7 ms·

IMO many people end up with a tool fetish, but some of these tools aren't worth it in a small startup: 1. You don't need Slack ($13 / month) as a two person st

IMO many people end up with a tool fetish, but some of these tools aren't worth it in a small startup: 1. You don't need Slack ($13 / month) as a two person startup — just do email and Skype 2. Notion ($16 / month) — this sounds like a glorified shared note taking app — just use Google Docs, or Dropbox Paper, or text files in a Dropbox folder 3. Sentry ($26 / month) — OK, this might be worth it, but if you have a high volume then it gets expensive — we host our own Sentry instance and past the initial setup it has mostly been a hands off deployment 4. Cloudflare ($20 / month) — not sure why they felt the need to go with the Pro account, maybe they have a lot of page rules, but for us the free account has been more than enough 5. LinkedIn Sales Navigator ($80 / month), SalesQL ($29 / month), Hubspot ($45 per month) — these are sales tools that should pay for themselves and evaluating that is easy, they either get you the leads to monetize or they don't and if not, then they aren't worth the monthly subscription 6. Figma ($24 / month) — I have mixed feelings about it, I haven't seen instances in which such software helped; might be worth it if the results are tangible and it saves you the cost of a designer; this too should be easy to evaluate and if it gets you the same results as drawing on whiteboard or paper, then get rid of it

lowercased 7y ago
sentry does have a free level which works out decently for small/medium volumes, but yeah, self-hosting might be cheaper.
iKlsR 7y ago
7. Github ($7 / month) — has unlimited private repos for a while now up to 3 collaborators.
Hendrikto 7y ago
> 1. You don't need Slack ($13 / month) as a two person startup — just do email and Skype Also, Email is federated, and your communications are not under the control of a single company. Email is easier to archive as well.
- nerdywordy 7y ago
  Looks like their product is built specifically for Slack.
judge2020 7y ago
4. Cloudflare - maybe better safe than sorry since you need Pro for the WAF.
- hombre_fatal 7y ago
  The $20/mo upgrade has more than that: https://www.cloudflare.com/plans/#compare-features https://www.cloudflare.com/plans/#compare-features You need to pay it just for Cloudflare SSL to work in all browsers which is pretty necessary if you use that feature at all. But the plan has various other goodies like more page rules, the "Polish" image compression, and rate limit rules.
  - judge2020 7y ago
    SSL status isn't changed with the pro plan. If you want non-SNI clients to be able to visit your site, you need the Business plan which assigns IPs to your website that serve your SSL even without SNI present, but this is usually unnecessary as the non-SNI client base gets smaller every year. All of the major browsers support modern TLS and SNI so the free plan will work as long as you don't need to support users running XP or odd mobile browsers on 5+ year old Android.
pijora 7y ago
I disagree. Slack is so much more than a discussion app. With integrations you can monitor your whole app in one place: - sales - bizdev - ops - deployment - support Same goes for Notion. We pay $16 but it is an awesome bang for the buck: - crm - collaborating blog draft - project management - finance - knowledge base And again, in one place.
- tirpen 7y ago
  Or you can set up email notifications and do the exact same thing in any mail client, like people have been doing for ages. But that's not cool any more I guess.
  - parasubvert 7y ago
    I think you underestimate how pervasive and usable Slack is over email. Email is still fine and necessary but is mostly for long form asynchronous communication. Organizing email inboxes is a pain. Spam is a pain. Slack is pre-organized and automatically integrated with a dozen other tools. It’s the beating heart of a distributed organization.
  - fnord77 7y ago
    nothing to do with "cool". I could never go back to email after using slack-like software. It's so much more efficient.
    - OOPMan 7y ago
      That is debatable. For sending IMs, sure. For a lot of other stuff it's pretty noisy and even with search is still less organisable than email.
      - hombre_fatal 7y ago
        It's debatable which is why the snark of "guess email isn't cool anymore :(" is such tired commentary, suggesting everyone is just an idiot lemming for not having email enlightenment.
robenkleene 7y ago
I agree with your point in principle, and it's my natural tendency to optimize out dependencies on recurring charges for services. But I actually think this perspective is wrong, or more precisely, focusing on this type of optimization will make your business less likely to succeed. The problem is ROI, $227 a month adds up to $2724 a year, which, assuming you're in the US (or similar cost of living area), is just such a small sum of money, relative to even just living expenses, that even spending time thinking about it, let alone actually using less efficient solutions, is going to negatively impact your business's chances of success. I say this as someone who is really drawn to optimizing out these expenses. So I don't want it to be true, but I truly believe focusing on these types of costs lowers my businesses chances of success.
- chiefalchemist 7y ago
  Perhaps. But it creates a false and unsustainable culture. If you're going to bootstrap then do so. Afterall, scarcity is the mother of innovation. Inexpensive or not, unnecessary is still unnecessary. What's next, $3k standing desks?
- fizixer 7y ago
  Cost is the not the only issue. My first impression was, do you really need all that. And is it making your life as an entrepreneur worthwhile. You could easily overdo if you only think about $227 a month. "Well, $227 is nothing. We could easily allocate $1000 a month on tooling. Therefore, let's go on a 6-month adventure of finding the best of the best tools, that are the hottest trend in the market".
  - CalChris 7y ago
    My sense of it was that they were used to having/using all that and so when it tallies to $227, it's not really worth arguing about.
- Silhouette 7y ago
  We avoid unnecessary dependencies like the plague at my businesses, for one simple reason that has almost nothing to do with the mostly trivial financial costs: every dependency is a potential point of failure. There are some things we simply can't operate without. We need a 24/7 managed presence on the Internet. We need to be able to accept payments. We have statutory obligations to file government returns and pay our taxes. We need robust off-site backups. These kinds of activities necessarily involve relying on external services. Despite their critical nature, even the services we use for these things have often have let us down in ways that significantly damaged the business affected. There are a handful of things where some non-critical functionality is much improved by using an external service. A good example is managing mailing lists in the era of big mail providers like Google not following standards and breaking normal mail operation. We use a (very small) number of such services as well. But for us, that's it. We use plenty of tools to help us do our work, but for anything we can, we set up locally, on infrastructure under our control, with software that is either freely available or something we own and have a right to use indefinitely. To anyone setting out and loading up with dozens of these online services, even at low cost or particularly free, I would ask two questions. Firstly, given that it's almost certain that any you're getting for free could drop you and discard your data/infrastructure/whatever with little if any notice, do you actually know what would happen to your critical operations in each case if they did? And secondly, do you have a plan for how to almost immediately restore anything critical that you would lose in each case? I would guess that the answers for a lot of small businesses with excessive dependencies are not going to be pretty, and that those businesses are also wilfully concealing significant risks from customers who are relying on them. You could reasonable certainly argue that all of my businesses are relatively modest in size, and that we might have given up on some opportunities by not using more of these tools. I would counter that all of my businesses are also still in business, and in some cases now run by just a handful of people working on them part-time, and that is partly because we have such low overheads in terms of maintaining all of those services and dealing with unwanted changes or outages. Sometimes you don't need to cloud-host your entire world. Sometimes you just need a server and ten minutes to install something that does the same job locally.
QuelqueChose 7y ago
> Internal communication and supporting customers in shared Slack channels If you're using Slack solely for the purpose of talking to your co-founder over a few categorized channels then the price is definitely not worth it over using email etc. IMO - unless you're willing to pay $13 a month to click on reaction emojis. However Slack's ability to be used as a sort of centralized dashboard for most if not all of the other services listed on the blog article might just be convenient enough to merit that price point. In addition to supporting customers and probably being able to chat with them right through the app, it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if they've set up one-click integrations for the other paid suites including Sentry, LinkedIn Sales, Hubspot.
- erikpukinskis 7y ago
  Emojis are like coffee. They make doing a tedious thing more exciting. There are parts of work that are intrinsically exciting. But there are also parts of work that are just tedious, and you just need to get through them.
CameronBanga 7y ago
Their product is built on the Slack platform. They probably need (and want) to be paid users if not for anything more than having a better understanding of their customer. Why you’d start (and fund?!) a business built entirely on a “hip” chat client, in a world where we’ve seen how walled gardens have ruined business models overnight (mobile app stores) is the real question. But it’s not my money (or apparently the blog authors either). So spend away!
- meesles 7y ago
  The reason is simple: Because there is a demand and multiple companies have already built successful products through this. Companies born from platforms is nothing new and makes plenty of sense.
krilly 7y ago
Why is Discord always ignored in discussions of slack alternatives? It's literally a slack clone. Are you all just put off by the marketing or the fact that it's not exclusively used by 'professionals'?
- chdaniel 7y ago
  Always wondered that myself. I can't "get it" since I'm not a Slack user (nor a Discord user), though I interacted with both
- swarnie_ 7y ago
  Negative stigma? I personally don't use it because everywhere I've seen it previously is in gaming/twitch communities.
- gugagore 7y ago
  Is it still required to have a phone to sign up for discord? That's what puts me off.
  - lmm 7y ago
    That's never been required as far as I know?
    - OOPMan 7y ago
      Anyway...you all have phones right ;-)
      - gpanders 7y ago
        We all have Social Security Numbers too (in the US). Doesn’t mean we should share them with anyone who asks.
  - aliceryhl 7y ago
    It's not required for everyone — only people Discord find suspicious for some reason.
chiefalchemist 7y ago
I agree. All those tools support more roles that two people could reasonably cover. Might they need some of these tools eventually? Of course - once there two or more additional team members. As it is, they need a tool for keeping track of all these tools.
ggregoire 7y ago
Also, I wonder how much time they waste switching between tools and managing them (accounts, settings & preferences, payments, upgrading plans, checking release notes, news & other notification emails, etc). Don’t using 28 productivity tools make you less productive eventually?
nojvek 7y ago
Figma is pretty awesome. I’m on the free licence but deffo see the value. You can collaborate on designs, hand off easily to devs and build quick prototypes. The tool pays for itself pretty fast.
- aliceryhl 7y ago
  It's pretty cool but I wish scrolling around wasn't infinitely slow.
dasil003 7y ago
I agree with the point about tool fetishization: it could be just another form of "playing house". That said, optimizing these sums of money is also not going to make you successful. If the tools are providing value then use them and don't fret over $0 vs $10 vs $20 a month. The more important thing is keeping cognitive load low by using simple systems and driving mental focus on the right things. To take an example: I wouldn't bat an eye at paying for Slack for a two-person startup because A) the integrations means I get centralized notifications and search for updates to all the tools I'm using essentially for free with no ops overhead, B) the mobile push notifications and per-channel settings are nicely tunable to ensure I'm on top of things without getting notification fatigue, and C) I'm already on 10 other Slacks, so it's not adding much overhead to my life overall.

lowercased 7y ago

sentry does have a free level which works out decently for small/medium volumes, but yeah, self-hosting might be cheaper.

iKlsR 7y ago

7. Github ($7 / month) — has unlimited private repos for a while now up to 3 collaborators.

Hendrikto 7y ago

> 1. You don't need Slack ($13 / month) as a two person startup — just do email and Skype Also, Email is federated, and your communications are not under the control of a single company. Email is easier to archive as well.

nerdywordy 7y ago
Looks like their product is built specifically for Slack.

judge2020 7y ago

4. Cloudflare - maybe better safe than sorry since you need Pro for the WAF.

hombre_fatal 7y ago
The $20/mo upgrade has more than that: https://www.cloudflare.com/plans/#compare-features https://www.cloudflare.com/plans/#compare-features You need to pay it just for Cloudflare SSL to work in all browsers which is pretty necessary if you use that feature at all. But the plan has various other goodies like more page rules, the "Polish" image compression, and rate limit rules.
- judge2020 7y ago
  SSL status isn't changed with the pro plan. If you want non-SNI clients to be able to visit your site, you need the Business plan which assigns IPs to your website that serve your SSL even without SNI present, but this is usually unnecessary as the non-SNI client base gets smaller every year. All of the major browsers support modern TLS and SNI so the free plan will work as long as you don't need to support users running XP or odd mobile browsers on 5+ year old Android.

pijora 7y ago

I disagree. Slack is so much more than a discussion app. With integrations you can monitor your whole app in one place: - sales - bizdev - ops - deployment - support Same goes for Notion. We pay $16 but it is an awesome bang for the buck: - crm - collaborating blog draft - project management - finance - knowledge base And again, in one place.

tirpen 7y ago
Or you can set up email notifications and do the exact same thing in any mail client, like people have been doing for ages. But that's not cool any more I guess.
- parasubvert 7y ago
  I think you underestimate how pervasive and usable Slack is over email. Email is still fine and necessary but is mostly for long form asynchronous communication. Organizing email inboxes is a pain. Spam is a pain. Slack is pre-organized and automatically integrated with a dozen other tools. It’s the beating heart of a distributed organization.
- fnord77 7y ago
  nothing to do with "cool". I could never go back to email after using slack-like software. It's so much more efficient.
  - OOPMan 7y ago
    That is debatable. For sending IMs, sure. For a lot of other stuff it's pretty noisy and even with search is still less organisable than email.
    - hombre_fatal 7y ago
      It's debatable which is why the snark of "guess email isn't cool anymore :(" is such tired commentary, suggesting everyone is just an idiot lemming for not having email enlightenment.

robenkleene 7y ago

I agree with your point in principle, and it's my natural tendency to optimize out dependencies on recurring charges for services. But I actually think this perspective is wrong, or more precisely, focusing on this type of optimization will make your business less likely to succeed. The problem is ROI, $227 a month adds up to $2724 a year, which, assuming you're in the US (or similar cost of living area), is just such a small sum of money, relative to even just living expenses, that even spending time thinking about it, let alone actually using less efficient solutions, is going to negatively impact your business's chances of success. I say this as someone who is really drawn to optimizing out these expenses. So I don't want it to be true, but I truly believe focusing on these types of costs lowers my businesses chances of success.

chiefalchemist 7y ago
Perhaps. But it creates a false and unsustainable culture. If you're going to bootstrap then do so. Afterall, scarcity is the mother of innovation. Inexpensive or not, unnecessary is still unnecessary. What's next, $3k standing desks?
fizixer 7y ago
Cost is the not the only issue. My first impression was, do you really need all that. And is it making your life as an entrepreneur worthwhile. You could easily overdo if you only think about $227 a month. "Well, $227 is nothing. We could easily allocate $1000 a month on tooling. Therefore, let's go on a 6-month adventure of finding the best of the best tools, that are the hottest trend in the market".
- CalChris 7y ago
  My sense of it was that they were used to having/using all that and so when it tallies to $227, it's not really worth arguing about.
Silhouette 7y ago
We avoid unnecessary dependencies like the plague at my businesses, for one simple reason that has almost nothing to do with the mostly trivial financial costs: every dependency is a potential point of failure. There are some things we simply can't operate without. We need a 24/7 managed presence on the Internet. We need to be able to accept payments. We have statutory obligations to file government returns and pay our taxes. We need robust off-site backups. These kinds of activities necessarily involve relying on external services. Despite their critical nature, even the services we use for these things have often have let us down in ways that significantly damaged the business affected. There are a handful of things where some non-critical functionality is much improved by using an external service. A good example is managing mailing lists in the era of big mail providers like Google not following standards and breaking normal mail operation. We use a (very small) number of such services as well. But for us, that's it. We use plenty of tools to help us do our work, but for anything we can, we set up locally, on infrastructure under our control, with software that is either freely available or something we own and have a right to use indefinitely. To anyone setting out and loading up with dozens of these online services, even at low cost or particularly free, I would ask two questions. Firstly, given that it's almost certain that any you're getting for free could drop you and discard your data/infrastructure/whatever with little if any notice, do you actually know what would happen to your critical operations in each case if they did? And secondly, do you have a plan for how to almost immediately restore anything critical that you would lose in each case? I would guess that the answers for a lot of small businesses with excessive dependencies are not going to be pretty, and that those businesses are also wilfully concealing significant risks from customers who are relying on them. You could reasonable certainly argue that all of my businesses are relatively modest in size, and that we might have given up on some opportunities by not using more of these tools. I would counter that all of my businesses are also still in business, and in some cases now run by just a handful of people working on them part-time, and that is partly because we have such low overheads in terms of maintaining all of those services and dealing with unwanted changes or outages. Sometimes you don't need to cloud-host your entire world. Sometimes you just need a server and ten minutes to install something that does the same job locally.

QuelqueChose 7y ago

> Internal communication and supporting customers in shared Slack channels If you're using Slack solely for the purpose of talking to your co-founder over a few categorized channels then the price is definitely not worth it over using email etc. IMO - unless you're willing to pay $13 a month to click on reaction emojis. However Slack's ability to be used as a sort of centralized dashboard for most if not all of the other services listed on the blog article might just be convenient enough to merit that price point. In addition to supporting customers and probably being able to chat with them right through the app, it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if they've set up one-click integrations for the other paid suites including Sentry, LinkedIn Sales, Hubspot.

erikpukinskis 7y ago
Emojis are like coffee. They make doing a tedious thing more exciting. There are parts of work that are intrinsically exciting. But there are also parts of work that are just tedious, and you just need to get through them.

CameronBanga 7y ago

Their product is built on the Slack platform. They probably need (and want) to be paid users if not for anything more than having a better understanding of their customer. Why you’d start (and fund?!) a business built entirely on a “hip” chat client, in a world where we’ve seen how walled gardens have ruined business models overnight (mobile app stores) is the real question. But it’s not my money (or apparently the blog authors either). So spend away!

meesles 7y ago
The reason is simple: Because there is a demand and multiple companies have already built successful products through this. Companies born from platforms is nothing new and makes plenty of sense.

krilly 7y ago

Why is Discord always ignored in discussions of slack alternatives? It's literally a slack clone. Are you all just put off by the marketing or the fact that it's not exclusively used by 'professionals'?

chdaniel 7y ago
Always wondered that myself. I can't "get it" since I'm not a Slack user (nor a Discord user), though I interacted with both
swarnie_ 7y ago
Negative stigma? I personally don't use it because everywhere I've seen it previously is in gaming/twitch communities.
gugagore 7y ago
Is it still required to have a phone to sign up for discord? That's what puts me off.
- lmm 7y ago
  That's never been required as far as I know?
  - OOPMan 7y ago
    Anyway...you all have phones right ;-)
    - gpanders 7y ago
      We all have Social Security Numbers too (in the US). Doesn’t mean we should share them with anyone who asks.
- aliceryhl 7y ago
  It's not required for everyone — only people Discord find suspicious for some reason.

chiefalchemist 7y ago

I agree. All those tools support more roles that two people could reasonably cover. Might they need some of these tools eventually? Of course - once there two or more additional team members. As it is, they need a tool for keeping track of all these tools.

ggregoire 7y ago

Also, I wonder how much time they waste switching between tools and managing them (accounts, settings & preferences, payments, upgrading plans, checking release notes, news & other notification emails, etc). Don’t using 28 productivity tools make you less productive eventually?

nojvek 7y ago

Figma is pretty awesome. I’m on the free licence but deffo see the value. You can collaborate on designs, hand off easily to devs and build quick prototypes. The tool pays for itself pretty fast.

aliceryhl 7y ago
It's pretty cool but I wish scrolling around wasn't infinitely slow.

dasil003 7y ago

I agree with the point about tool fetishization: it could be just another form of "playing house". That said, optimizing these sums of money is also not going to make you successful. If the tools are providing value then use them and don't fret over $0 vs $10 vs $20 a month. The more important thing is keeping cognitive load low by using simple systems and driving mental focus on the right things. To take an example: I wouldn't bat an eye at paying for Slack for a two-person startup because A) the integrations means I get centralized notifications and search for updates to all the tools I'm using essentially for free with no ops overhead, B) the mobile push notifications and per-channel settings are nicely tunable to ensure I'm on top of things without getting notification fatigue, and C) I'm already on 10 other Slacks, so it's not adding much overhead to my life overall.