

Dispatch launches a discussion layer for Dropbox and Google Docs - redheadjessica
http://dispatch.io

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joewee
Watched the presentation live at techcrunch. I like the idea and the
enthusiasm of the team but I wonder how compelling a layer on top of these
services really is?

Are small startups the target user? I own a small business that uses all of
these services. But in the case of dropbox, team members see when files
change. Google docs is google docs and file changes are pretty clear. We use
lighthouse house for task management and are in constant communication on
google talk but we are less than 10 employees.

Does this make more sense for the 30 person company? But at that level I would
assume we are investing in a more centralized project and content management
platform, box.net?

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nickstamas
Hi, I'm Nick, one of the founders. I really appreciate the thoughts on our
product. We're focused on smaller teams for now, because we are a small team
and are building Dispatch to be the tool we wanted to use. It's not just about
being notified when something changes, (which Growl is great for), it's being
able to have a discussion with the full context of whatever you're working on.
We find that having a central place to facilitate this discussion is really
valuable.

We also believe that the integration model, versus wholesale adoption of an
entire platform, is what we prefer for our team. We love the products we
integrate with for what they do, but we wanted something better than email to
keep things organized and focused.

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joewee
Nick thanks for the response. I think you guys are really sharp. Why not just
add a way to migrate organizations off the disparate platforms into your
single solution? Perhaps that's the transition into paid?

Wholesale adoption becomes important as a company gets bigger for a lot of
reasons, security, centralized accounts, centralized billing.

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nickstamas
Thanks :). That's an interesting thought, but right now we're focused on the
value we can to these existing services. We have intentionally launched with a
core set of features that we believe is the foundation for other things that
become useful in this context, like search across integrations and versioning.

I totally agree that the game changes when you're trying to sell large
enterprises on adopting something company-wide, but there is a precedent in
products like Yammer that start by gaining adoption with small teams and
organically grow out. That's the type of model we're interested in exploring.

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captn3m0
Add one thing: RSS Support. That is, allow an RSS feed to be used as a source
layer. This would help people easily hookup things like Redmine, Github
notifications and what not.

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nickstamas
That would be cool. Since most services actually expose an API, there are many
interesting ideas to explore around the idea of being able to post all
different kinds of things to a dispatch, including GH issues or tickets in
other issue tracking systems.

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mbesto
So, Box.com?

