Sunroom was aquired by Fanfix
My reflections on the acquisition, closing the platform, winding down work with my team, and what’s next for me.
Last month we announced that Sunroom was acquired by Fanfix! This culminates 5 years of work building Sunroom. We’re really excited about and proud of this outcome, and we know it’s going to positively impact our creators and members. Our users have spent the last month migrating their Sunroom profiles to Fanfix. We’ve done a lot of work with Fanfix to create a smooth migration and comms process. As you can imagine, there are A LOT of moving parts when you move your entire creator base, their paying members, and all the historical data to another platform, without stoking fear or frustration (as it’s turned out, fear and frustration were an inevitable part of this process). In the week leading up to the announcement, Michelle and I had 1:1 calls with 80 of our top creators + creators who have been with us for years. To be honest, I was nervous about asking our creators to transition to a new platform…but almost everyone was so stoked to hear about the acquisition and the move, because there was a lot to be gained:
More product features
More brand awareness
A bunch of really cool community perks
And way more traffic to their profiles
Through these calls Michelle and I were reminded of how sweet the women in our community are. Everyone was so encouraging, congratulatory, but also so grateful for what we’ve built. I shared tears with some women as they reflected on how much Sunroom had helped them transform their body image and confidence. I realized it’s done the same thing for me. I truly feel hotter having run my Sunroom account for a few years (I’ll unpack that more at a later date).
Today, a month after our announcement, is Sunroom’s last day operating as a platform. I’m full of mixed emotions today. The overwhelming emotion is relief. This acquisition is something we’ve been working on throughout this year. There’s been a lot of ups and down throughout the process. Times where it felt like things were dragging on and times where we were sprinting. I’m also feeling sentimental about Sunroom. I obviously got so attached to the app and our brand after working on the design for years. I’ve spent tens of thousands of hours toiling away on the development of Sunroom. And it is sad to see all that work disappear in an instant. I’m humbly reminded that software products are merely tools for people to get shit done on their digital devices. Their forms are immaterial, ever-changing, and often ephemeral by nature. They exist in strings of code, in the cloud, and in pixels on our screens. But I shouldn’t mourn the loss of those things, because the real output of our product was the economic opportunity, the connection, and the freedom of expression achieved by the people who used it. And those outputs live on in our creators’ bank accounts, in their relationships with their communities, and in how they now feel about themselves.
Running Sunroom for the last 5 years has been a gargantuan effort — undoubtedly the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Building a software product that is a two-sided marketplace consisting of tens of thousands of micro-entrepreneurs and their customers has exhausted me in ways I didn’t know were possible. Until Sunroom, I had never experienced a weight of responsibility so great. When you build a product for consumers, you have such a duty of care over their experience using your product. Even more so when your product is responsible for your users’ income and requires their vulnerability to gain that income. Every critical bug, every round of fundraising, every delay in delivering better services to our users has stressed me out for years. As we migrate our users to Fanfix, and pass that duty of care onto another platform, I am starting to feel relief. And it feels really, really good.
I also feel immense pride that we’ve been able to achieve an exit for Sunroom. We not only created something valuable for hundreds of thousands of people, but also something valuable for another company in our space. We might not have been able to fulfill all of the big vision we had for Sunroom (we wanted to help millions of women earn and IPO eventually), but we created something that meaningfully changed a lot of peoples’ lives. Millions have been earned by the women on Sunroom since we launched 3.5 years ago. 2.4M messages have been exchanged. And 629K pieces of content have been created. We might not have succeeded across all the traditional measures of a tech company, but Sunroom in many ways still feels like a success.
I’m also feeling some sadness about the shifts in relationships with my team. I’ve gotten to know my co-founders Michelle and Nik so intimately. We’ve literally spoken throughout the day, almost every day over the last 5 years. We know how to read each other quickly. We know each others’ strengths, weaknesses, tastes, sense of humor, and operating styles so deeply. We most certainly could not have created Sunroom without them. Their values, their grit, their tastes, their intelligence, their craftsmanship, and their ideas are firmly imprinted on Sunroom in ways that are imperceivable to an outside eye. Despite Sunroom being a downright drag at times, these two have always brought the LOLs, the sass, the energy, the gossip, and the banter that has made working on something this difficult just a bit more bearable.
Other key people like Carson, Jordan, Alistair, Lee, and Ley have contributed in essential ways to our code base, our infrastructure, our creator relationships, our social presence, our product, and our customer care.
Our investors, especially Nick from Blackbird, have of course been critical to this venture. Nick was a Sunroom believer from very early on. He sat on our board, and has dished out much wisdom and encouragement over the years. We’ve been so lucky to have him in our corner.
My partner Jerome also gets a special mention for all the Sunroom-related shit he’s put up with over the years. He’s held me during stress-induced breakdowns, and been a calm presence as I freaked out about AppStore rejections, fundraising rejections, missed targets, and a myriad of other blips along the way. He’s also been my biggest cheerleader.
And, most importantly, our OG creators — people like Elle Ransfield, Talibelle, Saterra St. Jean — who in our early days took a bet on a little-known platform because they believed in what our brand stood for. We’ve been able to grow so much because of the advocacy of these sorts of women. We never paid them to promote Sunroom. But they did so loudly and often, because they wanted to share the Sunroom secret with as many women as possible.
The question “What are you going to do next?” has been tossed my way a lot recently. To be honest, I’m not 100% sure. I know I don’t make the best decisions when I’m tired or when I have low motivation. I’m giving myself a break for the next few months, and trying as much as I can to abstain from work-related activities. I want to get bored and see how that feels. The best ideas come from the state of boredom. I’m excited to lie on the couch and read, to go on a hike on a random Wednesday, to make things with my hands again instead of through my screen. I’m excited to travel a bit, go back to Australia, maybe pick up a new hobby (Jerome is teaching me how to DJ!). I’m excited to finish furnishing our home, to dance, party, and be with friends.
I know I’ll build something else again in time. But next time around I’ll be much less naive. I now know the starting power and ongoing energy required to build and sustain a successful business. And I don’t have that in me right now. But creating something useful for people and putting it out in the world is far too addictive for me to not try it again.
Stay rich, stay hot.
Lucy x