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To add a competitive perspective: I'm the founder of Guilded, which is (afaik) the only VC-funded startup in direct competition with Discord. Discord was (and

To add a competitive perspective: I'm the founder of Guilded, which is (afaik) the only VC-funded startup in direct competition with Discord. Discord was (and still is) a great product. But those that used it in the very early days will remember - as users in this reddit thread[1] do - that the early days were pretty rough, and not quite the "10x better" described here. Yet still, it grew. Why? In startup mythology there's a belief that you need to build a "10x better" product in order to get people to switch to it. This is generally good advice, because in most spaces it's hard to get people to try your product at all, and it's even harder to get people to actually switch to it. Gaming is different, though. Gaming communities aren't generally using your product for business-critical functions, are generally extremely receptive to trying new things, and are often led by enthusiast early adopters. As a result, gaming communities have uncharacteristically low switching costs. This explains why Discord was able to move gaming communities far more quickly than could ever be done with (for instance) corporate customers. My hypothesis: Discord built a compelling product, and succeeded at talking to their early users and improving the product far faster than competitors. Because they built it for gamers, they didn't need to be 10x better right away: they just needed to be faster (and to stay alive in the meantime). If the above is true, the risk is that - especially as they move away from gaming and as they continue to move much more slowly than before - they can also lose that community to a better product very quickly, in exactly the same way. Only time will tell if this is true or not, but since we launched our chat product in May we've been seeing support of it in the form of accelerating growth and in the form of entire large communities migrating from Discord to Guilded every day. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/j8siby/discord_vs_guilded_a_quick_thoughtopen_discussion/g8ey936 https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/j8siby/discord_...

xmprt 6y ago
You're entirely correct about Discord but it will be difficult to switch over completely unless you make it almost a drop in replacement for discord (eg. supporting discord bots). I can imagine moving over some of the small servers with just a few friends but getting bigger communities to switch is a hard problem and unless you do that, almost everyone will still have a reason to stay on discord.
ZephyrBlu 6y ago
Interesting insights. Guilded looks super cool. Good luck with the product :).
- iEchoic 6y ago
  Thank you! :)
porb121 6y ago
i disagree, as a very early adopter of discord. early discord was rough around the edges, but it was still 10x better than any competitor because of how atrociously bad teamspeak/mumble/skype/ventrilo were. using skype was one of the worst communication experiences i have had on a computer - the fact that discord voice connections were semi-stable, not a complete hassle to set up, and had individual servers as well as DMs already made it better than any of its competiotors.
- josalhor 6y ago
  I think you're both right at the same time. Discord didn't need to be perfect to gain momentum, but it needed to be better. In a way, not only was Discord better; it also added a new use case. I have never tried Ventrilo or Mumble, but Teamspeak made communication completely dependent on the owner of the server. You couldn't communicate with someone outside of the server, they had no identity. You could do that on Skype... But let's not get started with the mess it is to add people to the call and end up with hundreds of groups. I didn't use Skype or Teamspeak for gaming, but rather for interacting with different groups of friends. These improvements were very noticeable. From all of my communications apps, Discord is one of the ones I don't mind the least. Most of the time, it just works.
quickthrower2 6y ago
Nice insight, so gamers are (or at least were?) the "early adopters" persona that a new product loves to have. I see this a lot in startup lore though, the idea of finding an audience where you are solving a big specific pain, rather than trying to make everyone's life a tiny bit better (but less than they care).
Justsignedup 6y ago
Oh man, I'm still excited about the prospects of guided. The threading alone is a feature I dearly miss. The problem has been getting everyone on voice chat in guided. It just didn't work as well as discord and our group more or less abandoned it. Getting a hundred people organized and trying a new tool is a pita. Also the lack of bot support made it a big downgrade for us. I'm sure it's improved in the few months since. It's definitely a catch up game now. :( :( :( But I have faith it can work out.
- iEchoic 6y ago
  > Also the lack of bot support made it a big downgrade for us. I'm sure it's improved in the few months since. We haven't announced it yet, but we've just started rolling out an all new "bot creator" feature this week, which'll allow you to create bots for your server without writing any code (and if you do want to write code, we now have an early-access request form for our upcoming API). If you want to try it out and don't have access to it yet, feel free to shoot me an email (in my profile). (we've improved voice significantly and have also added streaming channels for streaming gameplay, too, if you want to give those a shot!)
  - Justsignedup 6y ago
    hey sorry i didn't reply, i don't check the threads all too often. that's cool! good luck with that. I think many of us already have many bots that we use. But honestly the biggest hurdle was the audio issues. At least with Mumble it is the evil we know, but when we first tried Guilded like 5 months ago, even getting the client to switch microphones was a big chore and we couldn't get some people to even get on voice chat. Point is, if you can make it work as seamlessly as discord, it is definitely a step in the right direction. I love the thread features, all the document management, I eat that shit up, but no good voice, no use.

xmprt 6y ago

You're entirely correct about Discord but it will be difficult to switch over completely unless you make it almost a drop in replacement for discord (eg. supporting discord bots). I can imagine moving over some of the small servers with just a few friends but getting bigger communities to switch is a hard problem and unless you do that, almost everyone will still have a reason to stay on discord.

ZephyrBlu 6y ago

Interesting insights. Guilded looks super cool. Good luck with the product :).

iEchoic 6y ago
Thank you! :)

porb121 6y ago

i disagree, as a very early adopter of discord. early discord was rough around the edges, but it was still 10x better than any competitor because of how atrociously bad teamspeak/mumble/skype/ventrilo were. using skype was one of the worst communication experiences i have had on a computer - the fact that discord voice connections were semi-stable, not a complete hassle to set up, and had individual servers as well as DMs already made it better than any of its competiotors.

josalhor 6y ago
I think you're both right at the same time. Discord didn't need to be perfect to gain momentum, but it needed to be better. In a way, not only was Discord better; it also added a new use case. I have never tried Ventrilo or Mumble, but Teamspeak made communication completely dependent on the owner of the server. You couldn't communicate with someone outside of the server, they had no identity. You could do that on Skype... But let's not get started with the mess it is to add people to the call and end up with hundreds of groups. I didn't use Skype or Teamspeak for gaming, but rather for interacting with different groups of friends. These improvements were very noticeable. From all of my communications apps, Discord is one of the ones I don't mind the least. Most of the time, it just works.

quickthrower2 6y ago

Nice insight, so gamers are (or at least were?) the "early adopters" persona that a new product loves to have. I see this a lot in startup lore though, the idea of finding an audience where you are solving a big specific pain, rather than trying to make everyone's life a tiny bit better (but less than they care).

Justsignedup 6y ago

Oh man, I'm still excited about the prospects of guided. The threading alone is a feature I dearly miss. The problem has been getting everyone on voice chat in guided. It just didn't work as well as discord and our group more or less abandoned it. Getting a hundred people organized and trying a new tool is a pita. Also the lack of bot support made it a big downgrade for us. I'm sure it's improved in the few months since. It's definitely a catch up game now. :( :( :( But I have faith it can work out.

iEchoic 6y ago
> Also the lack of bot support made it a big downgrade for us. I'm sure it's improved in the few months since. We haven't announced it yet, but we've just started rolling out an all new "bot creator" feature this week, which'll allow you to create bots for your server without writing any code (and if you do want to write code, we now have an early-access request form for our upcoming API). If you want to try it out and don't have access to it yet, feel free to shoot me an email (in my profile). (we've improved voice significantly and have also added streaming channels for streaming gameplay, too, if you want to give those a shot!)
- Justsignedup 6y ago
  hey sorry i didn't reply, i don't check the threads all too often. that's cool! good luck with that. I think many of us already have many bots that we use. But honestly the biggest hurdle was the audio issues. At least with Mumble it is the evil we know, but when we first tried Guilded like 5 months ago, even getting the client to switch microphones was a big chore and we couldn't get some people to even get on voice chat. Point is, if you can make it work as seamlessly as discord, it is definitely a step in the right direction. I love the thread features, all the document management, I eat that shit up, but no good voice, no use.