You only spent a year building something, thats nothing.
I've spent years building products, the first year is alpha at best.
Walking Away from the Product I Spent a Year Building
61–70 of 221 posts
Re: Walking Away from the Product I Spent a Year Building
#62My fundamental question here is: what is the problem with slack and how do you plan to solve it?
Distraction is not a problem with slack, it is an individual problem that must be solved by everyone individually.
Re: Walking Away from the Product I Spent a Year Building
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
That kind of circular reasoning is only more maddening because it makes sense. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy combined with a prisoner's dilemma.
I don't think it does make sense. Funded businesses die all the time. Google cancels products all the time. companies are acquihired and products end of lifed. Even within organizations there are critically important employees. So, no, it doesn't make sense.
At this point in time, Slack is a billion dollar unicorn that can magic money out of wherever it needs to keep going as long as it wants. It's not going away any time soon. The worst case scenario for Slack is acquisition and long slow death over a decade.
Re: Walking Away from the Product I Spent a Year Building
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
That kind of circular reasoning is only more maddening because it makes sense. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy combined with a prisoner's dilemma.
I don't think it does make sense. Funded businesses die all the time. Google cancels products all the time. companies are acquihired and products end of lifed. Even within organizations there are critically important employees. So, no, it doesn't make sense.
Actually it makes perfect sense for all the reasons you stated.
"Funded businesses die all the time. Google cancels products all the time. companies are acquihired and products end of lifed."
So it makes perfect sense to avoid Google offerings (especially consumer side ones, which Google kills whenever it wants) and avoid "funded businesses" and newcomers that in danger of being acquihired and EOLifed.
Letting the careless early adopt those kinds of services, and using only mature ones (that have proven their longevity and aren't going anywhere even if acquired) in your company, makes sense.
Re: Walking Away from the Product I Spent a Year Building
#65You only spent a year building something, thats nothing. I've spent years building products, the first year is alpha at best.
Depends on the products, some can be final polished version 1.0s in a year or less.
Re: Walking Away from the Product I Spent a Year Building
#66I read this, and all through the article I kept waiting for the part where the author would talk about his own experience using his own product.
What I'm getting at is that, its really difficult to get people to love something you build unless you love it yourself, Seth Godin touches on this in his book "This is Marketing"
I like the data driven approach to product development, but sometimes passion trumps data, if you build something you yourself cannot live without, it's much easier to slowly win people over to your way of thinking.
And if you say to me "well he was the only one working on it", then my answer to you is like that punchline in the Famous "Coming to America" skit ...
"aha!"
It is infinitely better to work on problems that you have a firsthand understanding of/experience with otherwise you're always going to be depending on others for product insight, which is not terrible, but much much harder than when those insights come from you directly.
Re: Walking Away from the Product I Spent a Year Building
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not necessarily true. For example the enterprise I work in doesn't allow saving chat history. This makes email better for technical discussion that needs recorded.
What's the rationale behind that?
I suspect that part of it might be legal. It's too easy for someone to say something in chat that will look bad when you're sued.
Re: Walking Away from the Product I Spent a Year Building
#68The way I see it, it's not that people don't like Slack, it's that people don't like online chatting in general as the official way of communicating inside a company. I don't think that the solution to that problem could ever be another chatting tool.
Exactly. Chat means you need to stop what you're doing all the time and chat, which is hell for people who need quiet time to actually get work done. Email can be addressed when there is time for it. (and yes, in principle you can wait to reply in chat applications as well, but the drift is for people to expect quick response).
Re: Walking Away from the Product I Spent a Year Building
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
That kind of circular reasoning is only more maddening because it makes sense. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy combined with a prisoner's dilemma.
It also requires time travel to implement; the folding knowledge was not known at the time of decision.
It's not time travel, it's risk management.
Re: Walking Away from the Product I Spent a Year Building
#70On a more abstract level I feel he was trying to enable/enhance deep work, just this particular implementation didn't fly the way he expected it to. Instead of targeting people who are somewhat annoyed by slack and the like I believe the whole value proposal should be more along the lines of promoting the concept and benefits of deep work.
I've actually been following Derrick and the development of level on GitHub. The code is open source. It's remarkably well engineered and I use it as a source of reference for my own codebases.
So while probably unintentional, he's already helped others by building it.