I would assume that switching team tooling would have a social credit cost/risk. Didn't see that mentioned in the article. People don't want to appear incompetent if the new thing doesn't work out. It has to be really good. Maybe it has to have a certain momentum on personal projects...
Walking Away from the Product I Spent a Year Building
91–100 of 221 posts
Re: Walking Away from the Product I Spent a Year Building
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
All it takes is one information leakage scandal, and customers will abandon Slack at the drop of a hat. It's just a chat app, so it's very easy to replace.
I am willing to bet that 99% of users will not blink an eye if there was an information leak. See Equifax, Facebook..
Big difference with Corp data. Even FB never leaked that.
Re: Walking Away from the Product I Spent a Year Building
#93So. Will you open source the code?
Re: Walking Away from the Product I Spent a Year Building
#94Great post, Derrick! I learned almost precisely the same lesson in the same way over the same amount of time (a year) a few years back. It was _incredibly_ helpful to have those insights going into my next startup, and I approached customer development entirely differently. Lessons learned can be quickly applied!
Thanks so much!
Re: Walking Away from the Product I Spent a Year Building
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
You could make this same argument to argue that Slack would fail against email. Something like: there are all kinds of email integrations, user-specific and group-specific setups, etc. at companies. How can Slack ever compete? The answer was that Slack was so much better for many companies that it made sense to suffer the pain of switching. The company that beats Slack will likely be 10x better communication software…
Chat is a complement to email, not a replacement. Over time some people may take their formerly-email activities to chat, but no cutover is required. Running two chat systems side by side, on the other hand, is a huge pain. There really is a pressure to get everything migrated and the old one turned off.
Depends on the company. At our 6 year old startup, email is dead except for external communication. Everything is on slack including ops, stand ups and informal communication. At Google, hangouts was lightly used but everything was on email.
Re: Walking Away from the Product I Spent a Year Building
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's the rationale behind that?
Legal. When we are sued (we make equipment used in dangerous environments, and we have a lot of money, so if there is the slightest chance we can be blamed we will be sued) US law says we need to give all relevant information to the other side. That includes any saved chat logs and emails. However if something was deleted before we are sued we don't have to give it out. We lost a law suit once because a [not native E…
Sounds wrong to me. Hiding chat logs or other business information from the company itself as well as customers (albeit suing ones) seem stupid. How would the company ever be able to audit its own operations? Getting sued is sometimes also not too bad as it can reveal bad practices within an organization. An analogy would be an X-ray, not entirely healthy but very revealing.
Re: Walking Away from the Product I Spent a Year Building
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not that it'd be easy but I imagine that you can steal their customers by adding chat rooms and integrations slowly to some other type of software, rather than a more direct angle where you have to win at one of those two moments.
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?
Re: Walking Away from the Product I Spent a Year Building
#98Level is a pretty well designed product. Tried it briefly and I really did like it. My team was already using other communication tools (not Slack, but email and other options) and using Level might have become an eventuality if I or someone else on my team pushed for it harder. That said, as someone who also creates and launch products, I think it's hard to MVP into a space like this. It's better to wedge yourself i…
Thanks so much
Re: Walking Away from the Product I Spent a Year Building
#99Earlier 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.
Month-to-month, a new project by a single developer has many times the probability of folding than a company like Slack does. Shack is a significantly lower risk.
Further, there is much higher trust that Slack would give a reasonable notification period of they decided to stop existing, compared with a single dev's project.
Re: Walking Away from the Product I Spent a Year Building
#100Slack 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.