Short · checked 29 September 2026
The founder who wrote down why he stopped.
A Worcester security-auditing tool built in public by a bootstrapped founder, who stopped working on it in 2015 and later called it "an abysmal failure" on his blog before launching his next product.
AuditShark's October 2014 listing was a working tool, described plainly. From Worcester, Massachusetts, it remotely gathered security and configuration settings from Windows, Linux and Unix machines, checked them against a customisable standard, and flagged anything outside acceptable values as "Not Ok." The narrow screenshot uploaded with it shows just that: a tree of hosts on one side, a table of settings on the other, each row marked Ok or NotOk.
Most founders in this archive never explained what happened to their product. AuditShark's did, more than once. Mike Taber, whose company Moon River Software is based near Worcester, had been writing about AuditShark on his Single Founder blog since at least 2011. In January 2016, looking back on the previous year, he wrote that in 2015 he had made "the painful decision to stop working on AuditShark" after spending the better part of several years building it, because he wanted something that would succeed faster.
In July 2017, while preparing to launch his next product, Bluetick, Taber returned to it and called AuditShark "an abysmal failure" that he had found hard to let go. Moon River's list of projects now includes Bluetick, MicroConf and the Startups For the Rest of Us podcast. AuditShark is not on it, and auditshark.com returns an empty page.