8 ms·

Show HN: Emdash – Slack/Zoom alternative for distributed team collaboration

80 points by pz 2y ago

Hi HN, I’m Phil, one of the co-founders building emdash. Previously, I was an early engineer at Facebook and led Customer Products at Square. We’ve focused on making chat and video work together so distributed teams can stay aligned without drowning in information. You can try it here: https://emdash.io https://emdash.io. It frustrated us how easily important conversations would happen and then disappear. Slack never quite matched how we worked. Channels were too coarse which led to noisy notifications and broken search. Zoom meetings weren’t much better–unless someone took perfect notes (which rarely happened), video calls became black holes of lost knowledge. We spent too much time trying to find the information we needed to do our jobs. To address this, we’re testing a few concepts and would appreciate your feedback on the value of the following: (1) Automatically record, summarize, and transcribe your team’s video chats. We store meeting content directly inside discussions to facilitate search and discovery. (2) Make it easy to manage & organize conversations of varying scope. A chat between team members can be forked into a dedicated Discussion with its own audience permissions and subscription. Individual messages or entire Discussions can be moved after the fact. Conversations can evolve unpredictably, so having the right tools to keep them organized post-hoc was important to us. (3) Improve search with AI and hierarchical information retrieval. We use LLMs to uncover insights, summarize content, and connect the dots across related discussions, meetings, and documents. You can ask questions like “What are the team’s priorities this week?” or “What did we decide to do with feature X?” and get back a generative response AND deep links into the original chats and meetings. Try it out: https://emdash.io https://emdash.io and tell us what you think!

pz 2y ago
I should introduce the rest of the crew. We're a team of builders who have worked together for the better part of the last decade. Neville and I were early engineers on Facebook Ads. Neville later founded Rimeto, which was acquired by Slack. Fred has held various roles driving growth and was an early employee at Facebook, Doordash, and Rimeto. Nick jumped into startups right out of college, joining Rimeto and now diving back in with us at emdash.
- bsk26 2y ago
  great team!
- asadawan 2y ago
  pz, what a great username :)
clacker-o-matic 2y ago
One note I have about your pricing page is that you don't explain what a startup or small to midsize team actually is. I would also much rather have a set pricing scheme immediately with a 60-90 day trial period similar to how slack works.
- fred_h 2y ago
  Hi, Fred here – I’m one of the founding team members. Thanks for the comment. First, to the question about team sizes. We view "Startups" as generally teams with <25 users, followed by small/mid-sized "Growth" companies that have <250 employees. Beyond that, we anticipate most companies falling into the "Scale" category. That said, this could all be revised based on usage data and I will also update our website later today to reflect the above. Regarding pricing, we haven’t finalized it yet because we’ve prioritized understanding how teams actually use emdash—what works, what doesn’t, and where we should focus. Pricing is important, and we want to get it right. Typical usage patterns, evolving AI and cloud/infra costs, and where we fit competitively in the market are all variables we still need to explore. We’ll need to strike the right balance and be competitive enough with vis-a-vis the market. It would be smart to start with a free trial before transitioning users to a paid plan. We’re still figuring out whether that should be time-based (e.g., 60-90 days), usage-based (e.g., after your 20th video meeting). I get it – no one likes unexpected pricing shifts and when the time comes, we will be transparent about our thinking and communicate changes well in advance. Our goal is to build something sustainable, not just for us, but for the teams that rely on emdash. Hope this helps clarify.
  - rsyring 2y ago
    "We haven't figured out pricing" sounds like a big turnoff for anyone seriously considering this who wants self service. Just pick something that's a no brainier for people to try, change it later if you have to. Your biggest risk right now is people walk without giving the product real consideration. Lack of clarity on pricing will do that for a lot of people, even though you are offering a free trial.
    - 2y ago
kieranderfus 2y ago
Very cool guys, I think this will crush
reshmakh 2y ago
product looks very cool - it's nice to see a consumer level of polish on a b2b experience
- pz 2y ago
  Thanks! One of the benefits of dogfooding our product everyday is that we invest a lot in working out the everyday kinks in addition to the marquee features.
- fred_h 2y ago
  Thanks! We’ve definitely put a lot of thought into making emdash feel smooth, intuitive, and frictionless. We are constantly looking at all the seams where pieces connect and making sure they fit tightly. We probably over-invested in some details, but we believe those small touches add up, kind of like getting that nice “thunk” when closing a well-built car door. Glad you noticed the polish—it’s something we really care about!
shaneos 2y ago
Great to see more competition in this space - I'm currently on Slack and not happy about it. Here's hoping Emdash can fill the void left by Workplace and get some momentum to put pressure on Slack. It's much needed
- pz 2y ago
  Amen. We've migrated teams from Workplace who really appreciated our hierarchical discussion model
- wielrls 2y ago
  > I'm currently on Slack and not happy about it Yeah I heard that Slack is taking a breather this morning...
  - shaneos 2y ago
    Heh, yeah that happened right after I made the post above. Fate, it would seem, has a sense of irony :-)
- conradev 2y ago
  Same here! Slack is… fine. The one catch for Emdash for me is that we are hybrid (3 days in office) and use Zoom Rooms for our conference room are pretty happy with it.
bmoney24 2y ago
This is very cool. The summarization feature stands out as my favorite.
- fred_h 2y ago
  Appreciate you reaching out about the summarization feature. Teams have been making use of it to save time. They like jumping directly to key moments of the meeting and also outright skipping meetings.
written-beyond 2y ago
Good luck guys! This maybe that I've usually been a part of smaller teams but the screenshots you guys provided are a little... overload-y. Care to share what's the average size of your early adopters? Because it seems to be something great for larger teams but, then again I imagine the friction is greater for them too.
- pz 2y ago
  This is good feedback, thanks. We packed a lot into the product so far and could have spent more time focusing the media assets to distill things better. Early adopters range in size from 2 people to ~20. As you said, the Catch-22 for larger teams usually have established tool stacks so the (operational) switching cost is prohibitive. FWIW we are a team of 5 and already find the feature set useful (we're biased, of course). I expect that ~5 is the threshold the organizational and search features become invaluable.
symbolicator 2y ago
This looks great — can’t want to try it as we grow our team at Mobility. Are there integrations with other work surfaces like GDrive / Notion for deep search retrieval like “What are we working on this week”?
- pz 2y ago
  This is in the works. We have a prototype integration with Github that supports the deep search use case you mentioned. My favorite anecdote from this was a few weeks ago I was revisiting some work on transactional support in our controller framework and asked assistant "A few months ago I was working on transaction support and had to revert my change. Can you remind me what happened?" and it spit back my original PR, the reversion, and a deep link into the standup video meeting where we discussed the issue. For me, that was the magic moment where I knew this could be something much more than just a chat client.
alexbit2019 2y ago
keep it up phil, neville and the team.
hamzaaftab 2y ago
Really like the self-documentation of what the team is working on through the auto summarization and share-out of meeting. Strongly believe in "communication is the job" at tech companies, and with this it doesn't have to feel like a chore.
- fred_h 2y ago
  Thank you for the feedback. That’s exactly the idea. We see it as "write once, share everywhere." Conversations, meetings, and decisions can generate useful context, and having summaries automatically show up right where people are already working saves time down the road.
niutech 2y ago
Have you seen what is happening with Slack now? It's down for hours. Doesn't it teach businesses that the crucial instant messaging should be self-hosted for privacy & independence on 3rd party? Why would businesses use your hosted product instead of e.g. open source Nextcloud Talk, Element.io or Mattermost on their own server?
- wielrls 2y ago
  Absolutely. If your team has the expertise and bandwidth, self-hosting Mattermost or similar tools makes a ton of sense. We may even explore a self-hosted version of emdash in the future. That said, most customers tell us they’d rather focus their resources on their core business vs manage every tool themselves. Even those who’ve tried self-hosting haven’t necessarily seen better uptime vs Slack.
asadawan 2y ago
Really cool. Awesome product from a solid team!
lusujimo 2y ago
Very cool -- feels like teams are in "app overload" now with too much context switching. This looks pretty seamless and agree with others -- the summarization is a really nice feature.
trustinmenowpls 2y ago
Good luck, the sales cycles for large enterprise to switch from zoom/slack are super long... and I'm sure now that salesforce owns slack they're gonna be giving bundle discounts which will make it even harder to switch. I'll also note, I've yet to work for a place that would even consider paying for the teams pro stuff, and I haven't seen it at any of our clients either, so I'm really curious to know see how big the market is for this
mtlsnk 2y ago
This looks great. What is the reason for adding the https://sso.tax https://sso.tax? Why did you make SSO an enterprise feature? Is it due to some (technical) reason that would require a monetary compensation to be profitable? SSO has security benefits (on top of the maintainability aspect) which would also benefit small businesses.
- wielrls 2y ago
  To be honest, we're still finalizing our long-term pricing details. For what it's worth, "Sign in with Google" and "Sign in with Microsoft" are available to all users, and we'll prioritize additional canonical OIDC providers as demanded (let us know what you need!). 100% agree with the security benefits here. The SSO reference on our pricing page specifically applies to SAML-based IdPs, intended for customers who require further customization re: auth and provisioning strategy.
  - mtlsnk 2y ago
    I hadn't the time to look around further, so I missed the Google and Microsoft SSO login options. As long as those are/remain free, there is no SSO tax. I will have another look when I have more time, thank you.
- IshKebab 2y ago
  SSO tax seems like a very reasonable price differentiation method to me. Most of the price increases on sso.tax are quite reasonable for a company that needs SSO (most companies I've worked in don't bother until they are above 100 employees, despite what that site says).
  - anilgulecha 2y ago
    > SSO tax seems like a very reasonable price differentiation method to me Security is not a differentiation method. It's table stakes for any technical product. That's what the above linked website explains.
    - 2y ago
RadiozRadioz 2y ago
I see no mention here of using a pre-existing standard chat protocol like XMPP or Matrix, it looks like they rolled their own. Therefore this is not interoperable and is yet another proprietary walled garden. No GNU/Linux client either. Next.
- cryptonector 2y ago
  That's the way the game is played in the IM space. Sucks, but the only way out of that is to build an open source product.
alok-g 2y ago
Side question: Do these animations linked to scrolling add some real value to the readers? Is there some experimental data showing value (e.g., conversion rate) over a static page? Thanks.
- keyle 2y ago
  I found the text appearing in waves like that quite disturbing. It takes away from the classiness of the product.
- fred_h 2y ago
  Appreciate the feedback on this. We do want to focus folks on the product's value prop and remove distractions. I wouldn't say we are attached to the animations by any means and will have a chat with our team. Cheers.
- jitl 2y ago
  I enjoyed
debarshri 2y ago
One of the usecases that is relevant for us is supporting other companies over call. Zoom and team are built from meetings but not for support. Key things for support are: 1. Ability to share access to the customers machine with out any hassle and easy acknowledgement for sharing access 2. Recordings and summarirs automatically gets added to tickets and issues 3. Playbooks are handy for the support engineer during the call
- fred_h 2y ago
  Thanks for flagging this use case for us and agree that Zoom/Teams are better suited for presenting vs supporting. To your specific points: #1 makes a lot of sense and I sense the "low friction" part of this is the key distinction. #2 is something we have thought about through the lens of a yet to be built Zapier integration. This would effectively allow you to create more custom methods to route data from emdash into your CRM/other systems of record for customers. Curious if this approach would be interesting. #3 is in theory supported today. There are several ways you could store/share playbooks for support engineers. For example, you can create a Team and upload the playbooks as shared resources.
cryptonector 2y ago
"Individual messages or entire Discussions can be moved after the fact" -- sounds like a start, but I want more. Being able to tag chats with keywords would be nice. Being able to pull chats into docs easily would be nice. Being able to pull chats into more than one doc -- not just move, but tag/reference/copy. Global tags (with ACLs) as well as team and personal tags (also with ACLs) would be fantastic. Don't forget read and access ACLs, not just write ACLs. Email integration would be nice. Emails -> IM, so I can read IMs and emails in one app. IM -> email (right-click on a range of messages, click send, get placed in $MUA and edit). Don't forget retention controls, support for on-prem, etc.
- pz 2y ago
  > Being able to tag chats with keywords would be nice. Being able to pull chats into docs easily would be nice. Being able to pull chats into more than one doc -- not just move, but tag/reference/copy. Global tags (with ACLs) as well as team and personal tags (also with ACLs) would be fantastic. Don't forget read and access ACLs, not just write ACLs. Tagging is another organizational feature that is on our roadmap and has always made sense to me. Right now our organizational model is primarily hierarchical which has obvious limitations. RE: email integration - We have a pretty robust email integration right now. Neville was always insistent that we shouldn't force people into the app to have a conversation, especially for one-off collaborators who get looped into a chat. They can stay blissfully ignorant of the fact that the conversation is actually happening on emdash if it suits them.
- drewfish 2y ago
  I was at Yahoo when they did a big email redesign, and the new design didn't work for 1/2 their users. Digging deeper, they found that email users kinda fall into 2 camps: filers and pilers. Filers carefully organize their data so they can quickly navigate to their target. Pilers just collect stuff in a big pile and use search to find their target. Sounds like you're a filer (I am too). Sounds like emdash is kind of a mix of filing and piling.
  - cryptonector 2y ago
    I can't file. I can tag. I can't stand the idea that something belongs in only one box.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
insane_dreamer 2y ago
do conversations support nested threads? one frustrating limitation of slack is that a convo in a channel can be put into a thread, but that thread can't have nested threads, which makes it more difficult to follow long, multi-person conversations
- fred_h 2y ago
  We do! In theory, we support infinite nested threads within conversations. In practice, we found that most folks don't go deeper than 3 levels. However, the functionality is there.
insane_dreamer 2y ago
linux client planned?
- wielrls 2y ago
  If there's enough demand we can release one! :)
ckluis 2y ago
fwiw, what no chat system has done is incorporate the wiki well. transferring data from chat to kb is incredibly tedious. do this and win my undying love.
jesselawson 2y ago
Hi team--and hello Fred! You and I had some great conversations about Slack's direction--as well as its missed opportunities--back when we worked there together. I was leading developer education at the time, and frustrated with the decisions that were coming down that caused us to pivot away from what we agreed on was the "true core experience" of a collaborative messaging system: connecting users with the knowledge they need without having to parse through other knowledge that may be important in different contexts. I'm genuinely excited that you're in this space now, too, as I myself have had my nose to the grindstone building out what the collaboration app for distributed teams that I've always wanted. We need options/competition in this space; just this year alone, I've had a little over a a dozen conversations with interested folks in teams across the United States working in industries from agricultural sensors manufacturing to game studios for hire, and the same pain points that you and I were reasoning about back at Slack are the same pain points that users still unwillingly tolerate. See you around--and good luck out there! PS. As an English major I'd be remiss to not share that I love the name emdash. :D
- fred_h 2y ago
  :wave: Great to hear from you, Jesse — and so interesting that we’re both still thinking about these same challenges all these years later. Collaboration is tough to get right, and we’ve definitely heard plenty of painful stories along the way too. Wishing you the best with your work — I’ll be keeping an eye out for your launch. Good luck!

80 points by pz 2y ago

pz 2y ago

I should introduce the rest of the crew. We're a team of builders who have worked together for the better part of the last decade. Neville and I were early engineers on Facebook Ads. Neville later founded Rimeto, which was acquired by Slack. Fred has held various roles driving growth and was an early employee at Facebook, Doordash, and Rimeto. Nick jumped into startups right out of college, joining Rimeto and now diving back in with us at emdash.

bsk26 2y ago
great team!
asadawan 2y ago
pz, what a great username :)

clacker-o-matic 2y ago

One note I have about your pricing page is that you don't explain what a startup or small to midsize team actually is. I would also much rather have a set pricing scheme immediately with a 60-90 day trial period similar to how slack works.

fred_h 2y ago
Hi, Fred here – I’m one of the founding team members. Thanks for the comment. First, to the question about team sizes. We view "Startups" as generally teams with <25 users, followed by small/mid-sized "Growth" companies that have <250 employees. Beyond that, we anticipate most companies falling into the "Scale" category. That said, this could all be revised based on usage data and I will also update our website later today to reflect the above. Regarding pricing, we haven’t finalized it yet because we’ve prioritized understanding how teams actually use emdash—what works, what doesn’t, and where we should focus. Pricing is important, and we want to get it right. Typical usage patterns, evolving AI and cloud/infra costs, and where we fit competitively in the market are all variables we still need to explore. We’ll need to strike the right balance and be competitive enough with vis-a-vis the market. It would be smart to start with a free trial before transitioning users to a paid plan. We’re still figuring out whether that should be time-based (e.g., 60-90 days), usage-based (e.g., after your 20th video meeting). I get it – no one likes unexpected pricing shifts and when the time comes, we will be transparent about our thinking and communicate changes well in advance. Our goal is to build something sustainable, not just for us, but for the teams that rely on emdash. Hope this helps clarify.
- rsyring 2y ago
  "We haven't figured out pricing" sounds like a big turnoff for anyone seriously considering this who wants self service. Just pick something that's a no brainier for people to try, change it later if you have to. Your biggest risk right now is people walk without giving the product real consideration. Lack of clarity on pricing will do that for a lot of people, even though you are offering a free trial.
  - 2y ago

kieranderfus 2y ago

Very cool guys, I think this will crush

reshmakh 2y ago

product looks very cool - it's nice to see a consumer level of polish on a b2b experience

pz 2y ago
Thanks! One of the benefits of dogfooding our product everyday is that we invest a lot in working out the everyday kinks in addition to the marquee features.
fred_h 2y ago
Thanks! We’ve definitely put a lot of thought into making emdash feel smooth, intuitive, and frictionless. We are constantly looking at all the seams where pieces connect and making sure they fit tightly. We probably over-invested in some details, but we believe those small touches add up, kind of like getting that nice “thunk” when closing a well-built car door. Glad you noticed the polish—it’s something we really care about!

shaneos 2y ago

Great to see more competition in this space - I'm currently on Slack and not happy about it. Here's hoping Emdash can fill the void left by Workplace and get some momentum to put pressure on Slack. It's much needed

pz 2y ago
Amen. We've migrated teams from Workplace who really appreciated our hierarchical discussion model
wielrls 2y ago
> I'm currently on Slack and not happy about it Yeah I heard that Slack is taking a breather this morning...
- shaneos 2y ago
  Heh, yeah that happened right after I made the post above. Fate, it would seem, has a sense of irony :-)
conradev 2y ago
Same here! Slack is… fine. The one catch for Emdash for me is that we are hybrid (3 days in office) and use Zoom Rooms for our conference room are pretty happy with it.

bmoney24 2y ago

This is very cool. The summarization feature stands out as my favorite.

fred_h 2y ago
Appreciate you reaching out about the summarization feature. Teams have been making use of it to save time. They like jumping directly to key moments of the meeting and also outright skipping meetings.

written-beyond 2y ago

Good luck guys! This maybe that I've usually been a part of smaller teams but the screenshots you guys provided are a little... overload-y. Care to share what's the average size of your early adopters? Because it seems to be something great for larger teams but, then again I imagine the friction is greater for them too.

pz 2y ago
This is good feedback, thanks. We packed a lot into the product so far and could have spent more time focusing the media assets to distill things better. Early adopters range in size from 2 people to ~20. As you said, the Catch-22 for larger teams usually have established tool stacks so the (operational) switching cost is prohibitive. FWIW we are a team of 5 and already find the feature set useful (we're biased, of course). I expect that ~5 is the threshold the organizational and search features become invaluable.

symbolicator 2y ago

This looks great — can’t want to try it as we grow our team at Mobility. Are there integrations with other work surfaces like GDrive / Notion for deep search retrieval like “What are we working on this week”?

pz 2y ago
This is in the works. We have a prototype integration with Github that supports the deep search use case you mentioned. My favorite anecdote from this was a few weeks ago I was revisiting some work on transactional support in our controller framework and asked assistant "A few months ago I was working on transaction support and had to revert my change. Can you remind me what happened?" and it spit back my original PR, the reversion, and a deep link into the standup video meeting where we discussed the issue. For me, that was the magic moment where I knew this could be something much more than just a chat client.

alexbit2019 2y ago

keep it up phil, neville and the team.

hamzaaftab 2y ago

Really like the self-documentation of what the team is working on through the auto summarization and share-out of meeting. Strongly believe in "communication is the job" at tech companies, and with this it doesn't have to feel like a chore.

fred_h 2y ago
Thank you for the feedback. That’s exactly the idea. We see it as "write once, share everywhere." Conversations, meetings, and decisions can generate useful context, and having summaries automatically show up right where people are already working saves time down the road.

niutech 2y ago

Have you seen what is happening with Slack now? It's down for hours. Doesn't it teach businesses that the crucial instant messaging should be self-hosted for privacy & independence on 3rd party? Why would businesses use your hosted product instead of e.g. open source Nextcloud Talk, Element.io or Mattermost on their own server?

wielrls 2y ago
Absolutely. If your team has the expertise and bandwidth, self-hosting Mattermost or similar tools makes a ton of sense. We may even explore a self-hosted version of emdash in the future. That said, most customers tell us they’d rather focus their resources on their core business vs manage every tool themselves. Even those who’ve tried self-hosting haven’t necessarily seen better uptime vs Slack.

asadawan 2y ago

Really cool. Awesome product from a solid team!

lusujimo 2y ago

Very cool -- feels like teams are in "app overload" now with too much context switching. This looks pretty seamless and agree with others -- the summarization is a really nice feature.

trustinmenowpls 2y ago

Good luck, the sales cycles for large enterprise to switch from zoom/slack are super long... and I'm sure now that salesforce owns slack they're gonna be giving bundle discounts which will make it even harder to switch. I'll also note, I've yet to work for a place that would even consider paying for the teams pro stuff, and I haven't seen it at any of our clients either, so I'm really curious to know see how big the market is for this

mtlsnk 2y ago

This looks great. What is the reason for adding the https://sso.tax https://sso.tax? Why did you make SSO an enterprise feature? Is it due to some (technical) reason that would require a monetary compensation to be profitable? SSO has security benefits (on top of the maintainability aspect) which would also benefit small businesses.

wielrls 2y ago
To be honest, we're still finalizing our long-term pricing details. For what it's worth, "Sign in with Google" and "Sign in with Microsoft" are available to all users, and we'll prioritize additional canonical OIDC providers as demanded (let us know what you need!). 100% agree with the security benefits here. The SSO reference on our pricing page specifically applies to SAML-based IdPs, intended for customers who require further customization re: auth and provisioning strategy.
- mtlsnk 2y ago
  I hadn't the time to look around further, so I missed the Google and Microsoft SSO login options. As long as those are/remain free, there is no SSO tax. I will have another look when I have more time, thank you.
IshKebab 2y ago
SSO tax seems like a very reasonable price differentiation method to me. Most of the price increases on sso.tax are quite reasonable for a company that needs SSO (most companies I've worked in don't bother until they are above 100 employees, despite what that site says).
- anilgulecha 2y ago
  > SSO tax seems like a very reasonable price differentiation method to me Security is not a differentiation method. It's table stakes for any technical product. That's what the above linked website explains.
  - 2y ago

RadiozRadioz 2y ago

I see no mention here of using a pre-existing standard chat protocol like XMPP or Matrix, it looks like they rolled their own. Therefore this is not interoperable and is yet another proprietary walled garden. No GNU/Linux client either. Next.

cryptonector 2y ago
That's the way the game is played in the IM space. Sucks, but the only way out of that is to build an open source product.

alok-g 2y ago

Side question: Do these animations linked to scrolling add some real value to the readers? Is there some experimental data showing value (e.g., conversion rate) over a static page? Thanks.

keyle 2y ago
I found the text appearing in waves like that quite disturbing. It takes away from the classiness of the product.
fred_h 2y ago
Appreciate the feedback on this. We do want to focus folks on the product's value prop and remove distractions. I wouldn't say we are attached to the animations by any means and will have a chat with our team. Cheers.
jitl 2y ago
I enjoyed

debarshri 2y ago

One of the usecases that is relevant for us is supporting other companies over call. Zoom and team are built from meetings but not for support. Key things for support are: 1. Ability to share access to the customers machine with out any hassle and easy acknowledgement for sharing access 2. Recordings and summarirs automatically gets added to tickets and issues 3. Playbooks are handy for the support engineer during the call

fred_h 2y ago
Thanks for flagging this use case for us and agree that Zoom/Teams are better suited for presenting vs supporting. To your specific points: #1 makes a lot of sense and I sense the "low friction" part of this is the key distinction. #2 is something we have thought about through the lens of a yet to be built Zapier integration. This would effectively allow you to create more custom methods to route data from emdash into your CRM/other systems of record for customers. Curious if this approach would be interesting. #3 is in theory supported today. There are several ways you could store/share playbooks for support engineers. For example, you can create a Team and upload the playbooks as shared resources.

cryptonector 2y ago

"Individual messages or entire Discussions can be moved after the fact" -- sounds like a start, but I want more. Being able to tag chats with keywords would be nice. Being able to pull chats into docs easily would be nice. Being able to pull chats into more than one doc -- not just move, but tag/reference/copy. Global tags (with ACLs) as well as team and personal tags (also with ACLs) would be fantastic. Don't forget read and access ACLs, not just write ACLs. Email integration would be nice. Emails -> IM, so I can read IMs and emails in one app. IM -> email (right-click on a range of messages, click send, get placed in $MUA and edit). Don't forget retention controls, support for on-prem, etc.

pz 2y ago
> Being able to tag chats with keywords would be nice. Being able to pull chats into docs easily would be nice. Being able to pull chats into more than one doc -- not just move, but tag/reference/copy. Global tags (with ACLs) as well as team and personal tags (also with ACLs) would be fantastic. Don't forget read and access ACLs, not just write ACLs. Tagging is another organizational feature that is on our roadmap and has always made sense to me. Right now our organizational model is primarily hierarchical which has obvious limitations. RE: email integration - We have a pretty robust email integration right now. Neville was always insistent that we shouldn't force people into the app to have a conversation, especially for one-off collaborators who get looped into a chat. They can stay blissfully ignorant of the fact that the conversation is actually happening on emdash if it suits them.
drewfish 2y ago
I was at Yahoo when they did a big email redesign, and the new design didn't work for 1/2 their users. Digging deeper, they found that email users kinda fall into 2 camps: filers and pilers. Filers carefully organize their data so they can quickly navigate to their target. Pilers just collect stuff in a big pile and use search to find their target. Sounds like you're a filer (I am too). Sounds like emdash is kind of a mix of filing and piling.
- cryptonector 2y ago
  I can't file. I can tag. I can't stand the idea that something belongs in only one box.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

insane_dreamer 2y ago

do conversations support nested threads? one frustrating limitation of slack is that a convo in a channel can be put into a thread, but that thread can't have nested threads, which makes it more difficult to follow long, multi-person conversations

fred_h 2y ago
We do! In theory, we support infinite nested threads within conversations. In practice, we found that most folks don't go deeper than 3 levels. However, the functionality is there.

insane_dreamer 2y ago

linux client planned?

wielrls 2y ago
If there's enough demand we can release one! :)

ckluis 2y ago

fwiw, what no chat system has done is incorporate the wiki well. transferring data from chat to kb is incredibly tedious. do this and win my undying love.

jesselawson 2y ago

Hi team--and hello Fred! You and I had some great conversations about Slack's direction--as well as its missed opportunities--back when we worked there together. I was leading developer education at the time, and frustrated with the decisions that were coming down that caused us to pivot away from what we agreed on was the "true core experience" of a collaborative messaging system: connecting users with the knowledge they need without having to parse through other knowledge that may be important in different contexts. I'm genuinely excited that you're in this space now, too, as I myself have had my nose to the grindstone building out what the collaboration app for distributed teams that I've always wanted. We need options/competition in this space; just this year alone, I've had a little over a a dozen conversations with interested folks in teams across the United States working in industries from agricultural sensors manufacturing to game studios for hire, and the same pain points that you and I were reasoning about back at Slack are the same pain points that users still unwillingly tolerate. See you around--and good luck out there! PS. As an English major I'd be remiss to not share that I love the name emdash. :D

fred_h 2y ago
:wave: Great to hear from you, Jesse — and so interesting that we’re both still thinking about these same challenges all these years later. Collaboration is tough to get right, and we’ve definitely heard plenty of painful stories along the way too. Wishing you the best with your work — I’ll be keeping an eye out for your launch. Good luck!