I dislike immediacy of chats, so one may imagine I'm the perfect match for the product. But no, for people like me, I think, email works just fine. Level.app webpage says about its alleged superiority above Slack which looks a lot like returning back to good old email traditions (inbox, which you can check when you like, no presence status etc.) Fine, but... er, I already have it, as well as a variety of trusted tools, and everything based on the open protocols. So maybe the guy was solving the wrong problem all the time.
Walking Away from the Product I Spent a Year Building
211–220 of 221 posts
Re: Walking Away from the Product I Spent a Year Building
#212I recently had to do this with https://chart.ly . We've had great success doing data visualization service projects, but building a product in this space just became untenable due to the market's maturity and my teams lack of resources. Better to cut the cord than keep kidding yourself. Thanks for sharing!!
Not hosting my data in Libya!
Re: Walking Away from the Product I Spent a Year Building
#213Slack has a staying power that the author didn't catch: once you've got all kinds of apps reporting data directly into Slack, and all kinds of rooms set up for specific data purposes, it's even more sticky than email. Before a Slack-using company would switch, the competitor would need to support many/most/all of the integrations that the company is using. You've really only got two chances to win Slack's customers:…
Author here. Slack is undoubtedly sticky, although I challenge the assumption that all integrations need to be replicated in a niche play. Those who did adopt Level were willing to give up a number of integrations that were low-value to them or were just causing noise that proved unnecessary.
> Author here
Great article, very informative. Thank you for the effort.
Re: Walking Away from the Product I Spent a Year Building
#214"The gist is that it’s tough to get unbiased feedback during customer validation." - I wish this was taught along with lean startup content. Too many times I have heard founders say they validated the idea when all they have done is gotten biased feedback while asking self-fulfilling questions.
I say it every time, to every founding team I meet. Read “The Mum Test”[1]. It will make you aware that you to get unbiased feedback you need to remove your identity from the idea so that people aren’t nice to protect you. [1] http://momtestbook.com/
thank you. Skimming through this now and seeing how clearly it maps to recent conversations we've had that have turned into customers vs conversations we thought would and never did
Re: Walking Away from the Product I Spent a Year Building
#215> An engineer at Stripe told me about their careful balance of email, forums, and Slack. They recognize that Slack is not suitable for meaningful conversations, so they automatically delete chat messages older than a few weeks to discourage relying on it for long-term archival. In retrospectives, team members often reflect on whether they chose the right medium (email, chat, or forum) for various conversations. This…
if slack becomes your hub and you start adding in integrations the app limit (10) can hit you pretty quickly as well
Re: Walking Away from the Product I Spent a Year Building
#216"It is not the function of the artist to be the critic. The winnowing out, the deciding what is good from what is bad, comes later. That is a community process. The community decides what is good and bad art. But the individual should pour this forth." - Terence McKenna
What I take from this as an entrepreneur is: Have a vision and bring it into the world. The market response, and the financial outcome, are irrelevant.
If you disagree, it's probably because you feel that the ultimate goal of entrepreneurship is wealth. I used to believe this myself, and I can certainly understand the perspective of those who do.
As for the article, this line is pretty telling:
> make a bold statement about the problem (without too many specifics about the solution) and gather email addresses of people who wanted to join the movement
This particular journey seemed a lot more "tell me what to build and how to make money from it" than "here is my vision," and there's already some grandiose idea of a "movement" before even some vague outline of an actual solution/product have been conceived.
There's also a strong whiff of the toxic "fail fast" mentality. Oftentimes, tremendous persistence and radical care are the difference between success and failure. I shudder to think how many fantastic products have died under this type of thinking, when the real issue was some deficiency in execution, positioning, etc.
I say this in part because a year is not much of a sacrifice, at least from the perspective of an entrepreneur, and especially when you have the financial runway to do it. Any sane person would probably disagree, but it's neither the job nor the nature of founders to be sane.
Re: Walking Away from the Product I Spent a Year Building
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not a true story. People wanted less manure and fewer horse corpses. They were thrilled with the automobile because it neatly solved their top two transportation complaints.
Not sure about my particular anecdote, I can't verify that to be accurate or attribute it to Ford (I have heard it on many occasions, and even once saw a clipping from a newspaper but can't find it now), but https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2017/01/get-horse-americ...
Skeptical at first, but came around quickly. The quote is apocryphal.
Re: Walking Away from the Product I Spent a Year Building
#218I built and ran a groupware/crm system from 2001 to 2009. But didn't get the traction I needed and couldn't afford the co-located hosting any longer. I spent 3 years developing it full-time myself and very part time on it the rest of the time. While also supporting a wife and two kids. I moved it to very cheap hosting, told everyone it was closing, but then never closed it but didn't accept new signups. Checking now…
This is sensible. Nice point of view
Re: Walking Away from the Product I Spent a Year Building
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
Depends on the company. At our 6 year old startup, email is dead except for external communication. Everything is on slack including ops, stand ups and informal communication. At Google, hangouts was lightly used but everything was on email.
People expect an instant response on chat, but reading emails from time to time. That makes a huge difference in interruptions when you work.
This is dependent on a particular workplace's culture, not an inherent aspect of the technology.
Re: Walking Away from the Product I Spent a Year Building
#220The Paul Graham essay on start up ideas comes to mind [1]. Everybody kinda wanted this product but they didn't need the product. This paragraph sums it up: > The danger of an idea like this is that when you run it by your friends with pets, they don't say "I would never use this." They say "Yeah, maybe I could see using something like that." Even when the startup launches, it will sound plausible to a lot of people.…
this is what I needed to hear