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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

#41

Post by hnbear »

Just built out Rootly and it's fantastic product. On top of that JJ and team are responsive and really heavily engaged with customers, listening to feedback and continually implementing improvements.

Having trialed Rootly against competing products Rootly won out for the customer engagement. The competition just wasn't responsive.

Implementing easy incident management tooling also saw the volume of incidents increase rapidly as teams started to notice and handle issues as actual incidents. While the metrics increase is bad on the face of it, actually addressing far more issues that were previously just ignored is fantastic, and had lead to increased stability through better incident and problem management.

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

#42

Post by kwent »

porpoisemonkey wrote: post #29
kwent wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thank you for the feedback, we'll make some changes to the page.

Agree on those companies having technical talent and in fact a vast majority of our customers came to us with their own bot built out that resembles of our features. It really comes down to the age old question, build vs buy? The maintenance cost and feature enhancements for something owned in-house can be burdensome but I am obviously bias towards it.

We've seen it takes usually at least an engineer one whole quarter to standup the basics of nailing creating incidents right with some basic automation.

But the times customers decide building it themselves isn't worth it is often a) someone that owned it had left the company and b) its a big distraction from their core focus/ has become a full-time job to maintain.

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

#43

Post by ezekg »

kenrose wrote: post #10
rgthelen wrote: post #4

Congrats on the launch. How is this different than FireHydrant?

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

I've been a victim of this too and it sucks. People will flat out copy your business, and while they're at it, they'll go and copy and paste your painstakingly-written documentation as well. This really leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

I always try to go with the OG when I find these types of instances, since they're likely the one actually innovating (I know nothing of FireHydrant, so this is just conjecture).

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

#44

Post by jjtang1 »

hnbear wrote: post #41

Just built out Rootly and it's fantastic product. On top of that JJ and team are responsive and really heavily engaged with customers, listening to feedback and continually implementing improvements. Having trialed Rootly against competing products Rootly won out for the customer engagement. The competition just wasn't responsive. Implementing easy incident management tooling also saw the volume of incidents increase…

Thank you for the kind words, Alex. The whole team over at Gemini has been such a treat to work with.

The collaboration on building new features together is what really excites us. Appreciate you always pushing us to be better.

I feel like I should get you a t-shirt now that says "more incidents = better" because I couldn't agree more.

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

#45

Post by danpalmer »

kwent wrote: post #39
danpalmer wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

This was an awesome response and you absolutely nailed it. A vast majority of our customers actually have some sort of internal bot built. It's quite limited usually and largely focused on the "creation" portions of an incident. Most commonly create an incident channel, create Zoom, link to a few integrations, and that seems to be it. But depending on who you speak with that can be enough which is totally fair. Espec…

One last thought, if engineering teams paid "what it was worth" for a tool for every piece of their stack, they'd have no money for engineers or building an actual product. It is very easy to spend the entire personnel budget again on tools, and most companies just can't do this. At that point, you're competing with your competitors for business, and with other unrelated service providers for budget.

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

#46

Post by capableweb »

kwent wrote: post #36
dneri wrote: post #32

Congrats on the launch, I would use this for my smaller team. Why have a pricing page with no pricing on it though?

Thank you for the kind words and feedback. If you email jj@rootly.com we can get you some pricing ASAP. It'll be dependent on number of users and level of support/onboarding/custom feature development required. But if you're a small team, Rootly is powerful and ready to go out of the box with defaults and you might not require some of the custom stuff. To answer your question directly, we customize each package for e…

I'm sorry, but if your pricing is too complex to write out on the pricing page so I can know upfront if it's even worth talking to you, I won't reach out to you. It also suggests that your pricing is simply too complex, and that would hurt me as a paying customer as well, as I wouldn't fully understand the invoices I receive from you.

Building a calculator that lets potential customers input their variables and you show what the pricing would do solves that problem fully, and takes minimal amount of time to implement.

That you haven't spent that short amount of time in order to be transparent, looks shady to me (and others, some of them even write the same in this comment thread), as otherwise you'd surely display your pricing upfront.

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

#47

Post by jensenbox »

kwent wrote: post #36
dneri wrote: post #32

Congrats on the launch, I would use this for my smaller team. Why have a pricing page with no pricing on it though?

Thank you for the kind words and feedback. If you email jj@rootly.com we can get you some pricing ASAP. It'll be dependent on number of users and level of support/onboarding/custom feature development required. But if you're a small team, Rootly is powerful and ready to go out of the box with defaults and you might not require some of the custom stuff. To answer your question directly, we customize each package for e…

If there is no pricing, I will likely never return. If you cannot get your money right, how can I expect you will get anything else right?

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

#48

Post by macspoofing »

kwent wrote: post #21
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.

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…

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

Wow - you're looking for dirt on a company in the EXACT thread that calls out some shady things you've done against them.

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

#49

Post by jjtang1 »

capableweb wrote: post #46
kwent wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for the kind words and feedback. If you email jj@rootly.com we can get you some pricing ASAP. It'll be dependent on number of users and level of support/onboarding/custom feature development required. But if you're a small team, Rootly is powerful and ready to go out of the box with defaults and you might not require some of the custom stuff. To answer your question directly, we customize each package for e…

I'm sorry, but if your pricing is too complex to write out on the pricing page so I can know upfront if it's even worth talking to you, I won't reach out to you. It also suggests that your pricing is simply too complex, and that would hurt me as a paying customer as well, as I wouldn't fully understand the invoices I receive from you. Building a calculator that lets potential customers input their variables and you s…

Thank you for the feedback, a calculator is a good suggestion! We realize there are a fair number of people that will be turned away by this, we'll see what we can do for a better middle ground.

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

#50

Post by jjtang1 »

jensenbox wrote: post #47
kwent wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for the kind words and feedback. If you email jj@rootly.com we can get you some pricing ASAP. It'll be dependent on number of users and level of support/onboarding/custom feature development required. But if you're a small team, Rootly is powerful and ready to go out of the box with defaults and you might not require some of the custom stuff. To answer your question directly, we customize each package for e…

If there is no pricing, I will likely never return. If you cannot get your money right, how can I expect you will get anything else right?

Appreciate the feedback!
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