Live data from Hacker News

Realizing the dream of good workplace software

campsite.com

11–20 of 29 posts

Re: Realizing the dream of good workplace software

#11
post #7

As someone who absolutely despises what Slack has become, runs an agency, and holds the purchasing power at work, I imagine I'm the target audience for this product. I read this post while nodding along sagely, posted the link in our Slack, then went and looked at the pricing. Campfire is apparently almost triple the cost of Slack. Does it offer triple the value? The product features page suggests not, and even if I'…

Really appreciate the feedback, thank you

You're welcome. 45 minutes later I'm still thinking about Campsite because I hate Slack so much, so I really hope I'm wrong and it takes off for you.

Re: Realizing the dream of good workplace software

#12

Is MS Teams channels really so bad that we’d pay $16/mo per user for something else?

Yes. It'd be worth paying $16/mo to opt out of MS Teams.

Although, it's as much about the culture of the companies that use MS Teams as it is about the software itself.

Re: Realizing the dream of good workplace software

#13

I've recently started using Zulip a lot more after the Changelog podcast soft migrated their community from Slack to Zulip. I've also been following along with Zulip's official dev group, and some other community groups. And it's really good. I don't mind Slack at work at my fairly small company. It's definitely a distraction, but only a fairly small one. But coming back to a community chat after a day or three of no…

My old smartphone (Samsung galaxy A5) struggles to load heavy webpages (it is fine with HN); with Zulip, it gives up completely. Zulip never loads on my phone. Frustrating, since Zulip is where the Lean community decided to be.

Re: Realizing the dream of good workplace software

#14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked at Facebook for 5 years and agree. Though the culture was a big driver too. It’s not like switching to Workplace will magically transform company culture.

Yeah, me three (I was also there 5 years oddly. Do you enjoy being a traitor, incidentally?). But I think that the big learning from trying to roll Workplace out to other companies is that it was the FB culture that made it work. It's also worth noting that even though internal-FB stuff in core FB was absolutely bonkers, it definitely contributed to community formation, as you'd end up seeing that your XFN peeps hobb…

Love being a traitor. Just can’t look at $META and do the math.

Re: Realizing the dream of good workplace software

#15
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really appreciate the feedback, thank you

You're welcome. 45 minutes later I'm still thinking about Campsite because I hate Slack so much, so I really hope I'm wrong and it takes off for you.

I do think we deliver $16/user/mo of value fwiw: unrestricted posting, DMing, video calls with recording + transcripts + LLM summaries, API, and tons more. But we're not doing a good enough job:

1. Giving people an on-ramp to try posting on Campsite without committing to $20/u/mo. What's your take if we had a $10/u/mo "starter" tier? 2. Telling the story on how working the "Campsite way" is so much better than Slack, and the craft in the product justifies the price (in my strong, very biased opinion).

Re: Realizing the dream of good workplace software

#17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, me three (I was also there 5 years oddly. Do you enjoy being a traitor, incidentally?). But I think that the big learning from trying to roll Workplace out to other companies is that it was the FB culture that made it work. It's also worth noting that even though internal-FB stuff in core FB was absolutely bonkers, it definitely contributed to community formation, as you'd end up seeing that your XFN peeps hobb…

Love being a traitor. Just can’t look at $META and do the math.

Yeah, I invested all my remaining stock (not much, given that I wasn't US based) into a house which has appreciated (but a lot less than Meta).

Re: Realizing the dream of good workplace software

#18
post #7

As someone who absolutely despises what Slack has become, runs an agency, and holds the purchasing power at work, I imagine I'm the target audience for this product. I read this post while nodding along sagely, posted the link in our Slack, then went and looked at the pricing. Campfire is apparently almost triple the cost of Slack. Does it offer triple the value? The product features page suggests not, and even if I'…

I’m a very active Campsite user (for the Campsite team, hi this is Ethan!)

I don’t think Campsite is overpriced at all. It functions as our internal wiki, our chat, and our video conferencing solution.

It makes asynchronous work actually functional, so to me this comes down to: if you want a high-functioning asynchronous team, Campsite is WELL worth the cost. If you just want to “replace Slack” for unknown (?) reasons or to just try something new (?) then yeah, it’s overpriced.

The integration of docs (or more generically long-lived evergreen content, b/c I’m not sure Docs are the right abstraction), calls w/ AI features integrated, posts, and DMs all together is huge. A lot of synergies to be had by having all of these things in a combined system that supports bidirectional linking between all of them.

Re: Realizing the dream of good workplace software

#19
post #16

Is MS Teams channels really so bad that we’d pay $16/mo per user for something else?

No, and you also shouldn't hire people that think that a company's culture is dictated by which chat app they use. Very stupid.

“Dictated” no, “highly influenced by,” yes. It’s insane someone could think otherwise.

If your organization communicated by carrier pigeon, it’d make some types of organizations and cultures and solutions possible while precluding others.

Obviously communication methods influence organizations :|

We switched to Campsite and our mode of thinking changed immediately. Suddenly we were able to have long-lived, complex conversations. Which is important to us as a company that has to solve complex problems over long periods of time.

Post reply on HN