

Ask HN: What can we do with our messaging platform startup? - ex3ndr

Small background: We are the team that founded by ex-Telegram developer and we try to create something like &quot;Slack&quot;. When we started, Slack wasn&#x27;t so cool and only last 2-3 months people started to ask us &quot;how you differ from Slack?&quot;.<p>We created the high-performance platform that could deliver messages at worst networks fast. We can handle the good amount of simultaneous connections at once (sorry no numbers) and deliver messages at very high rate. We don&#x27;t solve any specific problem; this is just good messaging platform that works on Android, iOS, and Web. Platform means that we can easily integrate, customize systems.<p>For now we burn all our money (~100k$), and we are even not started to sell something. We are tech guys, and we can&#x27;t do sales for now and we don&#x27;t have money for this. This strategy is my (as CEO) huge mistake, of course.<p>We think that we can:
1) Raise more money. But without any traction? We have just good dev team in Russia (and we want to leave this country).
2) Fire all team and start selling by founders and make some basic traction.
3) Wait for luck.<p>All this cases seems to be unreal; no one gives us money for now, and I can&#x27;t give something to investors. It is hard to sale in our domestic market because of business culture and current economic situation (during winter we lose 50% of our money just because of currency exchange rate changing).<p>What can we do in this situation?<p>P.S.: Right now we are preparing our sources to release, and they will be available in a week or two.<p>P.S.S.: Anyone can join experimental chat by opening URL: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;quit.email&#x2F;join&#x2F;a8086c23dbaf9f0f7c5003844774e61dfef6d571dd37baa0c28d48fe5012171a
======
blakewatters
Hey guys, head of engineering at Layer here. If you actually try to go down
the road of building a platform for other developers then you are very quickly
going to discover that you need to build a bunch of other stuff totally
separate from the core messaging service. You are going to need solutions for
getting data in/out, dashboards, billing systems, sample code -- on and on.
Plus you have to provide an SLA to close any meaningful business. And you'll
need a pro sales team to get those opportunities interested and through the
funnel. We are 35 people and I could easily keep another 5 engineers fully
loaded to attack the roadmap as aggressively as we'd like. And we've been at
this for 2 years. There's a lot of surface area and you need to be very good
on both technical and sales dimensions to make a platform play work.

My best advice for you is to either find a unique value prop in the consumer
space where you can perhaps gain a foothold and access virality or focus on
finding a nice home for your engineering team and technology. I've seen a lot
of advice here about how you should start consulting to create runway. This is
terrible advice and you should face reality. Nobody is going to build an app
and a business on top of a messaging platform that is a part time project of a
handful of developers without any runway. It's just not a rational business
decision and nobody who is capable of paying you real money would make that
call. You are in a market with existing well funded players that are rapidly
evolving their product and addressing that market through sales and marketing.
You either have to build something that you can give away for free and
generate traction that you can raise money against or you need to focus on
selling the core assets that you do have: the people and the tech. You may
want to reconsider releasing that code if you want a shot at an aquihire
outcome. Best of luck.

~~~
dosh
agree with blake here. we're also working on a similar product, but we had
customer base from the start with actual use cases, which lead to
bookings/revenue early on. you have to look at from the customers' perspective
to see which problem you are actually solving and how you are creating
value/saving cost for their business.

in the age of over-supply, it's definitely never enough to just create
technology and expect it to sell automagically. go talk to your
existing/potential customers and get their feedback. start with a local
optimum product catered to their needs, and generalize towards global optimum
from there. even Einstein started with a special relativity and not general
relativity. ;)

to offer a realistic advice, unless you have a customer-development cycle in
place with a target customer base (who has at least signed a MOU/LOI/Purchase
Agreement/etc.), I'd stay frugal until you have something like this, then
raise money. and yes, I'd definitely stay away from consulting kind of work if
you are serious about your business/product. this is a short-term way of
staying afloat, but once you build your company's cycle/rhythm/culture around
b2b human-labor business, it's hard to turn that around towards a product-
driven business.

------
empressplay
Slack is extremely expensive for large "community" chat rooms. If you could
handle a several-thousand user room and offer full functionality for a
fraction of Slack's price you might have something that could get some
traction.

~~~
amelius
Could you describe a usecase for that?

~~~
danielrmay
Let's see:

\- Large open source projects

\- MOOCs with many students

(Taken from discussion of this post from yesterday):

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9754626](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9754626)

~~~
ex3ndr
Yeah! I saw this post today and we thinking about building something for
communities.

May be some app for easy find right group chat (Android global group, hacker
news group, SF Local Tech group, etc...). May be someone know such apps? I try
to find it, but no one tries to implement this.

~~~
rorykoehler
I was going to suggest contacting freecodecamp.com and seeing if they would
like to partner with you to develop a product that suits their use case.

------
devgutt
> Anyone can join experimental chat by opening URL

Why are you asking for my phone number just to try a demo? You are creating
unnecessary friction IMO.

~~~
billconan
yes, I wanted to try the service, but stopped when it asks for phone number.

------
andreasklinger
IMHO:

Short Term:

\- You need time => consult to get money => to get time

\- Be careful with this path => make sure it stays only short term

\- if possible consult in the same space of your product.(best case: your
clients pays your future platform development)

Mid Term:

\- You think like a developer atm - unless you plan to sell to developers this
wont solve your core problem (understanding the market)

\- tech can be completely useless with one usecase or extremely valuable with
another. Figure out who could be potential customers (it's product thinking
not dev thinking, best case: you learned this in your consulting period)

\- when you figured out who "could" be your customer make sure it's actually a
customer you can/want to deliver for. If you sell to enterprise it will be a
sales operation and you need to learn this.

In any case: Head up and be confident. Things are not as bad as they seem and
there will be a good end (maybe not directly afterwards but in the years to
come)

------
billyhoffman
> We don't solve any specific problem;

This is your major problem. You built technology without a specific business
case. Now you are trying to turn that into a business. This is a terrible
position to be in for 2 reasons: You will be trying to fit problems to match
your solution. Your solution doesn't have the nuance or context associated
with a specific problem, which is usually required to have a compelling
product.

Of the options you list, #3 is just silly. No one is coming to save you. #2 is
your best bet. Then again, I have no idea how you got $100K of funding for not
solving a problem, so maybe you can convince those suckers to re-up for #1
again.

Building technology is not the same thing as building a business. You guys
blew $100K on technology, and now have no money to make a business. And now
your are entertaining the idea of open sourcing the one resource you do have:
your technology.

Stop all this. It's tough, but fire everyone. You can't pay them and taking
more money with no idea how to get more is, at least in my opinion, unethical.
Go do consulting in spaces where this technology might be applicable.
Understand what problems they have and try your best not to assume your
messaging technology is the solution. If you are a lucky, you will find an
actual problem that you can repurpose some of this technology to solve. Then
and only then can you re-build this as a business.

------
jakozaur
Consider option: 4) Start doing consulting work. That way you can survive as a
team and gather resources for the next phase. Whatever it will be, productive
dev team is an asset and it can be worth something.

PM me if you are willing to explore that scenario and consider relocating to
Poland.

------
bhc3
I don't know this market well. But I can suggest three tests that you should
apply to any potential niche you're considering.

"Jobs-to-be-done" (JTBD) is useful analytical tool here. A "job" is a thing
that someone is trying to accomplish. Harvard's Theodore Levitt expressed it
well in this quote:

"People don't want to buy a 1/4 inch drill. They want a 1/4 inch hole."

It reframes the discussion away from features to customer objectives.

As you look at your platform, think about different market niches and the
things they're trying to get done. Here are three tests to apply as you
consider a given niche.

1\. Is it an actual JTBD for a large enough target niche?

This is the most basic test. Do people actually have the need that your
product/service addresses? Not only that, but can you characterize the the
number of potential customers with the JTBD?

2\. Does your product/service/idea meaningfully improve on the incumbent
solution(s)?

This is a tougher test. How does your idea outperform the current way
customers address the JTBD? You need to have a clear view on this. And the
improvement needs to be significant, not just a little. Customers will
overvalue their incumbent solution's benefits, and undervalue the new
product's benefits.

3\. Is the total incremental cost _to the customer_ of your idea less than the
total incremental value to the customer?

This test is the toughest. You need to consider monetary costs of course. But
there can be many other switching costs as well. Loss of existing data, new
time required to learn, new formats that have upstream and downstream impacts.

My take is that successful products can get to clear yes's on these three
tests. But it takes some work, experimenting and seeing where your idea falls
short if it's not getting yes's on the three tests.

------
vonklaus
I have very simple advice: Get people using your product and ask them what
they like/dislike about it. I wouldn't try and compete in the messaging space
as it is saturated. In enterprise there is Slack and Hipchat, and in the
consumer space there are so many I won't name them. You can stay in
communication, but change your product a bit:

> Provide simple encrypted messaging, like GPG but for people who have no
> desire to manage their own keys/ aren't tech savvy. This could work if you
> want to stay in enterprise.

> Target things regionally. Maybe you can provide a product that works better
> in Russia than Slack or use some advantage of knowledge of the culture to
> make a great product for a specific region.

You really need to be out talking to customers and potential customers. I
don't think making a simple messaging app will work in this market, you need
to find a competitive advantage. You only find this by knowing it already or
talking to customers.

edit: or you could pivot into customer support chat communication.

~~~
chetanahuja
_" I wouldn't try and compete in the messaging space as it is saturated"_

I don't think so. I think there's lots of room in enterprise chat space for
differentiated products... it's not just slack or hipchat. E.g., a on-premise
hosted chat with actual native clients for OSX, Windows, iOS, and Android
would find buyers. IRC has traditionally been the solution for this but IRC
doesn't have a uniform mobile client experience and the backend integrations
(notifications for github, gitlab, bug tracking systems etc. etc.) are not as
rich and diverse as slack/hipchat.

------
mkagenius
> during winter we lose 50% of our money

so, "winter is coming" might really be a thing there, huh!

> P.S.: Right now we are preparing our sources to release, and they will be
> available in a week or two.

Don't worry about anything for now. Just do that release, having those doubts
before a release is fatal. Just focus on the release for now. Things will be
different after the release.

~~~
ex3ndr
I can't believe in releases. Just release meant nothing usually, isn't it?

~~~
jorangreef
No, focus on getting the release out. Then focus on what comes after that.
Keep your head down for now.

~~~
andreasklinger
the problem is that developers tend to develop when things go south

but usually the "development part" wasnt the thing to worry about in first
place

(same with bizdev who go to networking events or arrange meetings, designers
who redo landing pages or ceo's who spend time chasing investors)

my thoughts a bit longer explained: [http://klinger.io/post/36585126176/the-
founders-lie-about-co...](http://klinger.io/post/36585126176/the-founders-lie-
about-comfort-zones)

------
yumraj
Have you looked at enterprises?

AFAIK Slack and Hipchat are cloud based, which is fine for some but not all
enterprises due to obvious security concerns, and if you can make self-
contained and easily deploy-able system that can integrate with enterprise IT
systems, particularly authentication, you may have an interesting use-case.

Healthcare is another big space, where there are several startups looking at
messaging where Slack etc. won't work due to HIPAA compliance and other
specific scenarios.

P.S. Didn't try your demo, since it wanted phone number, and sorry we don't
know each other well at this time to trust you with it. :)

------
adyus
Take a look at layer.com. Perhaps you could find something that sets you apart
(low latency and lots of connections, plus a good price for Android devs, for
example) and market to developers.

------
dragonbonheur
You have a platform, build an fun app that uses it. For example: ask
yourselves what twitter would be like if it allowed people to exchange markup
or bytecode that defines applets instead of 140 character texts? What is the
most application you can ship in 32 KB of data? Yes, Kilobytes.

Or just make a clone of this for mobile:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Palace_(computer_program)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Palace_\(computer_program\))

------
Firegarden
Publish your code on a github repository and become a platform as a service.
People need to adopt your platform as a foundation for anything. At the same
time offer messaging as a paid add on service with a revenue model tied
directly to use. Eg. * > 100,000 messages per month is 1.00 per month. Sell
your support and integration services.

------
hugothefrog
I'm keen to understand exactly what parts of a 'messaging stack' you guys have
built. Feel free to drop me an email (details in my profile).

------
jorangreef
Perhaps you could provide your messaging platform as infrastructure as a
service for startups?

~~~
prettynatty
Here comes another question: what's the difference with
[https://layer.com](https://layer.com)?

~~~
jorangreef
If the technology is 10x better, there doesn't need to be much difference.
There's room for more than one provider.

------
amelius
Offer reliable voice/video conferencing supported on all platforms.

~~~
ex3ndr
We can provide voice/video with 3rd party services and it works good on stable
networks, but does it add enough value or we need to spend half-year on
optimizing webrtc?

~~~
amelius
The keyword is "reliable". Solve this problem and you have a product.

Perhaps you need to think bigger than your own project, but develop something
that others can incorporate into their product. Designing a basic chat service
is relatively easy and will become even easier in the future with programming
languages like Erlang/Scala becoming more popular and widespread. (Chat
programs are often the "hello world" programs of these languages in
tutorials). But designing a robust video-chat service is something that not
many companies can pull off.

~~~
ex3ndr
Good chat application is not like hello world app. You can build something
like chat, but it doesn't have most required features and performance.

