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Launch HN: Rootly (YC S21) – Manage Incidents in Slack

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Re: Launch HN: Rootly (YC S21) – Manage Incidents in Slack

#21

Post by kwent »

ceejayoz wrote: post #16
kenrose wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The CEO of FireHydrant had a less charitable answer last year: https://twitter.com/bobbytables/status/1403090735038189573

FireHydrant was my worst experience out of every incident manager I experimented with - literally nothing worked during our tests - and after two months of asking they're still refusing to remove our account; we still get a weekly email dashboard.

Sorry to hear that. I'll do my best to resist asking if you'd like to chat instead ;).

We try to take a very "partnership" centric approach. What that looks like day-to-day is our engineers/success/leadership team collaborating in a shared Slack Connect channel on new features. For a lot of our customers we get deep into the problem and bring in outside speakers from the industry to come do workshops, AMAs, etc. that might align well with the challenges.

This is the fun part about the job!

Re: Launch HN: Rootly (YC S21) – Manage Incidents in Slack

#22

Post by btables »

ceejayoz wrote: post #16
kenrose wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The CEO of FireHydrant had a less charitable answer last year: https://twitter.com/bobbytables/status/1403090735038189573

FireHydrant was my worst experience out of every incident manager I experimented with - literally nothing worked during our tests - and after two months of asking they're still refusing to remove our account; we still get a weekly email dashboard.

Yikes! Never like seeing that. Can you email me directly and I will get this sorted? robert@firehydrant.com

Re: Launch HN: Rootly (YC S21) – Manage Incidents in Slack

#23

Post by kwent »

linza wrote: post #17
midislack wrote: post #15

I’ve always wondered about building a startup on another startup’s back. What happens if they cut you off? Is getting bought up by Slack the end goal here? Seems like a big risk, one whim at Slack and you’re toast.

Let's hope slack itself doesn't start using rootly for incident response :)

Although this post is largely focused on our integration with Slack, we have a standalone Web platform that does the exact same. We have quite a few companies (especially MS Teams shops) run incidents solely from there.

This also serves as a backup when Slack goes down, users can continue using Rootly (top 5 most common questions we get).

Re: Launch HN: Rootly (YC S21) – Manage Incidents in Slack

#25

Post by kwent »

davidhariri wrote: post #18
midislack wrote: post #15

I’ve always wondered about building a startup on another startup’s back. What happens if they cut you off? Is getting bought up by Slack the end goal here? Seems like a big risk, one whim at Slack and you’re toast.

It’s actually pretty common to start on the back of an incumbent. As a startup gains success it can do more to reduce dependency by building more of the end to end experience and distribute risk to more than one partner.

That is spot on. We're investing in our Web platform which has the exact same experience and quite a few companies running incidents from there.

But the Slack ecosystem has been great for us so far. Easy to develop on and fairly flexible in terms of what we can do. I think the most challenging part is going through the review cycle, can take longer than expected when you're constantly shipping new features!

Re: Launch HN: Rootly (YC S21) – Manage Incidents in Slack

#26

Post by danpalmer »

kwent wrote: post #12
mchusma wrote: post #7

I do t get the pricing on things like this and pingdom. This stuff seems like it should be cheap, like $5/user/mo. But everyone seems to go expensive. There are other industries that are similar, but this always stood out to me as an industry where the pricing never felt right to me.

I appreciate the feedback. We tried to think of our pricing as the value a user would get out of the tool. The amount of time and headache we'd save them when actually responding to an incident. We've found a lot more pushback for smaller sized companies (e.g. Just curious for my own learning, is the thinking behind "should be cheap" motivated by potentially not everyone would need access to tools in monitoring, aler…

For non-technical purchasers, it makes sense to price by the value the organisation will get out of the tool. However for tools that technical users are involved in you have to fight against the "I could build this myself" factor.

There are lots of tools that are basically CRUD apps, or maybe CRUD with a chat interface in this case, which are fundamentally straightforward to build a first-pass version of. I'm sure the product here is far better than a first-pass version, but it's an uphill battle to justify that when the pricing is on the value to the user, rather than based on the cost to build.

Another complicating factor for this market in particular is that there are often two types of users: regular and infrequent. In my experience tools like this would be used heavily by the engineering team, but there was value in having everyone in the org have access to the tool. There may be 10x the number of non-engineers, but they're often worth 1/10th or less to have on the platform. Each person isn't worth having by themselves but having everyone there is worth something. Nickel-and-diming customers on the basis of lots of users who rarely use the platform isn't great.

Edit: also, don't have a pricing page with no pricing on it.

Re: Launch HN: Rootly (YC S21) – Manage Incidents in Slack

#27

Post by ceejayoz »

btables wrote: post #22
ceejayoz wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FireHydrant was my worst experience out of every incident manager I experimented with - literally nothing worked during our tests - and after two months of asking they're still refusing to remove our account; we still get a weekly email dashboard.

Yikes! Never like seeing that. Can you email me directly and I will get this sorted? robert@firehydrant.com

Tickets #1452, #1454, #1588. Was told "the account has been removed" on March 22nd, but I continue to receive "Last week on FireHydrant" emails specific to our org, most recently on May 29.

Re: Launch HN: Rootly (YC S21) – Manage Incidents in Slack

#28

Post by evnsio »

kwent wrote: post #19
neximo64 wrote: post #11

What do you see as different to incident.io?

Great question. Incident.io is likely our closest competitor and are doing amazing work over there. They have a strong team and smart founders that have been in the trenches before. From a product perspective they are my favourite of our competitors if I had to pick one myself to use. Our differences are largely driven by the customer segment we serve and the needs of SMB vs. enterprise. We've found by going upmarket…

Hey folks. Co-founder of incident.io here.

Firstly, thanks for the kind words Quentin – appreciate it, and congrats on your progress so far.

incident.io is pitched slightly differently to Rootly, insomuch as we're not building an engineering product, but instead something that's designed to work for entire organisations. I saw first hand what this looks like at Monzo – a bank here in the UK – where incidents weren't just declared when Cassandra fell over (ahem, https://monzo.com/blog/2019/09/08/why-monzo-wasnt-working-on...), but were also declared for things like excessive customer support queries and not enough people to serve them, regulatory issues, or a customer threatening staff in reception. All of these things require teams to form quickly, communicate well, and follow a process. We're building for this.

In terms of market and customer segments, we're working with a wide range of companies with up to 6k employees. That said, we're a perfect fit right now for folks in the 200-1500 people range.

By all means reach out if you have any questions.

Re: Launch HN: Rootly (YC S21) – Manage Incidents in Slack

#29

Post by porpoisemonkey »

kwent wrote: post #12
mchusma wrote: post #7

I do t get the pricing on things like this and pingdom. This stuff seems like it should be cheap, like $5/user/mo. But everyone seems to go expensive. There are other industries that are similar, but this always stood out to me as an industry where the pricing never felt right to me.

I appreciate the feedback. We tried to think of our pricing as the value a user would get out of the tool. The amount of time and headache we'd save them when actually responding to an incident. We've found a lot more pushback for smaller sized companies (e.g. Just curious for my own learning, is the thinking behind "should be cheap" motivated by potentially not everyone would need access to tools in monitoring, aler…

Not the OP, but in one of the smaller companies (~30 people/~12 engineers) you describe that's currently looking for a tool like this.

I can't actually see the pricing because it's behind a nebulous "contact us" link, but if this is more than about $5/user/month I would definitely balk at the price.

Larger companies already have dedicated platform and tooling teams with enough technical talent and bandwidth to build this sort of solution (I've seen something eerily similar to this at a previous employer that had about ~75 engineers). IMHO it's the small companies that need off the shelf incident management because they have very few people to dedicate to solving this problem and need a way to manage the communication chaos that incidents can cause.

Re: Launch HN: Rootly (YC S21) – Manage Incidents in Slack

#30

Post by evnsio »

evnsio wrote: post #28
kwent wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great question. Incident.io is likely our closest competitor and are doing amazing work over there. They have a strong team and smart founders that have been in the trenches before. From a product perspective they are my favourite of our competitors if I had to pick one myself to use. Our differences are largely driven by the customer segment we serve and the needs of SMB vs. enterprise. We've found by going upmarket…

Hey folks. Co-founder of incident.io here. Firstly, thanks for the kind words Quentin – appreciate it, and congrats on your progress so far. incident.io is pitched slightly differently to Rootly, insomuch as we're not building an engineering product, but instead something that's designed to work for entire organisations. I saw first hand what this looks like at Monzo – a bank here in the UK – where incidents weren't…

Oh and if you're not in the market to buy something, I open sourced the tool I originally wrote at Monzo: https://github.com/monzo/response
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