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These engineers quit their jobs to start LeChat
- karterk 14y agoThe actual app itself looks pretty neat. However, I see their pricing and it's "$1 per user per month". If anyone from LeChat is reading this - you should charge more. Although it appears like having a lower price is a differentiator, in reality it will hurt you.
- lechat 14y agoCould you please elaborate on this?
- proexploit 14y agoYou're not going to make enough money.
- rekoros 14y agoWe ran some numbers and as long we run our own boxes (and buy our own RAM), our margins look pretty good. But we'll see, obviously. We don't have enough data to dispute your prediction at the moment :-)
- JEVLON 14y agoYou may want to research how perceived value can be derived from price. However, your current price may be right for other reasons.
- karterk 14y agoDid your calculation involve cost of customer acquisition? What's your marketing strategy? If it involves any form of advertising, you have to figure out how much it's going to cost you to acquire a single user. Your calculation should also involve things like churn, cost of customer support (even if it's your own time to begin with) etc. I'm pretty sure you will find it hard to scale with 1 USD per user when most companies will gladly play much more for something that solves their problem.
- jfim 14y agoI was pleasantly surprised to see that LeChat's logo is a cat, even though it looks a little bit funny. I am curious, are you planning to add integration with external protocols, such as XMPP or IRC? It doesn't seem to be mentioned anywhere on the FAQ page.
- Qwl 14y agoOur immediate plan is to provide great native apps for mobile and desktop that will use our proprietary protocol. We like to think of LeChat as "Dropbox of chats", you never leave your conversation as you move between desktop, web and mobile devices. Gateways for XMPP and IRC are further down our list and are more on API/integrations side.
- jfim 14y agoInteresting, I can see how that would be useful, although some of that is already working using XMPP (Google Talk, really). Is there a way to be notified when you have XMPP integration? Most of our dev tools integrate with it[1][2] and having some of those notifications(build failure, issue fixed) stream into a common area would be very cool. [1] http://www.jetbrains.com/youtrack/whatsnew/ http://www.jetbrains.com/youtrack/whatsnew/ [2] http://blogs.jetbrains.com/teamcity/tag/jabber/ http://blogs.jetbrains.com/teamcity/tag/jabber/ Edit: wrt/ YouTrack, it doesn't support group chats yet(see http://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/JT-18866 http://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/JT-18866).
- Qwl 14y agoSure, if you sign up we are sending announcements about new features. Dev tools integration is our big focus. So far we have GitHub, BitBucket, CloudForge and Airbrake plus raw HTTP and direct email address for each chat room. One of our customers created a Ruby Gem [1]. [1] http://rubygems.org/gems/lechat-rb http://rubygems.org/gems/lechat-rb
- tedchs 14y agoI would be a possible customer for this. I use Campfire today, and I looked at your homepage and it looks very similar... can you give some points on which this is different/improved? Thanks!
- ximeng 14y agoWhat does "We perform continuous encrypted offsite backups for customer data." mean?
- Qwl 14y agoWe perform backups of chat history, accounts and any other customer data, encrypt them and upload to multiple locations outside of our data center.
- avree 14y agoThere's a lot of good discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5202381 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5202381 (original LeChat announcement) I'm pleased to see that Qwl has a different stance on XMPP than the 'lechat' user posted in the thread.
- Helianthus 14y agoIs this anything other than LeChat's advertisement for angel investors? I'm with the folks in avree's linked discussion. IRC already does this for a dollar less per month.
- hunterwalk 14y agohi, i wrote the post. As many engineers try to decide what's a "side project" vs startup, i thought it would be interesting to share one team that just made the decision.
- Qwl 14y agoI guess similar argument can go for GitHub/BitBucket versus internal Git server, yet GitHub and BitBucket are very popular for private repositories.
- Helianthus 14y agoUh. I don't see the relation. You can run your own IRC server.
- rekoros 14y agoHi, I'm the other LeChat founder. The issues with running an IRC server: 1. you still have to run it somewhere 2. you have to support it 3. there's no search (grepping through logs is not search) 4. you have to use screen/tmux to not miss anything 5. your CFO will probably never use it I think there definitely is a need in a chat tool that is "easy" to use. Having said this, I think IRC is invaluable, just in a different context.
- richardkmichael 14y agoI agree to date chat hasn't been done well enough: cross platform, fast effective UI. Looks like LeChat is making inroads, and I think the focus on search is a very good idea. How are you planning to monetize everything that everyone says? (I presume you're planning to do this, since you have all the data.) If I quit LeChat, what happens to what I've said? Do I get a copy? Can I remove it from histories?
- Qwl 14y agoWhen people have great search at their disposal they actually start relying on chat to keep their important assets. This enables nice dynamics--the more history they have over time, the more valuable it gets. If you quit LeChat, or at any other point in time, you can download full history in plain text and in JSON format, which retains important metadata.
- richardkmichael 14y agoYou have an opportunity to do interesting experiments with your pricing model.
- rekoros 14y agoWe're not planning on selling ads based on the contents of your conversations, if that's what you mean (or the direction).
- znq 14y agoWhat's the differentiator to HipChat? https://www.hipchat.com/compare https://www.hipchat.com/compare
- rekoros 14y agoMuch better search The ability to view multiple conversations at the same time Better support for pasting and copying code Hopefully much better reliability (we use Erlang and do proper OTP release upgrades) We're pretty fanatical about fixing bugs.