down below:

• Chipmunk will be shutting down its service, effective July 31st, 2019.
• We will fulfill all requests for your user data (or requests to delete user data) through August 30th, 2019.
• After August 30th, we will be wiping all user data and will be unable to retrieve it.

If you have any questions, please email support@getchipmunk.com by August 30th.

Three years ago, our team set out to solve a problem that we, along with many other teams, faced: working on creative content as a team is hard. Unlike documents or code, design files, artwork, audio, and video projects span many files, revisions, and iterations that can easily clutter a file system, server, or traditional asset management system. In turn, this makes the process of working with clients and stakeholders especially difficult, since media almost always needs to be exported in order to be easily accessible. We searched far and wide for a solution to this problem and couldn’t find one. So we set out to create it ourselves.

We received a lot of initial attention during our research, beta, and launch phases. As Chipmunk went beyond launch, however, we were unable to secure the resources that we needed in order to maintain the momentum we had at launch. As a result, we decided to shut down the service.

We’ll be supporting our users as we wind down Chipmunk, helping to ensure that they can transition to other solutions for their use cases. Three years later, we live in a much different space for collaboration. With Sketch for Teams, new team-focused features for inVision, Lingo, and improvements to traditional version control, teams have more resources than ever to work together effectively.

While Chipmunk didn’t work out in the end, we learned a few valuable lessons. Executing a vision can be easy, but building a commercially successful product is still very hard. It takes the combination of an unrelenting passion for the problem, a willingness to step away and rethink things entirely as early as possible, and a bit of luck as well. In the future, I look forward to continuing to focus on my personal vision — helping creative people achieve success.

Sincerely,

Lily Montoute, Co-founder