Walking Away from the Product I Spent a Year Building • Hacker News Board

Re: Walking Away from the Product I Spent a Year Building

#121

Post by addicted » Fri, May 17, 2019, 9:30 PM UTC

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #97

lloydde wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft Teams with their decent video conferencing might have an angle plus being “free” part of 365.

That's the discussion we're actively having now. My only concern is how to move the knowledge and context that's currently in Slack somewhere else. Also, who knows if Teams will actually catch on - though with Microsoft threatening to get rid of Skype, it'll end up being the more official looking meeting app anyways, so why not bring the rest along?

I’m pretty sure Teams is here to stay. It’s growing. MS is investing a lot of resources and it’s improving rapidly.

But I think your point about MS getting rid of Skype for Business in favor of Teams is the most important one. Once that happens, which MS has stated publicly, Teams will become a necessary app for MS to support, since enterprises won’t tolerate MS not having s chat service in O365.

Re: Walking Away from the Product I Spent a Year Building

#122

Post by boudewijnrempt » Fri, May 17, 2019, 9:30 PM UTC

derrickreimer wrote: post #100

BrentOzar wrote: post #14

Slack 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.

I was struck with " 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 your article.

It's something I feel quite strongly about: chat should not be archived. There should be no backscroll; being not around when people are talking means not being part of that conversation. Chat messages have no value beyond the moment. Any chat implementation that assigns importance to messages beyond the current conversation is wrong.

For the rest... It was like peeking into an alien world. I've been maintaining an open source application since 2004, and I've had various day jobs, but managed to build it out into my day job the past couple of years. I've never had the startup itch :-) Just let me build up my userbase, my income stream and my contributor team, and I'm happy.

Re: Walking Away from the Product I Spent a Year Building

#123

Post by sonnyblarney » Fri, May 17, 2019, 9:31 PM UTC

ddebernardy wrote: post #87

> “Ugh, Slack distracts me so often. You’re right; everything feels urgent even when it’s not. I’m super interested in what you’re building here. We’re pretty open to change at my company – I don’t see switching being too big of a deal.” This is such a common mistake. When doing customer development, do NOT stick to asking "would this be of general interest to you?". In fact, you can get away with not asking this at…

Though 'would this interest you?' may not be the way to start, neither would 'how much would you be willing to pay?' either.

Consider that even for established products 'willingness to pay' may be zero until there's a sales process i.e. they trial it, they like it, they discover some things, then the sales person starts to do a 'close'.

The problem with the 'how much would you pay for it' kind of discovery is it misses the opportunity for the company to determine in a material way why it's valuable to them.

There's a similar problem in consumer land as well, you can't hardly establish price points by asking how much people will pay.

Also - price isn't really the big concern. It's not going to be a margin issue, it'll be a volume issue if anything. The price for such a service would probably be very low per-person, to the point of not being that important. Price is not the big point.

And since companies will pay for stuff they find valuable ...

The 'real' question you want answered is: 'will they find this thing useful' in one way or another, or better yet 'what problems near my product do they need solved' so the maker can add that functionality or even pivot a little bit.

I think it's possible to rationalize the process of getting to that point, unfortunately it often takes industry experience beforehand, and probably a longer dev curve up front with some willing pre-customers.

Re: Walking Away from the Product I Spent a Year Building

#124

Post by philipov » Fri, May 17, 2019, 9:34 PM UTC

sonnyblarney wrote: post #119

AznHisoka wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am willing to bet that 99% of users will not blink an eye if there was an information leak. See Equifax, Facebook..

Equifax is a consumer product with uninformed customers, wherein the 'blowback' can't really be had by individual customers, rather, it has to pick up as a media storm. Slack contains a world of sensitive corporate information. Oddly though I don't recall any major email company losing gazillions of emails to a hacker either, but I could be wrong. It's an existential risk for Slack, but not unlike most other SaaS com…

It's important not to forget that this isn't about whether Slack is something a company should adopt. Any such risk you can attribute to using Slack will be multiplied a million-fold with a nascent service being developed by a single person or startup. All of these are reasons to continue using Slack instead of switching to Level.

Re: Walking Away from the Product I Spent a Year Building

#125

Post by perlgeek » Fri, May 17, 2019, 9:49 PM UTC

BrentOzar wrote: post #14

Slack 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:…

Couldn't you offer an integration API that's compatible with Slack?

Maybe not in the US, where APIs are under copyright, but outside it could work...

Re: Walking Away from the Product I Spent a Year Building

#126

Post by donnfelker » Fri, May 17, 2019, 9:51 PM UTC

BrentOzar wrote: post #14

Slack 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:…

This.

Re: Walking Away from the Product I Spent a Year Building

#127

Post by JoshTriplett » Fri, May 17, 2019, 9:51 PM UTC

boudewijnrempt wrote: post #122

derrickreimer wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I was struck with " 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 your article. It's something I feel quite strongly about: chat should not be archived. There should be no backscroll; being not around when people are talking means not being part of that conversation. Chat…

> being not around when people are talking means not being part of that conversation.

Persistent chat is one of the biggest values of Slack or Discord or Mattermost, and one of the big reasons I'll take it over IRC any day.

Persistent chat that you can join and read the backlog of is incredibly valuable. It becomes an asynchronous communication medium, rather than a synchronous one. And it's much richer and lower-friction than email.

Re: Walking Away from the Product I Spent a Year Building

#128

Post by grey-area » Fri, May 17, 2019, 9:53 PM UTC

a13n wrote: post #90

grey-area wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes I honestly have no idea what problems in our workflow chat would solve, but I can think of loads of problems it would introduce. I have no idea how other programmers tolerate chat as a communications medium for work. Why would you prefer chat over other async mediums?

Chat is just as async as email or any online communication platform - there's no obligation to respond immediately, and you can disable notifications for as long as you please.

In practice, people expect a response in a relatively timely way, it is after all chat, not email. It does seem a lot of companies treat it explicitly as ephemeral (and therefore requiring frequent checks). Even slack deletes old messages for free accounts, and the search is pretty poor IME. It is also full of chatter irrelevant to the topic at hand as far as I've seen in the slack groups I've participated in (though I have avoided it for work, so have not experienced it working well in a work environment).

I can imagine it is very useful for responding to a live incident for example, so perhaps people use it for that sort of thing. For a developer working on product though it seems crazy to me to have a chat window open for any significant part of a working day. People work differently though I guess and perhaps I just haven't seen it used well.

Re: Walking Away from the Product I Spent a Year Building

#129

Post by SI_Rob » Fri, May 17, 2019, 9:55 PM UTC

BrentOzar wrote: post #14

Slack 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:…

What's stopping potential competitors from making slack-compatible APIs?

Re: Walking Away from the Product I Spent a Year Building

#130

Post by IanCal » Fri, May 17, 2019, 9:56 PM UTC

boudewijnrempt wrote: post #122

derrickreimer wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I was struck with " 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 your article. It's something I feel quite strongly about: chat should not be archived. There should be no backscroll; being not around when people are talking means not being part of that conversation. Chat…

> It's something I feel quite strongly about: chat should not be archived. There should be no backscroll; being not around when people are talking means not being part of that conversation. Chat messages have no value beyond the moment. Any chat implementation that assigns importance to messages beyond the current conversation is wrong.

What's the value in removing this? I regularly look back to see what was discussed, it allows easier integration across timezones. I don't want to have to be around late for my American colleagues, or have to shift the conversation to large cc'd email. For chat I am involved in, why do you think I shouldn't be allowed a history of what I have talked about with people?