When fortune 500, 100 and 50 organizations are buying AI coding tools at scale (I know from personal exp), then I would say you're late. So yes. Late stage adoption for this wave.
I run a company that services 1,000+ clients on Slack, another 300+ on Teams, and a < 100 on Email/Gchat
I wouldn't wish Teams on my worst enemy, so in that regard, I love Slack
The thing I struggle with the most is how I'd move all of our core functionality from Slack. A lot of the people/teams that build these "Slack killers" I don't think have ever run Slack at scale
How are you going to replace the 30+ in-house apps I've built that automate 50+ workflows?
How are you going to replace the 100+ workflows I use with 1,000+ clients when they have to submit a ticket, or questionnaire, or a security event?
How are you going to replace the 100+ partner channels I have where we send out automated messages about specials and discounts we're running?
What about the 500+ other apps I run that integrate with our systems? Are they going to support your new platform?
Do you have retention settings? DLP? How granular can I go on permissions? What about picking up events via the API so I can train people in real time on what not to do in public channels?
I have no affinity or personal ties to Slack. But if you're going to position yourself as a Slack competitor you have to actually do what Slack does
Feels like the more important question is how are you going to do all these things when Slack cuts you off, or there is some new Slack policy that prevents it, or they increase their pricing by 1000%
Haven’t you basically built your entire business on this singular proprietary platform they you have almost no control over?
> Feels like the more important question is how are you going to do all these things when Slack cuts you off
I pay Slack $50k/year. They have no reason to shut me off.
> or there is some new Slack policy that prevents it
Prevents what exactly? The new API pricing they introduced doesn't apply to internal apps. I suppose they could apply it to internal apps. We'd have to figure out a path around it
> or they increase their pricing by 1000%
1000% increase in pricing seems incredibly unlikely. That would not only disrupt thousands of companies but would likely kill Slack entirely
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> Haven’t you basically built your entire business on this singular proprietary platform they you have almost no control over?
Not really. We service clients through Slack. Could we switch? Sure. Would it be a pain? Yeah. Would it be costly? Yeah.
But there's also no reason to switch. And if a new platform comes out (like the one this thread is about), I would expect them to have the features to compete with Slack if they are posiitioning themselves as a Slack competitor
Every third party you contract with can pull the rug from under you this way, even this new startup with its 'forever free tier'.
You plan for it as a potential risk just like anything else and, if the time comes, you can work on migrating out. Companies will off board third parties all the time if the financials don't add up.
$50k a year? Those are rookie numbers. You're actually fine, as a small fish going belly up isn't the end of the world. You can start a new business. For some big tech companies this is potentially near existential. I would know.
Ok, but what stops same from happening with any other solution? There are two things that would "fix" it:
* Fully open and interoperable protocol: We had it (XMPP), it was flawed, but at one beautiful moment in time it worked and using same protocol I could contact both google and facebook contacts. Then the companies decided "no, we would prefer to keep a walled gardens rather than make it easy to move to competition.
* Fully open source (no open core nonsense, latest Mattermost rugpull from OSS part users being one example why) chat platform with corporate backing and SaaS option - there is Matrix but afaik it is lacking feature-wise, tho I havent used it much. With plugin app store so it is possible to make and even sell integrations with other systems.
Second option seems more viable but it takes a lot of effort to make something as good as Slack or Discord
I didn’t read the full site but it seems they’re not really going for those users?
Anyone who has dozens of custom workflows and apps in their Slack is probably spending 10s of thousands of dollars on Slack. It is probably vital to their business.
This seems like it’s for small teams (like 3-5 people even, collaborating daily) who get rekt really fast before they’re forced to spend $60 a month.
i have a side gig with 3 other people, we use slack chat for daily coms and webhooks. we meet weekly over discord becuase huddles are a paid feature, are you planning on implemening voip?
after 4 years we're almost at the point where i feel its worth spending $ for different types of convinient features.
Like a lot of other apps that go viral, it's a novelty that wears off in a few weeks (if that). There's nothing that keeps people on the platform. How many goofy AI generated videos does someone actually want to make? 10? 20? After you've done that, what else is entertaining or amusing? Any _really_ good Sora videos are posted on TikTok or Reels anyway. There's nothing tying you to the platform.
> Salaries for developers are well under $150k in most of the United States, for example, and that is for senior engineers
As someone who has hired hundreds of SWEs over the last 12 years from 20+ states, I have to disagree.
$150k is on the lower end for base for a Sr. SWE, and well below the total comp someone would expect. You can make the argument that $150k base is reasonable, but even Sr. SWE in the middle of the country are looking for closer to $180k -$200k OTE.
4x founder with 2 exits. The only time conflict arose or I felt like giving up was when we weren't growing. Growth and sales can heal just about all wounds (not all, but just about all). These types of articles always seem to point out the symptoms, and not the cause.
The symptom of wanting to give up is because you aren't growing fast enough
The symptom of founder turmoil is because whatever strategy you're currently using isn't growing the company fast enough
The symptom of running out of money is because you're not hitting your sales targets
Congrats on your good fortune, and agree with your diagnosis.
Does it work the other way? If the company isn't growing, do you close it? When/how do you decide this? What if the growth is just around the corner if you just solve this just one more thing?
I agree on your statement that growth and sales heals a lot of wounds or covers them actually. In co-founder relationship the absence of those also does open wounds and shows problems.
I agree. Growth solves all. It give you money to throw at problems, raises to keep people happy, and motivation. When there is no growth, that is when things fall apart.
Because I've ran into the same issue. I don't think this is actually the tariff. I'm almost 100% positive this is the shipping companies (UPS, and FedEx, but UPS seems to be the biggest culprit) are slamming receivers with massive bills because they are miscategorizing many items coming from Europe.
I also imported a roughly $400 item from Romania. Was expecting a 30% tariff at most. Nope. $756. Sender says there is nothing they can do. UPS says that's the money I owe. They will send to collections if you go long enough without paying it. Reddit had no answers, and many are struggling with the same situation.
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