Clickety, a Portland, Ore.-based startup that aimed to help CEOs and managers keep record of their relationships and conversations with employees, will shut down at the end of September.
Puppet founder Luke Kanies, who founded the company in 2019, sent an email to customers Tuesday morning.
“It sucks to close down,” Kanies wrote. “But we are prioritizing the health of our team members, which is the right choice, even if it’s sad, difficult, and a little scary.”
Kanies declined to provide more details when contacted by GeekWire.
In an interview with GeekWire last month, Kanies described Clickety as “project management for people.” The software is similar to tools such as Salesforce and Outreach that help salespeople keep track of leads, but designed for leaders who spend a majority of their day interacting with folks in meetings, on the phone, or over email. Journalists, analysts, and lawyers are also potential users.
Clickety connects with email and calendar apps, and tracks past conversations so users can remember discussion topics, promises made, action items taken, or other key information.
Clickety said it was doing an official launch later this year, with plans to charge $25 per month or $250 per year.
The startup raised a $2 million seed round from Founders’ Co-op, Flying Fish, Oregon Venture Fund, Liquid 2 Ventures, and angel investors including Kenny Van Zant, a longtime board member at Puppet, and Jay Simons, former president at at Atlassian. The company employed six people as of last month.
“We are incredibly proud of what we’ve built. We’ll miss using it ourselves,” Kanies wrote. “And we’re as convinced as ever that what we were building — a powerful tool to help people whose jobs are built around people work — is still needed. But we aren’t able to continue our efforts.”
Kanies pointed customers to Folk and Dex as alternatives to Clickety.
Kanies founded Puppet in 2005. The company has become a leading cloud infrastructure automation company based in Portland, Ore. He left day-to-day duties in 2016 but remains a board member.
