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Show HN: Emdash – Slack/Zoom alternative for distributed team collaboration

emdash.io

31–40 of 69 posts

Re: Show HN: Emdash – Slack/Zoom alternative for distributed team collaboration

#31
This looks great. What is the reason for adding the https://sso.tax? Why did you make SSO an enterprise feature?

Is it due to some (technical) reason that would require a monetary compensation to be profitable?

SSO has security benefits (on top of the maintainability aspect) which would also benefit small businesses.

Re: Show HN: Emdash – Slack/Zoom alternative for distributed team collaboration

#32
I see no mention here of using a pre-existing standard chat protocol like XMPP or Matrix, it looks like they rolled their own. Therefore this is not interoperable and is yet another proprietary walled garden. No GNU/Linux client either. Next.

Re: Show HN: Emdash – Slack/Zoom alternative for distributed team collaboration

#34
One of the usecases that is relevant for us is supporting other companies over call. Zoom and team are built from meetings but not for support.

Key things for support are:

1. Ability to share access to the customers machine with out any hassle and easy acknowledgement for sharing access

2. Recordings and summarirs automatically gets added to tickets and issues

3. Playbooks are handy for the support engineer during the call

Re: Show HN: Emdash – Slack/Zoom alternative for distributed team collaboration

#35
post #33

Side question: Do these animations linked to scrolling add some real value to the readers? Is there some experimental data showing value (e.g., conversion rate) over a static page? Thanks.

I found the text appearing in waves like that quite disturbing. It takes away from the classiness of the product.

Re: Show HN: Emdash – Slack/Zoom alternative for distributed team collaboration

#36
post #28
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi, Fred here – I’m one of the founding team members. Thanks for the comment. First, to the question about team sizes. We view "Startups" as generally teams with Regarding pricing, we haven’t finalized it yet because we’ve prioritized understanding how teams actually use emdash—what works, what doesn’t, and where we should focus. Pricing is important, and we want to get it right. Typical usage patterns, evolving AI a…

"We haven't figured out pricing" sounds like a big turnoff for anyone seriously considering this who wants self service. Just pick something that's a no brainier for people to try, change it later if you have to. Your biggest risk right now is people walk without giving the product real consideration. Lack of clarity on pricing will do that for a lot of people, even though you are offering a free trial.

Thanks for the advice. One challenge for us will be how to price-in token based costs, e.g. downstream GPT services. There was an interesting post earlier today on HN related to this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43186032 which recommended progressive pricing, which I thought was really interesting. On the other hand, the marginal cost of these services is being aggressively driven down by the big players so it may ultimately be safe to provide a fixed cost subscription model.

Re: Show HN: Emdash – Slack/Zoom alternative for distributed team collaboration

#37
"Individual messages or entire Discussions can be moved after the fact" -- sounds like a start, but I want more.

Being able to tag chats with keywords would be nice. Being able to pull chats into docs easily would be nice. Being able to pull chats into more than one doc -- not just move, but tag/reference/copy. Global tags (with ACLs) as well as team and personal tags (also with ACLs) would be fantastic. Don't forget read and access ACLs, not just write ACLs.

Email integration would be nice. Emails -> IM, so I can read IMs and emails in one app. IM -> email (right-click on a range of messages, click send, get placed in $MUA and edit).

Don't forget retention controls, support for on-prem, etc.

Re: Show HN: Emdash – Slack/Zoom alternative for distributed team collaboration

#38

I see no mention here of using a pre-existing standard chat protocol like XMPP or Matrix, it looks like they rolled their own. Therefore this is not interoperable and is yet another proprietary walled garden. No GNU/Linux client either. Next.

That's the way the game is played in the IM space. Sucks, but the only way out of that is to build an open source product.

Re: Show HN: Emdash – Slack/Zoom alternative for distributed team collaboration

#39
post #33

Side question: Do these animations linked to scrolling add some real value to the readers? Is there some experimental data showing value (e.g., conversion rate) over a static page? Thanks.

Appreciate the feedback on this. We do want to focus folks on the product's value prop and remove distractions. I wouldn't say we are attached to the animations by any means and will have a chat with our team. Cheers.

Re: Show HN: Emdash – Slack/Zoom alternative for distributed team collaboration

#40
post #31

This looks great. What is the reason for adding the https://sso.tax ? Why did you make SSO an enterprise feature? Is it due to some (technical) reason that would require a monetary compensation to be profitable? SSO has security benefits (on top of the maintainability aspect) which would also benefit small businesses.

To be honest, we're still finalizing our long-term pricing details. For what it's worth, "Sign in with Google" and "Sign in with Microsoft" are available to all users, and we'll prioritize additional canonical OIDC providers as demanded (let us know what you need!). 100% agree with the security benefits here. The SSO reference on our pricing page specifically applies to SAML-based IdPs, intended for customers who require further customization re: auth and provisioning strategy.
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