
Walking Away from the Product I Spent a Year Building - rwalling
https://www.derrickreimer.com/essays/2019/05/17/im-walking-away-from-the-product-i-spent-a-year-building.html
======
trustfundbaby
I read this, and all through the article I kept waiting for the part where the
author would talk about his own experience using his own product.

What I'm getting at is that, its really difficult to get people to love
something you build unless you love it yourself, Seth Godin touches on this in
his book "This is Marketing"

I like the data driven approach to product development, but sometimes passion
trumps data, if you build something you yourself cannot live without, it's
much easier to slowly win people over to your way of thinking.

And if you say to me "well he was the only one working on it", then my answer
to you is like that punchline in the Famous "Coming to America" skit ...

"aha!"

It is infinitely better to work on problems that you have a firsthand
understanding of/experience with otherwise you're always going to be depending
on others for product insight, which is not terrible, but much much harder
than when those insights come from you directly.

~~~
RaceWon
> What I'm getting at is that, its really difficult to get people to love
> something you build unless you love it yourself

This reminded me of a quote which is totally the opposite, and imo more
accurate: "Most entrepreneurs fall in love with the wrong thing. They fall in
love with their products and their business when they should be falling in
love with their clients and customers" -Jay Abraham

Both sentiments are however; worthy food for thought.

~~~
mritchie712
Best case scenario: you are the customer. In this case, both sentiments can be
true.

~~~
travisjungroth
Turns out that the real productivity hack was learning to love yourself.

------
danvoell
"The gist is that it’s tough to get unbiased feedback during customer
validation." \- I wish this was taught along with lean startup content. Too
many times I have heard founders say they validated the idea when all they
have done is gotten biased feedback while asking self-fulfilling questions.

~~~
AznHisoka
Yep, it is extremely hard. Lean Startup makes it sound trivial when it's
almost impossible. Almost nobody is going to clear up their day to talk to you
about their problems, answer your questions, give you feedback, be your guinea
pig, etc.

The ideal way to validate it is to be so immerse in the industry/problem such
that you understand most of the pain points. Do the job that your ideal
customer is doing. Attend the conferences they're going to. Visit the forums
they're visiting. Read the websites they're visiting. Analyze the reviews
they're posting in TrustRadius/G2Crowd. Look at their Linkedin profiles to see
what their day to day involves.

~~~
rpedela
I agree overall but it's not that hard to get people to talk to you if done a
certain way. If you are trying to sell them while talking, yes that will be
hard/impossible. However if you approach it as learning from experts, then I
find people are much more receptive because most people like to help and feel
important/useful. I always say I want to learn from them and offer to pay for
their time which shows them I understand they are busy. I still get some NOs
but that's okay. BTW I've never had someone want me to pay them, but I would
if they did.

~~~
mixmastamyk
Pay could be a fancy lunch while discussing the issues.

------
_hardwaregeek
The Paul Graham essay on start up ideas comes to mind [1]. Everybody kinda
wanted this product but they didn't _need_ the product. This paragraph sums it
up:

> The danger of an idea like this is that when you run it by your friends with
> pets, they don't say "I would never use this." They say "Yeah, maybe I could
> see using something like that." Even when the startup launches, it will
> sound plausible to a lot of people. They don't want to use it themselves, at
> least not right now, but they could imagine other people wanting it. Sum
> that reaction across the entire population, and you have zero users.

Granted, it's not like I possess a magical "good startup ideas" power. And I
don't have a successful startup under my belt. But still, I find it curious
that many people haven't read this essay.

[1]
[http://www.paulgraham.com/startupideas.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/startupideas.html)

~~~
quickthrower2
The problem I see, from briefly looking at the landing page is that you can
achieve what you want on Slack by disabling notifications and then checking
slack every hour or so, when you've just committed some code and feel like
your mental cache can be flushed. This is what I do. There isn't a big enough
problem being solved, especially to move away from the slack ecosystem. Even
if the 'other' product had all the things slack has, the cost of getting
another tool and getting used to it seems too high when that effort could be
put into swapping a different tool for a different reason with more upside for
the team. The cost of the product itself in this equation is almost
irrelevant.

Having said that no one wants to be the "Dropbox is just rsync " guy. Or Lily
Allen turning down thousands of bitcoins (although she's successful anyway so
she probably shouldn't care). If you see what I mean ... no one wants to say
an idea sucks before hand, and if they do you can just say "well they said
that about Dropbox".

~~~
_hardwaregeek
If there's one thing Hacker News lacks, it's biting criticism and pessimism :P

Kidding aside, I see your point. I guess it's important to distinguish between
criticism and dismissal of an idea. "Dropbox is just rsync" seems like a
dismissal, not a critical look at the validity of the idea. And Lily Allen
turning down bitcoin? Well honestly I'm a little with her on that one. "Oh
yeah can you perform and we'll pay you with a totally legit online currency we
swear." Not exactly a great sell.

------
BrentOzar
Slack has a staying power that the author didn't catch: once you've got all
kinds of apps reporting data directly into Slack, and all kinds of rooms set
up for specific data purposes, it's even more sticky than email.

Before a Slack-using company would switch, the competitor would need to
support many/most/all of the integrations that the company is using. You've
really only got two chances to win Slack's customers: the point before they
seriously adopt Slack, and the point in the future where Slack does something
stupid like jack prices way up or suffer a serious breach.

~~~
derrickreimer
Author here. Slack is undoubtedly sticky, although I challenge the assumption
that all integrations need to be replicated in a niche play. Those who did
adopt Level were willing to give up a number of integrations that were low-
value to them or were just causing noise that proved unnecessary.

~~~
boudewijnrempt
I was struck with " They recognize that Slack is not suitable for meaningful
conversations, so they automatically delete chat messages older than a few
weeks to discourage relying on it for long-term archival." in your article.

It's something I feel quite strongly about: chat should not be archived. There
should be no backscroll; being not around when people are talking means not
being part of that conversation. Chat messages have no value beyond the
moment. Any chat implementation that assigns importance to messages beyond the
current conversation is wrong.

For the rest... It was like peeking into an alien world. I've been maintaining
an open source application since 2004, and I've had various day jobs, but
managed to build it out into my day job the past couple of years. I've never
had the startup itch :-) Just let me build up my userbase, my income stream
and my contributor team, and I'm happy.

~~~
JoshTriplett
> being not around when people are talking means not being part of that
> conversation.

Persistent chat is one of the biggest values of Slack or Discord or
Mattermost, and one of the big reasons I'll take it over IRC any day.

Persistent chat that you can join and read the backlog of is _incredibly_
valuable. It becomes an asynchronous communication medium, rather than a
synchronous one. And it's much richer and lower-friction than email.

~~~
AdrianB1
With people having the expectation of chat to be instantly replied, like a
chat in a real life (someone walking to your desk and saying something) it is
not asynchronous in any way.

~~~
iso-8859-1
You seem to suggest people have that expectation, but I think it might be very
culture specific. Where I come, people will not freak out if it takes you a
day to respond to an SMS.

~~~
AdrianB1
SMS is NOT chat.

~~~
detaro
That's also culture-specific.

------
ErikAugust
"Every large team I spoke to had an exceptionally high bar and was unwilling
to entertain Level until it was significantly more “mature.”"

They all made the right decision, as it folded only a couple months later.

~~~
philipov
That kind of circular reasoning is only more maddening because it makes sense.
It is a self-fulfilling prophecy combined with a prisoner's dilemma.

~~~
yeahitslikethat
I don't think it does make sense. Funded businesses die all the time. Google
cancels products all the time. companies are acquihired and products end of
lifed.

Even within organizations there are critically important employees.

So, no, it doesn't make sense.

~~~
swombat
At this point in time, Slack is a billion dollar unicorn that can magic money
out of wherever it needs to keep going as long as it wants. It's not going
away any time soon. The worst case scenario for Slack is acquisition and long
slow death over a decade.

~~~
cuspycode
All it takes is one information leakage scandal, and customers will abandon
Slack at the drop of a hat. It's just a chat app, so it's very easy to
replace.

~~~
AznHisoka
I am willing to bet that 99% of users will not blink an eye if there was an
information leak. See Equifax, Facebook..

~~~
sonnyblarney
Equifax is a consumer product with uninformed customers, wherein the
'blowback' can't really be had by individual customers, rather, it has to pick
up as a media storm.

Slack contains a world of sensitive corporate information.

Oddly though I don't recall any major email company losing gazillions of
emails to a hacker either, but I could be wrong.

It's an existential risk for Slack, but not unlike most other SaaS companies
as well, so it's just part of the cost of doing business a per the industry.

~~~
philipov
It's important not to forget that this isn't about whether Slack is something
a company should adopt. Any such risk you can attribute to using Slack will be
multiplied a million-fold with a nascent service being developed by a single
person or startup. All of these are reasons to _continue_ using Slack instead
of switching to Level.

------
drchiu
Level is a pretty well designed product. Tried it briefly and I really did
like it. My team was already using other communication tools (not Slack, but
email and other options) and using Level might have become an eventuality if I
or someone else on my team pushed for it harder.

That said, as someone who also creates and launch products, I think it's hard
to MVP into a space like this. It's better to wedge yourself into some aspect
of that space and eventually branch out once you have a paying user base that
already likes your product.

Good luck on your next endeavour.

~~~
derrickreimer
Thanks so much

------
gscott
I built and ran a groupware/crm system from 2001 to 2009. But didn't get the
traction I needed and couldn't afford the co-located hosting any longer. I
spent 3 years developing it full-time myself and very part time on it the rest
of the time. While also supporting a wife and two kids.

I moved it to very cheap hosting, told everyone it was closing, but then never
closed it but didn't accept new signups. Checking now there is still a little
usage in 2019 (although the majority of usage stopped in 2016).

It costs me $20 to keep alive, using GoDaddy. It was $14 a month but GoDaddy
keeps raising their hosting price with no notification.

Eventually I will re-design the UI to Boostrap to make it modern and relaunch
it.

What I am trying to say is if you made something nice that you like, you can
keep it alive and work on it sometime in the future. You never know when Slack
is going to bought out and then eventually die. You could be the DuckDuckGo to
Google but for Slack. If you had a million dollar marketing budget things
would be different.

~~~
techsin101
This is sensible. Nice point of view

------
pkaler
I've been listening to The Art of Product podcast since the start and Level
really didn't make sense to me as a solution even though I understood the
problem.

Most issues are around context and focus when moving from an individual
contributor to a lead. If a programmer I'm leading doesn't implement a feature
in a way that I expect it is because the context that is in my brain hasn't
been transferred to the programmer's brain. If a feature isn't being worked on
then I having communicated focus and priority.

A solution would focus on revealing context and focus by:

1) Deeply integrating with Slack, JIRA, Github, etc. The tools that we already
use. A new product can't be a silo.

2) Mobile or GTFO. Leads are in meetings, on airplanes, in transit, etc.

~~~
AdrianB1
#2: it depends on the kind of team you have. My team of developers never had
any chat client installed on their mobile for work use, they were either in
front of their computers or away and not available. We did not discuss in
airplanes as we were trying to focus when we had discussions, not to board and
block the other passengers because we were busy chatting in the middle of the
embark flux.

------
brainpool
My take is that this was a case of hubris. Can happen to the best of us. Where
it really derailed was here:

“Others were not decision makers, so I had to take their feedback with a grain
of salt.”

Most users of this kind of product are not decision makers, at least when it
comes to selecting the product. But they are the ones that have to use it and
their opinions are critically important.

~~~
dmitryminkovsky
The idea of soliciting feedback before building a start up really doesn’t make
sense to me. If you like your idea (“this is something I’ve always wanted”),
are willing to dedicate yourself and have the means then you should try it.
Otherwise you’ll never find out. If the creator of the automobile had listened
to people they probably would’ve thought it was a dead end because unlike
horses cars can’t reproduce. The idea that you can explain your vision to
people who will spend one minute thinking about it with you and get useful
feedback is also not obvious. Build the product or you’ll never know.

~~~
joering2
> If the creator of the automobile had listened to people they probably
> would’ve thought it was a dead end because unlike horses cars can’t
> reproduce.

Actually, a true story: Ford said that if he were to listen to what people
want better than a horse, he would have built a carriage with hitch for 6
horses :)

~~~
mratzloff
It's not a true story. People wanted less manure and fewer horse corpses. They
were thrilled with the automobile because it neatly solved their top two
transportation complaints.

~~~
dmitryminkovsky
Not sure about my particular anecdote, I can't verify that to be accurate or
attribute it to Ford (I have heard it on many occasions, and even once saw a
clipping from a newspaper but can't find it now), but
[https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2017/01/get-horse-
americ...](https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2017/01/get-horse-americas-
skepticism-toward-first-automobiles/)

~~~
mratzloff
Skeptical at first, but came around quickly. The quote is apocryphal.

------
dreamgt
Sorry but the outcome seemed obvious from the get go. Of course you weren’t
going to be able to single handedly replace a platform like slack, while
improving upon the pitfalls it’s creating in cross-team communication. The
insight into your experience is great, but it’s really the type of thought
that is born and dead within a few minutes of most developers minds.
Especially when we think of the effort and consequences of such an endeavor.

------
ddebernardy
> “Ugh, Slack distracts me so often. You’re right; everything feels urgent
> even when it’s not. I’m super interested in what you’re building here. We’re
> pretty open to change at my company – I don’t see switching being too big of
> a deal.”

This is such a common mistake. When doing customer development, do NOT stick
to asking "would this be of general interest to you?". In fact, you can get
away with not asking this at all. Instead ask: "how much would you pay for
this?" And if you like the price tag, also throw in: "can we set a date to
sign next week/month/quarter?"

~~~
sonnyblarney
Though 'would this interest you?' may not be the way to start, neither would
'how much would you be willing to pay?' either.

Consider that even for established products 'willingness to pay' may be zero
until there's a sales process i.e. they trial it, they like it, they discover
some things, then the sales person starts to do a 'close'.

The problem with the 'how much would you pay for it' kind of discovery is it
misses the opportunity for the company to determine in a material way why it's
valuable to them.

There's a similar problem in consumer land as well, you can't hardly establish
price points by asking how much people will pay.

Also - price isn't really the big concern. It's not going to be a margin
issue, it'll be a volume issue if anything. The price for such a service would
probably be very low per-person, to the point of not being that important.
Price is not the big point.

And since companies will pay for stuff they find valuable ...

The 'real' question you want answered is: 'will they find this thing useful'
in one way or another, or better yet 'what problems near my product do they
need solved' so the maker can add that functionality or even pivot a little
bit.

I think it's possible to rationalize the process of getting to that point,
unfortunately it often takes industry experience beforehand, and probably a
longer dev curve up front with some willing pre-customers.

------
dangero
I have a lot of similar thoughts about Slack and also had the idea to go head
to head with it a couple of years ago. I partnered with a PHD researcher who
had expertise in the area of focus.

Before I started building I launched a paid sales campaign to see if people
would be interested with a mocked up website looking like we already had the
product. I had a lot of website visitors, but nobody signed up for a demo. Not
one person. At that point I realized that whether or not the product was a
good idea, I didn't know how to sell it, so I ditched the idea, deleted the
test website and moved on.

------
harrisreynolds
I recently had to do this with [https://chart.ly](https://chart.ly). We've had
great success doing data visualization service projects, but building a
product in this space just became untenable due to the market's maturity and
my teams lack of resources.

Better to cut the cord than keep kidding yourself. Thanks for sharing!!

~~~
isostatic
Not hosting my data in Libya!

------
yingw787
I think for things like business chat, since the purchasers of the product are
different from the users, and not completely aligned with them 1:1, VC-backed
companies with the connections and credibility to said stakeholders may have a
much easier go at getting paid users. You can also trade profitability for
growth, which is something bootstrapping precludes.

P.S. I read @rwalling's "Start Small, Stay Small" a few months back, and it
was a phenomenal read. Highly recommend.

~~~
wpietri
Agreed! I think products where the purchaser and the user are different are an
enormous graveyard for startups. There's a big difference between building a
_product_ and building a _business_ no matter the sector. But when the
purchaser and user are different, it can be way worse. Good designers and
engineers want to focus on improving the user experience, but that may not
translate into sales at all.

------
jessmartin
Great post, Derrick!

I learned almost precisely the same lesson in the same way over the same
amount of time (a year) a few years back.

It was _incredibly_ helpful to have those insights going into my next startup,
and I approached customer development entirely differently.

Lessons learned can be quickly applied!

~~~
elefanten
I'm guessing you're referring to this part at the end:

"In hindsight, I took on an unreasonably audacious endeavor with Level in part
because of my internal “this might get big if I play my cards right” dialogue.
It would have been far better to either deliberately go for the big idea (and
probably seek venture funding to make it happen), or start far smaller and
build my way into a sustainable company of one."

I appreciate this passage... a thoughtful reflection.

------
woohoo7676
Great post - it really resonated with me, having personally tried to do an
overambitious startup that failed with a small budget. I agree with you that
doing a 'lifestyle business' and getting to really zero in on a niche group's
needs is an ideal area to be.

Thanks for sharing, and hope you find what you're looking for in your next
venture (and keep sharing details!).

------
verttii
On a more abstract level I feel he was trying to enable/enhance deep work,
just this particular implementation didn't fly the way he expected it to.
Instead of targeting people who are somewhat annoyed by slack and the like I
believe the whole value proposal should be more along the lines of promoting
the concept and benefits of deep work.

I've actually been following Derrick and the development of level on GitHub.
The code is open source. It's remarkably well engineered and I use it as a
source of reference for my own codebases.

So while probably unintentional, he's already helped others by building it.

------
jv22222
Original post about "The Madness"

[http://justinvincent.com/page/951/the-madness-the-all-
consum...](http://justinvincent.com/page/951/the-madness-the-all-consuming-
obsession-of-new-projects)

------
nathan-io
"It is not the function of the artist to be the critic. The winnowing out, the
deciding what is good from what is bad, comes later. That is a community
process. The community decides what is good and bad art. But the individual
should pour this forth." \- Terence McKenna

What I take from this as an entrepreneur is: Have a vision and bring it into
the world. The market response, and the financial outcome, are irrelevant.

If you disagree, it's probably because you feel that the ultimate goal of
entrepreneurship is wealth. I used to believe this myself, and I can certainly
understand the perspective of those who do.

As for the article, this line is pretty telling:

> make a bold statement about the problem (without too many specifics about
> the solution) and gather email addresses of people who wanted to join the
> movement

This particular journey seemed a lot more "tell me what to build and how to
make money from it" than "here is my vision," and there's already some
grandiose idea of a "movement" before even some vague outline of an actual
solution/product have been conceived.

There's also a strong whiff of the toxic "fail fast" mentality. Oftentimes,
tremendous persistence and radical care are the difference between success and
failure. I shudder to think how many fantastic products have died under this
type of thinking, when the real issue was some deficiency in execution,
positioning, etc.

I say this in part because a year is not much of a sacrifice, at least from
the perspective of an entrepreneur, and especially when you have the financial
runway to do it. Any sane person would probably disagree, but it's neither the
job nor the nature of founders to be sane.

------
fourseventy
It seems like one of the main problems is that their target market was too
large, and they were directly competing with slack which dominates that
market. A better approach might have been to target a more niche market in the
business communication tool space, and be the best tool in that space, before
broadening to the wider market.

~~~
AdrianB1
If you target the business communication space you are dead in the first
second: you cannot compete to Skype for Business, for example, that is backed
up and supported by Microsoft (and that matters a lot) and it is already
feature-complete. Not unless you have a product that can compete on features
and backed up with guarantees you will offer upgrades and support for many
years, this is what companies want first.

------
lowii
The way I see it, it's not that people don't like Slack, it's that people
don't like online chatting in general as the official way of communicating
inside a company. I don't think that the solution to that problem could ever
be another chatting tool.

~~~
grey-area
Yes I honestly have no idea what problems in our workflow chat would solve,
but I can think of loads of problems it would introduce.

I have no idea how other programmers tolerate chat as a communications medium
for work. Why would you prefer chat over other async mediums?

~~~
a13n
Chat is just as async as email or any online communication platform - there's
no obligation to respond immediately, and you can disable notifications for as
long as you please.

~~~
grey-area
In practice, people expect a response in a relatively timely way, it is after
all chat, not email. It does seem a lot of companies treat it explicitly as
ephemeral (and therefore requiring frequent checks). Even slack deletes old
messages for free accounts, and the search is pretty poor IME. It is also full
of chatter irrelevant to the topic at hand as far as I've seen in the slack
groups I've participated in (though I have avoided it for work, so have not
experienced it working well in a work environment).

I can imagine it is very useful for responding to a live incident for example,
so perhaps people use it for that sort of thing. For a developer working on
product though it seems crazy to me to have a chat window open for any
significant part of a working day. People work differently though I guess and
perhaps I just haven't seen it used well.

------
jchook
Thank you sincerely for not contributing energy to realtime chat, FOMO, and
the "constant inbox".

I personally find amazing productivity when I turn my phone to DND (helps with
robocalls too) and quit all chat apps. On most phones you can configure who
can call you in DND.

------
yixiang
> I spent the next six weeks building. By that point, my customers were loving
> the product – even my largest customer that started out highly skeptical of
> the paradigm. Everyone who had converted so far applauded the user
> experience and agreed Level was a beautiful product.

I wonder why they switched to Level and loved it when most were fine with
Slack. Is it because they were fans, or do they have some real pain that drive
them to action? Maybe the author accidentally hit a niche?

If it's me, I'd find that out before giving up. So most people are fine with
what they have and won't switch, so what? Isn't that to be expected? Aren't
you supposed to find some earlier adopters and grow from there?

------
robodale
I walked away from mine only after 8 years. It was difficult realizing it had
to go. Taking something that was a part of your life for so long out behind
the metaphorical barn with a rifle is tough...

------
tomxor
> If people were ravenous for a solution, why weren’t most people even
> attempting to pilot Level?

This is _not_ purely the "everyone is lying" problem, i.e everyones lack of
ability to quantify the actual importance of a problem... The original
questions were deceptive to both parties because they are unwittingly framed
with the assumption that a "solution" in the form of a product or technology
is a _valid_ form of solution.

Not all problems deserve or need technical solutions, but the subjects are
denied the opportunity to consider this aspect. If you identify a problem
everyone will likely agree it exists, which is useless, this doesn't qualify
it for a solution let alone a solution in the form of a product.

I'm not very trusting of market research, but if I had to, i'd try to make
this possibility intuitively clear by offering alternatives for comparison
e.g: Do you think problem x would be better solved by a workplace policy or a
technical solution / product?

~~~
mratzloff
I attended a UX seminar once. We split into groups and were assigned a
scenario: improve the check-in experience at a fictional hotel (acted out by
the organizers). Literally every other group began their presentation with,
"We built an app that..." Most involved checking in by phone.

Meanwhile, our group noticed a number of basic inefficiencies and suboptimal
interactions, and proposed about 5-10 improvements to policies and staff
procedures.

We all watched the same skit. I thought the solutions were so obvious as to be
on the nose, but evidently not.

------
sam0x17
I mean I've done this with things I spent 3-4 years building :/

~~~
ddtaylor
Same here. I am in the process now of checking out The Mom Test book and
seeing how we failed in getting soft interest.

~~~
robfitz
Hope it's helpful somewhat. Give me a shout if you have any further questions
or issues with it.

------
JabavuAdams
I would assume that switching team tooling would have a social credit
cost/risk. Didn't see that mentioned in the article. People don't want to
appear incompetent if the new thing doesn't work out. It has to be really
good. Maybe it has to have a certain momentum on personal projects...

------
andrewstuart
I think product development takes a bit of madness - a leap of faith,
something that you believe that others don't ...... yet.

I don't think any amount of asking people what they want is a replacement for
building something and putting it in front of people - only then do you get a
true reaction.

------
nbrempel
If you like the idea of Slack alternative that promotes focus and reduces
distractions, I recommend looking at [https://twist.com/](https://twist.com/).

I used it briefly and really liked it. It's created by the same team that
makes Todoist.

------
rolleiflex
I work on something that would be a competitor to Level, so I'm sad to hear
this, not only because of market viability, but also because I share the
belief in Slack being anathema to any sort of focused work. There's a lot to
unpack here, but briefly:

— The amount of effort, design expectation and polish everyone expects from a
product is exponentially increasing. 'I'm one guy, Google is 75,000 people' is
no longer a valid argument. Arguably it never was, but especially now you
cannot ship a product that does not do what it says it will do to a very high
degree. That effectively makes for longer product development processes and
probably makes bootstrapped competitors to Slack unviable. At least, this was
the logic I ended up going for institutional venture capital: it buys me the
time to make it _work_.

— Non-real-time communication is useful when the team size grows above a
certain point, however when that happens the companies grow and have higher
expectations of their tools. So this market is an interesting one in that it
largely forbids scrappy, _just-alpha-don 't-mind-me_ kind of products. Trying
to sell to smaller (less than 5 people) startups will fail since they do not
_yet_ have a problem with Slack, and anything above, companies get
increasingly desperate, however, the tool space rapidly diminishes as
companies grow.

— This sort of non-real-time communication requires a lot of trust in other
people in your company, in that they will see and eventually respond. In real-
time, you can know if somebody hasn't responded in a few minutes. Your delay
risk from a single question moves from a few minutes to a few hours, to a day,
or larger if your team is distributed across the planet. It requires a certain
type of team with this kind of trust to make it work. It's a cultural issue as
much as a tools issue, and a good designer not only builds the tools to make
things work, but also builds them in a way that they _shape the team culture_
so that the tool can work. In our specific case, our main goal is to make your
team a more trusting, more efficient one, not just to make you focus by
reducing notifications spam.

— Derrick is a bit of a known person, with a podcast and all, and I think in
this case it worked against him somewhat. He mentions receiving interest from
his fans, this (fans of your personality) is an audience that converts
especially poorly.

— Slack is a complex tool serving a variety of needs, so it is very hard to
replace it without being Slack - and if you try that, you'll end up with just
an inferior copy. However, what one can do is to handle a subset of tasks it
does better than it. However, even this will take multiple years for a team
that has no runway problems because of the expectation of polish mentioned
above.

— "Everyone is lying", as a designer, I do take a bit of an issue with that:
it's not that everyone is lying, but that everyone has different incentives.
And when you're a known person, those incentives align with keeping you happy,
so that you'd become their acquaintance for potential use in the future. This
is not conscious, this is just human nature. This happens even when you are
just a nice person that they don't know. Empathy from your users is a powerful
thing. It is also your enemy.

They are not lying to you. They want you to be happy. I won't blame users for
that. It is your (our / mine / other designers') job to counteract that.

I have a lot more, but I'll leave it here since this is already too long
because I think about these all day every day. If you think this is
interesting, though, happy to chat. (Email in my profile.) We're launching
pilots in a few weeks. The core idea, I like to say, is that Slack is a
_marketer_ ’s idea of what a good comms tool should be, while Aether Pro is an
_engineer_ ’s.

------
ErikAugust
The buyers of a Slack for an enterprise organization wouldn't be developers
doing "Deep Work". The buyers would be executives and managers, ie: the people
pushing the content that causes the annoying notifications, anyway.

~~~
apl002
I am a product manager and basically live in slack. My job is basically to
communicate all day. On the flipside I've spent the last couple years learning
to code in my free time and I can't imagine being interrupted by slack while
im in a groove. It's def made me better about waiting to talk to my devs in
our daily meetings despite being right next to them

~~~
staunch
Paul Graham's essay "Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule" should be required
for anyone working with developers.

[http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html)

~~~
lifekaizen
Thanks for recommending that, well written and gives clarity to something that
can be a source of misunderstanding and friction.

------
m0zg
IMO there's a ton of untapped potential in good old email still, with chat
being last resort when realtime response is really necessary. There were a few
startups years ago that tried to tackle some of the warts of email UX (e.g.
Xobni) but nothing came of it it looks like.

Slack is cancer. I'm working with a client right now that uses Slack, and I
bill every single minute I have to spend on Slack, so I know exactly how much
time is wasted there. It's an open invitation to just shoot wind all day never
accomplishing anything, which is, unsurprisingly, how people use it, mostly.
Especially people who get paid a fixed salary.

------
pier25
Great read.

The thing is Slack wouldn't be as successful as it is without some merits. I
think understanding why it is so successful could be a very interesting
exercise for anyone wanting to get into that market.

We actually have the opposite problem where I work. We have Slack and only a
handful of people out of 50 use it regularly, all of which are remote devs
such as myself. The only communication that works is face to face meetings or
casual corridor conversations, so remote people are basically excluded from
everything that happens. Email is generally useless too. Writing skills are
not abundant here, when the emails do get answered.

------
z3t4
The problem is that a product like Slack does not wear down, you do not have
to replace it every second year, so there's no good opportunity for a
competitor to sell a replacement product. It either have to be an order of
magnitude better, or you have to sell it as an alternative, not a replacement,
to customers that not already have their needs fulfilled. So when people
search for a team chat product, first you need to make sure people know that
your product is an option, but not only that you need a very good explanation
of why they should pick your product and not the most popular one.

------
tardo99
I'm not sure I understand the business model Derrick was pursuing, but the
objective seems very interesting. Maybe instead of shutting it down he should
consider pivoting Level to a FOSS approach modeled on something like lichess.
Maybe a set of early adopter companies would be interested in joining in to
help build and support the product. There would obviously be less or maybe no
immediate financial incentive in it for him, but he would be continuing with a
very constructive aim. In my experience, that kind of involvement in a growing
project usually pays dividends, one way or another.

~~~
ronpeled
I agree. It seems like he pulled the plug a bit early but honestly he would
know better than all of us if it makes sense or not. Perhaps he have found a
better project to sink his teeth into...

------
catchmeifyoucan
It's good to see that the author had early feedback and performed interviews.
However, looking at an early post at the interview methodology, it seemed like
there was the lack of validation around the product. The author successfully
validated the problem, but not necessarily what he wants to build. A good read
is the "Customer Driven Playbook" \- which details a hypothesis driven model
in product development to get more measurable outcomes. I think he should keep
at it - but set more specific outcomes and look at smaller sets of things to
improve within the larger space.

------
brokenkebab
I dislike immediacy of chats, so one may imagine I'm the perfect match for the
product. But no, for people like me, I think, email works just fine. Level.app
webpage says about its alleged superiority above Slack which looks a lot like
returning back to good old email traditions (inbox, which you can check when
you like, no presence status etc.) Fine, but... er, I already have it, as well
as a variety of trusted tools, and everything based on the open protocols. So
maybe the guy was solving the wrong problem all the time.

------
tomcam
Powerfully familiar. I have learned similar lessons. In my mind “The Mom Test”
is the most important business book for high-tech entrepreneurs, and I wish it
existed a few years before it was released.

~~~
robfitz
Hah, me too, but couldn't write it till I had taken my knocks first ;)

------
some1else
> An engineer at Stripe told me about their careful balance of email, forums,
> and Slack. They recognize that Slack is not suitable for meaningful
> conversations, so they automatically delete chat messages older than a few
> weeks to discourage relying on it for long-term archival. In retrospectives,
> team members often reflect on whether they chose the right medium (email,
> chat, or forum) for various conversations.

This is bad news for Slack's freemium economics. I'm going to recommend we
don't upgrade with this in mind.

~~~
zild3d
if slack becomes your hub and you start adding in integrations the app limit
(10) can hit you pretty quickly as well

------
madebysquares
I've never heard of this product before, but it definitely does sound
interesting. I know exactly how hard it is to get a small / medium sized
company to switch to a new product, its definitely not easy.

That aside, I wish Slack was more customizable (or open to allowing some
customization) that would enable it to function more like what Derrick was
trying to accomplish with Level. That would be the best of both worlds.

------
fuddle
Why is there no screenshots of the level app on the homepage or Github page? A
picture of the app would help me decide whether I want to use it.

~~~
sbr464
I was curious also, but found some in the docs.

------
GordonS
This was a really interesting read - it's so difficult to walk away from
something you've put heart and soul into for so long.

This also sounded familiar:

"The gist is that it’s tough to get unbiased feedback during customer
validation. I already knew this to be correct, but I underestimated to the
degree to which everyone lies"

Has anyone found effective strategies for getting honest customer feedback?

------
theyinwhy
I walked away from a product I spent 10 years building. My advice: don't look
back. It's easier and more profitable this way.

------
soneca
As a listener of the Art of Product podcast I am a little sad with this
announcement. But rationally I don't think I should be. The founder was very
aware and honest about the challenges of his product; and this decision, at
this time, seems very mature and right.

Good luck on your next endeavor, which, I guess, will be a developers'tool :)

------
chambo622
Great read, and also a strong bull case for Slack no matter how unbearable it
gets at any significantly large organization.

------
carlsborg
Very hard to do front end build out and UI tweaks and backend and product
planning and customer development as a one man shop. Consider finding a
motivated offshore dev to hand over the non-core bits and pieces - the net
time it frees up can be dramatic, speaking from experience.

------
yashap
Great article. Thought the author sounded really bright, practical, mature,
customer focused and motivated, did a lot right. Seems like someone I’d love
to found a company with. But the simple truth is startups are hard, most of
them fail even if you get a tonne of things right.

------
Aeolun
I’m a bit sad. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to make my company
switch to something like this, but if I were ever in the position to make that
choice myself?...

The problem is the decision makers don’t mind being interrupted all the time.

------
andybak
So. Will you open source the code?

~~~
robamaton
[https://github.com/levelhq/level](https://github.com/levelhq/level)

~~~
aliswe
No screenshots as far as I can tell?

------
pathartl
I've never been more annoyed by a basic website. Center your content!

~~~
quaffapint
It's one of those subjective things with design and why we have so many
cars/etc to choose from. To each his/her own. I personally like the design.

~~~
pier25
It's not subjective.

We usually sit right at the center of our main monitor for a reason. Reading
that website on a large 32'' monitor is annoying.

~~~
JabavuAdams
> It's not subjective.

Oh, please. You may have some rationale that makes a certain kind of sense,
but clearly a lot of others don't care, or value other things. So ...
subjective.

------
jcoffland
A year is pretty short.

------
edisonjoao
this is the toughest thing ever

------
BentFranklin
Too dark; didn't read.

------
dana321
You only spent a year building something, thats nothing.

I've spent years building products, the first year is alpha at best.

~~~
coldtea
Depends on the products, some can be final polished version 1.0s in a year or
less.

------
nategri
Is "a year" supposed to add a lot of impact here?? I frequently spend multiple
years on more dubious endeavors, and have zero regrets about it. That's life.

Edit: Okay this came out pretty harshly, but what I am poorly trying to
express is that most people spend more time on worse things, so "a year"
doesn't parse as the intended intensifier for me.

~~~
coltonv
There's no need to be so judgemental of a well written article describing
someone else's experience, even if it isn't as grand and wonderful as yours.

~~~
aliswe
Thatcs actually supposed to be read as encouraging, as he said the guy did
something better than him and in a shorter time. And thus he should feel less
remorse than he does, which he doesn't. If that makes sense...

