How stupid would it be to build a Slack alternative?
It's an idea I am somewhat excited about but I think I may be in over my head here.
I draw my inspiration mostly from Superhuman, AIM, IRC, and Ripcord.
Competitors seem to be Slack, Zulip, Mattermost and Rocket Chat.
Slack is Slack. Zulip's user interface is TERRIBLE. Mattermost appears to have a terrible mobile app. Rocket Chat seems to be pretty good and comparable to Slack.
Zulip/MatterMost/Rocket Chat also have the benefit of being open source and self-hosted. Seems like Slack can get away with being proprietary since it was first to market.
The features that I am contemplating will stand out are:
- Fully native client (like Ripcord) - Only Mac/iOS at first for MVP
- Entire chat history is cached clientside and can be searched/filtered instantaneously (like Superhuman)
- Simple / distraction-free user interface to keep you focused (e.g. usage stats / notification filters / option to disable images / etc)
- No voice/video conferencing
- No existing integrations (but would have a REST API for bots and stuff)
- Proprietary client/server
My main concern is the lack of feature parity with the competitors and the fact that there exist fully open source self-hosted solutions already. That being said I think "works offline" + no Electron may sway some orgs. I have a lot of experience programming and can build the server / client all by myself but my biz dev is pretty weak. I also imagine its pretty hard to get an org to adopt a new chat client in general. You have to get the whole company to switch and commit to it.... seems like a hard sell for a proprietary no-name chat app, when Slack already exists.
Just wondering if I'm in over my head here and if anyone had a good strategy for an MVP. But perhaps I should think smaller.
You might think that if you've listened to a lot of Stewart Butterfield's interviews. He always talks as if the most similar thing to exist before Slack was the ancient IRC.
But it's not true.
Slack is almost a carbon copy of Atlassian's HipChat, which was popular all over the bay area before Slack arrived. From direct chats to groups to emoji and image insertion to bots to github hooks, Slack was almost a feature for feature clone of HipChat. So much so that I basically had no friction when leaving a huge unicorn using HipChat in early 2014 and then moving to a tiny startup using Slack in late 2014.
Whatever reason Slack was successful, it wasn't being first to market.
WARNING: Extreme opinion coming forth.
I think Slack was successful because they took their talent at making an attractive UI (it felt like a video game and had a bunch of silly loader messages like a game). They were, after all, a video game company before they launched Slack.
This also explains why Discord is growing rapidly. I use it more than I use the others now even (except when I have to use Slack because of work).
In fact, Discord started out as chat and audio chat for gamers, but it's quickly grown to just about every other segment.
They keep it fun and interesting.
The progression (roughly):
IRC --> ICQ --> AIM --> HipChat --> Slack --> Discord
In almost every way, it's been about UI progression... and in most cases, they all started out pretty fun and eventually became corporate customer slaves and reduced the fun... leaving the market open for a "fun chat."
AIM was used for work? I only used it to talk to friends.
That's a very interesting observation. Did you notice any other apps or classes of apps with similar traits?
I do think design plays heavily in the success of apps. Given two equal/equivalent apps by feature, the one with the better design tends to win.
But that said, I don't think I can think of a progression as similar to the one I presented above.
I think precisely because your biz dev is weak, you should start by building up an audience and interest first, because building the product with just your vision alone is akin to flying blind. I'd start by googling Slack pain points...a search phrase I used was 'I don't like Slack chat', and found these results:
https://medium.com/@chrisjbatts/actually-slack-really-sucks-625802f1420a
https://www.fastcompany.com/40433793/my-company-tried-slack-for-two-years-this-is-whywe-quit
http://ashtonkemerling.com/posts/i-dont-like-slack/
Identify the common pain points, and brainstorm for solutions for them. Whittle it down to top 3-5, then make a landing page. Share it within your network, your twitter, get buy-in. For people who have expressed interest, add them to a group chat or group page, or just mailing list.
Now you do what you do best - start building it. A minimal prototype will do. Keep the interested folks updated.
I wouldn't ever tell you not to go for it, worst case you ship something that doesn't gain traction and you learn from that experience.
However, I would suggest you read this post from someone who tried building a better Slack and consider how you will tackle the problems that he faced: https://www.derrickreimer.com/essays/2019/05/17/im-walking-away-from-the-product-i-spent-a-year-building.html
Hope that helps!
-Chris
Your first sentence here is exactly what I was about to write also. Completely agree that the experience gain alone can make it worthwhile to try.
However a further note which has also been mentioned is, everyone should always take in to account the time/effort/money required to build such a project, and whether it will be too much of an impact should it come to a close in the end.
Derek Reimer spent a year working on a Slack competitor and ended up walking away from it, so his post about it might give you an interesting perspective https://www.derrickreimer.com/essays/2019/05/17/im-walking-away-from-the-product-i-spent-a-year-building.html
Whoa, beat me to it! 😆
This comment was deleted 3 years ago.