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Ask HN: How can Slack be disrupted?

• eitally 11y ago
  Better administrative controls, more fully fleshed out bot ecosystem, payments integration (perhaps by bot), ability to let users setup alerts (hashtag, keyword or user) based on content in various chat spaces that they may or may not want to actively participate in, email integration, better binary document handling (attach files to chats), preferably with collaborative inline editing.... Just a few things OTOH. There are really two options, imho: 1) go after Slack & enterprise chat, or 2) go after Whatsapp, FB Messenger & WeChat and consumer group chat. If anyone creates a product that can do both, they'll be instant billionaires.
  • Fargren 11y ago
    Nitpick: OTOH usually means "on the other hand". I'm guessing you mean "off the top of my head", but that's not an usage I can find anywhere else.
• sharemywin 11y ago
  That's just it, it would have to work 10x better to disrupt. I suppose it would take not reacting to new technology change. If Augmented reality took off, and their interface was only minimally adapted.
• hackerboos 11y ago
  With a gitlab like business model.
  • sytse 11y ago
    Thanks for the compliment! GitLab is shipping with Mattermost that is an open source Slack replacement and we're working with Rocket Chat to bring that to GitLab.
• an4rchy 11y ago
  I think the open source approach is probably the most likely at this point. To become a meaningful disruptor in the space, you need a product that does something much better (or at least start of with parity features but free). If you can scale, an open source project with the same features and reliability would be a starting point. Slack also has great customer acquisition/retention metrics so this new product would have to work hard to convince a lot of people to learn a new product for it to be worth it.
• niahmiah 11y ago
  Easy... Apple builds the functionality into iOS and OS X, so you never look for an alternative.
• sadadar 11y ago
  I think disrupting slack is a mistake. They are still in their infancy and have clearly built a solid product. Disrupt spaces and industries that don't have that :)
• sadadar 11y ago
  I think disrupting slack is a mistake. They are still in their infancy and have clearly built a solid product. Disrupt spaces and industries that don't have that :)
• unfamiliar 11y ago
  Why is everyone so eager to disrupt Slack? What exactly is so bad about it that an alternative needs to be built? It seems to me that they just made a product that works really well and everybody finds useful.
  • bossx 11y ago
    I'm not eager to disrupt Slack, I am genuinely curious how the companies I referenced in the original post could possibly disrupt them. As I mentioned, we are happy with their product and continue to use it, and I am seeing Slack disrupt other products we use (example is the recent addition of voice chat).
• Communitivity 11y ago
  You will have better luck with a different question. Don't ask 'How do I disrupt Slack?', or more generally 'How do I disrupt Y?'. Also don't ask 'I want to build Slack for X, what X is good?', or more generally 'I want to build Y for X, what X is good for that Y?'. Instead observe your environment. Get out and walk around. Talk to people you know in domains you have personal experience in, or are very familiar with. Lots of people - people that are like you, and people that aren't. Find out what their pain points are, and what they'd pay to get rid of those pain points. If you want to focus on chat, find out what their pain points are in communication (the broader area). Then execute to solve those pain points and make the world a better place. Iterate your execution to solve one pain point (the one the most people say they have/would pay for) and get your first customers. Then solve additional related pain points in successive iterations.
  • bossx 11y ago
    I didn't ask how I can disrupt Slack, nor do I have any intent to. I posed the question to the community to start an intelligent debate around how they might be disrupted in the future. Slack wasn't built by walking around talking to people outside, they built an internal chat tool to solve a problem they had at their company (where they were originally building a video game). They realized the chat tool was good, and turned it into a product. They solved their own pain point, not other people's. http://www.techvibes.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-slack-2015-09-25 http://www.techvibes.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-slack-2015-...
• swah 11y ago
  I'm going back to Skype, which is actually lighter than Slack, and we only need simple chat. Slack (both Chrome and the desktop version) was taking almost a second to change rooms... (like a webpage with thousands of elements)
  • tajen 11y ago
    And no-one talks about HipChat anymore.
• joeyspn 11y ago
  With FOSS... I.e: https://rocket.chat/ https://rocket.chat/
  • atonse 11y ago
    I'm not sure about that. Right now (apart from ideology), there are probably two major reasons why someone would pick an OSS solution. 1) Inside Firewall hosting – Slack can easily fix this by introducing a product that works inside your firewall, and I bet they're already working on it. Their "teams" model already works perfectly for it. 2) Customizability – Slack already has such a robust API for integrations, that most of your customizability and branding needs can be taken care of through the API and CSS rules. The one thing I personally need for my product is the ability to bundle slack as an embedded chat directly on my site (mostly because I don't want users to have to install a separate app), and I really don't see Slack building that, to be honest.
• smilesnd 11y ago
  Sounds more like a lot of click-bait news articles to me. I don't see Slack going away any time soon, but I stick mostly to irc Freenode for all my communication needs. It almost does everything Slack does minus the screen sharing, voice, and video stuff.
• justin_vanw 11y ago
  Why do you want to disrupt Slack? Slack is a great product, and it's not winning based on features and functionality alone, they have a great business team as well. Don't try to compete with a well run team at the peak of their abilities. Go find an underserved market that has tons of money and incompetent incumbents providing services. Slack is successful because this is what they did, but that has sucked a lot of the upside out of the market.
  • bossx 11y ago
    I don't want to disrupt Slack, I posed the question to the community to start an intelligent debate around how they might be disrupted in the future. I disagree that you can't compete with a well run team at the peak of their abilities, this is a free market, you can compete with whoever you like. Slack is successful because they solved an internal pain point, read about their history http://www.techvibes.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-slack-2015-09-25 http://www.techvibes.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-slack-2015-...
    • justin_vanw 11y ago
      Of course you can compete against a well run team, but why would you ever want to do that when you can instead compete against a crappy team that is in the toilet, steal all their customers, and so on?
• MichaelBurge 11y ago
  What a myopic question. There's 30 companies registered to do the annual backflow inspections that the city requires on my property. When I get the list, I don't think to myself "Man, there's at least 30 companies making buck inspecting people's pipes. I better start a backflow inspection company! How can I disrupt these people who've managed to scrape together some profit?" Yes, yes - Slack gets all the news and chicks and is probably bigger. But it's the entire mindset. You wouldn't start an HVAC repair company after hearing that an HVAC repair company is doing well, even if they're the biggest one in the region and even if they're making millions; similarly, you shouldn't start a chat app just because you hear Fortune magazine writing about a chat app. There's another part to this too: With the word 'disrupt' I'm hearing "Slack is doing well; I'm jealous of Slack; how can I hurt Slack?" I used to have a neighbor that would get jealous of people and key their car if it was nicer than his. Nobody liked him and eventually they arrested him for unrelated reasons. Don't phrase your business plan as being the equivalent of keying Slack's car.
  • bossx 11y ago
    First of all, I never said I wanted to disrupt Slack, I simply posed the question to the community to start an intelligent debate about how they might be displaced in the future. If you lack the foresight to look that far head, that's okay, you can say you don't know how they can be disrupted. There have been multi-million (and billion) dollar businesses started by disrupting major players in their space, by solving the problem they are trying to solve, with much better technology and approaching the problem from new angles. If you think tech companies aren't started with the intent of disrupting other companies, you are living in a bubble. http://www.claytonchristensen.com/books/the-innovators-dilemma/ http://www.claytonchristensen.com/books/the-innovators-dilem...
• cballard 11y ago
  The experience of Slack is horrid, IMO. - Anyone can be interrupted at any time (to say nothing of @everyone), so it's essentially just an all-day meeting. At least emails could be responded to at relative leisure. - There are only three notification states: "nothing" (normal icon) "something happened in a non-muted channel" (red dot), and "you were mentioned specifically". There's no way to gauge importance without disrupting your flow. Some pointless cat GIF (why are these being posted on work chat?) is ranked the same as "what should we do next?". Similarly, "@everyone there are donuts in the kitchen, OMG" is ranked the same as "@someone THE SERVER IS ON FIRE". - Channels are never-ending, so it's relatively impossible to tell where one topic began and another ended. Additionally, multiple conversations can be held at the same time, and it's difficult to tell who's replying to who. However, I quite like Slack's group private chats. I'd like to see a group-chat solution that promoted those and completely got rid of static channels. Everything's just a private group chat, with all of the people that are needed. When the discussion's done, archive it - it's searchable, of course, but if you need to continue the discussion, make a new one! Maybe everyone in the chat even gets a summary emailed to them that they can search in their email client as well (thus solving the "wait, where did we discuss that" problem). There are a few other changes I would make - for example, the return key should be newline by default to prevent people from writing like this and instead putting their thoughts into well-composed messages
  • flippant 11y ago
    I recently started using Flowdock after a similar experience with Slack and it seems to solve a lot of these problems with threaded conversations in channels.
  • LargeWu 11y ago
    You have a culture problem, not a technology problem.
    • cballard 11y ago
      SVN says this better than I can: > It’s common in the software industry to blame the users. It’s the user’s fault. They don’t know how to use it. They’re using it wrong. They need to do this or do that. But the reality is that tools encourage specific behaviors. A product is a series of design decisions with a specific outcome in mind. Yes, you can use tools as they weren’t intended, but most people follow the patterns suggested by the design. And so in the end, if people are exhausted and feeling unable to keep up, it’s the tool’s fault, not the user’s fault. If the design leads to stress, it’s a bad design. https://m.signalvnoise.com/is-group-chat-making-you-sweat-744659addf7d#.ju812bkla https://m.signalvnoise.com/is-group-chat-making-you-sweat-74...
• jpalomaki 11y ago
  I have a feeling that sometimes (often?) people just get bored with their existing, working solutions and want to try something new. Obviously Slack is so new that this does not really work.
• leojg 11y ago
  Slack is IRC for dummies. Use IRC, its 100% free and 1000% more powerful.
  • lerouxb 11y ago
    100% free: sure. 1000% more powerful: debatable at best.
    • AznHisoka 11y ago
      One word: fserves.
• vincent_s 11y ago
  Ask all those people looking for an alternative: https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=slack%20alternative&date=1%2F2009%2087m https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=slack%20alternative&...
• open-source-ux 11y ago
  This might not be a popular opinion amongst (some) developers, but to compete against Slack, you need an excellent UI and UX that matches or exceeds (not necessarily copies) the UI of Slack, with similar core features or useful new features. When I say UI and UX, I mean an interface that both looks good and is easy to use as well (they are not mutually exclusive). Of course, the app has has to be fast and reliable too. Even better if it's lightweight in size and in it's use of system resources - things that many cross-platform apps rarely achieve (including Slack). I don't think Slack has the best UX in some aspects. For example, the way you need to sign-in multiple times to separate groups feels clumsy and cumbersome. Does Slack now have too many features and functions? Does the interface feel too busy or cluttered? Do people want even more features? (Probably, although they probably want different features for their own unique needs). Can a simpler, open-source version offer an alternative? One thing that's obvious from interviews with their staff is that they take UX very seriously - it's a key component in the development of their product. If you're developing an alternative open source version, don't discount the importance of UX to your own product. Whether you agree or not that Slack is a well-designed app, there's no doubt its succeeded because it can easily be used by both developers and non-developers. Not something you can really say abour IRC, often put forward as a Slack alternative.
• bryanlarsen 11y ago
  We were just discussing here at work about how Flowdock sucks for knowledge capture and retention. Somebody asked a question that I had answered one or two weeks prior, and it wasn't easy to find the answer. I assume Slack isn't any better. Incredibly difficult problem to solve -- any solution would probably add considerable friction to the interface, but it would rock if somebody could nail it.
• Jach 11y ago
  Slack is still niche, it's like asking how to disrupt the Go language. I wouldn't mind hearing ideas of how to arrest its progress though. Personally I'll just pitch hard for Matrix if my team ever gets the desire to move off HipChat.
• tremendo 11y ago
  They're still in the honeymoon of warm-fuzzy public perception, sitting in plenty of cash. They're not going to be disrupted soon apparently. Not even by freemium and advertising and a few different features, native clients, etc. or being just good. See Ryver.
  • bossx 11y ago
    I agree, it will be hard to disrupt them through technology right now, but in the next 2-3 years there will be a new wave of tech they might not adapt to immediately. Another possibility is them getting acquired, as they have already raised 7 rounds of funding (investor pressure), and their founder has had a large exit already (Flickr to Yahoo). https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/slack https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/slack
• saulrh 11y ago
  Target a well-defined sub-market that Slack currently serves and serve it better by targeting it more precisely [1]. As demonstrated by the comments on this thread, there are a lot of people that all think that Slack needs to go in different directions, which agrees with my own personal observations of Slack's utility to different people on different teams. Slack is a simple, general solution that works well enough for a lot of teams and a lot of people. If you want to disrupt it, I doubt you're going to be able to improve it across the board point-for-point, so in stead you want to target a subgroup that's sort of well serviced by Slack but could stand to have tweaking done to fit it to their needs better. To collect some examples from this thread: * Some engineering teams need default UI that encourages larger message sizes so people aren't writing strings of tiny messages all the time. This _clearly_ isn't something that everybody wants or needs - a lot of brainstorming goes on in my Slack chats, for example, and that means tiny ideas have to go out quickly and easily - but it's a reasonable submarket to target. This would also lead to a larger emphasis on text formatting and composition, better controls on notification and addressing, better searching and filtering and quoting/reply/threading, and other tools that improve the power of an individual message at the expense of usability and speed - move it more toward the email/forum topic side of things. * Some teams feel that the existing UI already gets in their way too much. Improve the ease of use and speed of message composition and flow of discussion. Not sure how you'd do this exactly; Slack is already pretty well optimized in this direction. Step one here would probably be to hire a whole building full of UX engineers and optimize the crap out of every single interaction anybody ever does with the UI. Microoptimization on top of microoptimization on top of microoptimization, like Apple did with the groundbreaking early IOSs. * Specifically cater to enterprise clients with security requirements. Better technical details for security and access control, make it compliant with regulations with particular security and auditing and access control requirements. Provide a powerful system for per-channel access controls that interoperates with something like LDAP, maybe provide a system where you can only talk to people in different groups if you've managed to inherit some permissions that let you talk to them otherwise everything they say never appears on your screen, tag everything with a secrecy level and control access intelligence-agency style, etcetera. And so on and so forth. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIiAAhUeR6Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIiAAhUeR6Y
• DotSauce 11y ago
  Currently using Wrike + Skype and I've found it's a much better experience than Slack.
• joefarish 11y ago
  These companies will have a hard time displacing existing Slack installs, but they should still be able to grab some of the remaining market share.
• hanniabu 11y ago
  I think it'd be great if there was a way to create different branches for a topic within a chat. Take that as you will and use your imagination.
• taf2 11y ago
  Flowdock
• andymurd 11y ago
  A lot of people (me included) use Slack/HipChat like a news feed, in which chat is an incidental feature. My servers, databases, CI/CD, bug tracker etc all publish to Slack and then (maybe) a human discussion will form around a particular event. To disrupt Slack, make an awesome news feed, with chat and publishing API and search. Add an API for reading (like Twitter's API). Make it easily compartmentalised (faceted search maybe?) Then you'll pick up users like me, who used to use email and find group chat better but really need "Hootsuite for infrastructure".
• mbrock 11y ago
  Start from the premise that existing forms of human communication are far from optimal. Come up with a delightful, game-like interface for collaborating on thoughts, arguments, knowledge, etc. Step out of the matrix of predefined forms like "chat", "mail", "wiki", "forum". Get the clients very, very right. Establish a brand so strong that people can't stop talking about it. Make the technology so great that lovers want to use it to get closer to each other.
• jdevtlv 11y ago
  slack needs the virtual equivalent of "closing the door", an "online"-"away" that can be accessed through the taskbar icon. And teams need guidelines and free spaces and open channels for all the different types of team memebers... you can't expect the technology to solve every single issue (yet)