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One free scan finds every outdated or missing driver and matches the right update for your exact hardware.Free scan · exact hardware matchArgyle Social, a Durham, North Carolina, social media management startup, announced on April 16, 2014, that its service would close permanently on May 31, 2014. The company said it could not keep pace with larger competitors’ features while shouldering the work of maintaining integrations as social networks changed their APIs.
What happened to Argyle Social?
VentureBeat reported on April 16, 2014, that Argyle Social had emailed customers to announce its shutdown. The notice, signed “Adam & the Argyle Team,” said: “After 4 years, Argyle Social is shutting down our service – effective 5/31/2014.” This is a historical account of Argyle Social, not a report about a current brand with a similar name.
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The company explored possible partnerships that might allow the service to continue, but founder and CEO Adam Covati said it could not reach an agreement that worked for both sides. The report does not describe an acquisition or identify a buyer or successor operator.
Why did the startup close?
Competition with larger vendors
Covati described social media management as “a very tough industry.” He said larger companies had more marketing budget and sales capacity, making it difficult for Argyle to match their product development. “It’s not what we wanted to do, but in the long-term, we could see that we were going to have a hard time continuing to stay competitive with the feature set of some of our competitors,” he told VentureBeat.
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The 2014 report named Radian6, Adobe and Hootsuite among the larger competitors in that market at the time. These names describe the competitive context of the shutdown, not a current software comparison.
The cost of keeping integrations working
Argyle also faced ongoing engineering work as social networks changed their application programming interfaces (APIs)—the systems that let outside software connect to their services. For a small team, maintaining those connections competed with building the features needed to keep up with better-resourced rivals.
Integrations did not close the gap
Argyle had tried to stand out by connecting its social media management product to marketing automation platforms, including Marketo and Pardot. VentureBeat’s account indicates those integrations did not offset competitors’ greater resources and feature development.
What were customers told to expect?
The shutdown notice said the website and backend infrastructure—including the application, database and analytics-processing servers—would be terminated on May 31, 2014. Customers were offered a report listing their short URLs and the destination URLs to which they pointed.
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Argyle expected short-link redirects to remain active for as long as feasible, but did not guarantee ongoing service and warned that redirects would eventually expire. Customers using custom domains might have been able to host redirects themselves, though the notice said that would likely require a server and custom code. The report does not establish whether any former Argyle redirects still work today.
How large was Argyle Social?
The figures below are historical claims reported by VentureBeat in 2014, not independently audited or current figures.
| Measure | Historical figure | Context |
|---|---|---|
| Time in business | More than four years | Stated in the customer shutdown notice reproduced by VentureBeat. |
| Employees | As many as 25 at times | Attributed to Covati in VentureBeat’s 2014 report. |
| Reported financing | $1.6 million | Total reported by VentureBeat in 2014. |
| Seed round | $325,000 in October 2010 | Reported by VentureBeat in 2014. |
| Funding round | $1.2 million in September 2011 | Reported by VentureBeat in 2014. |
What is known about the shutdown—and what is not
The April 16, 2014, report supports the closure date, the company’s stated reasons, its unsuccessful effort to find a partner, and the instructions customers received about servers and redirects. It does not establish what happened to Argyle Social’s staff, assets or investors after the shutdown, or the present status of the larger competitors it named.
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Source: VentureBeat, April 16, 2014.
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