
Billionaire Brothers Want to Build a Cheaper Rival to Slack - doener
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-30/billionaire-turakhias-fund-own-startup-to-build-rival-to-slack
======
shubhamjain
The cost of Slack becomes significant only if you see it as "OMG! We're are
spending $3000 / month on it". But, if you're already paying hundreds of
thousands of dollars in payroll, why would you mind paying a few
dollars/employee on a software that enables better collaboration. I have often
seen management balking at spending on software and hardware in favor of a
near-free and cheaper alternative. The end-result is 10X productivity loss but
good luck convincing them to spend more.

On an additional note, how is this company so good at PR? Many companies are
working on alternatives to popular applications but I find no reason for them
to be covered in Bloomberg with such an exaggerated headline; as if they're
revolutionizing the communication industry.

~~~
kobeya
Does slack really enable good collaboration? It seems to destroy productivity
in every environment I've ever been in. It is the workplace equivalent of
Facebook shitposting.

Also, IRC and XMPP servers are cheap.

~~~
Akujin
I'm using Slack every day in a major corporation of greater than 5000 users.
Slack enables communication and discovery within such a large organization.

Problem with your mac? Go to #osx-troubleshooting

Got an IT problem? Check out #IT

Want to discuss an architecture problem with dozens of the smartest people in
the entire company? Hop onto #architecture

Want to share the 5 extra pies of Pizza you had delivered for an undersized
audience? Go to #freefood and watch it disappear.

We also use bots to surface data into the chatroom automatically as we're
doing something collaborative. It's really quite useful when you setup the
correct rules.

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dvt
Discord is free. Gitter is free (for up to 25). HipChat is free. WhatsApp is
free. There are already plenty of _free_ (forget cheap) alternatives to Slack.

Nothing to see here. I mean, the thing reads like a sponsored piece anyway.

~~~
chrisbolt
Comparing Slack to WhatsApp or Discord seems disingenuous. For an employee,
that means adding every other user in your company. And what about
integrations? With slack it's easy to send messages to channels with an HTTP
request, which (for me) replaces email spam.

Also, Slack has a free plan, so Slack is free.

~~~
briandear
WhatsApp? What company in their right mind would use a Facebook service for
their proprietary communications? Have you read their terms and conditions?

Facebook already collects device-level usage information through their
Facebook app in order to keep track of emerging competitors.. what’s to
prevent them from using WhatsApp to further enhance their competitive
intelligence?

~~~
what_ever
Uhhh -
[https://www.facebook.com/workplace/stories](https://www.facebook.com/workplace/stories)

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rcarmo
When I read "cheaper", I immediately started thinking about power consumption.
Slack is easily the most resource-guzzling app I've run, and lowering its
resource requirements by 20% would probably save enough on electricity bills
to run a small country.

~~~
Johnny555
I haven't found that to be the case -- my Slack app (which I use frequently)
has been running for about 30 hours and has accumulated 30 minutes of CPU
time, or using around 1.6% of my CPU and is using around 450MB of memory.
Chrome has used about 5 hours of CPU time in that same 30 hours and is
consuming around 3GB of memory.

~~~
saagarjha
Which is why Chrome’s memory usage isn’t used as a goal or target…

~~~
Johnny555
Regardless, Slack uses .4% of my machine's CPU (forgot to take the quad CPU
into account earlier) and less than 3% of my RAM. Not bad for something I use
as often as Slack.

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nasir
The article sounds like the billionaire brothers are taking on SpaceX rather
than Slack. There are tons of other Slack alternatives.

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mdekkers
_Entrepreneur has 140 pairs of sweatpants and T-shirts_

This is listed right under the headline - is this really a key takeaway for
the article??

~~~
tomhallett
Yes, haha. For a story like this to be relevant to the general public, it
needs unique elements and not just "startup launches slack competitor".

This one is "this guy is the new whiz kid. Watch out for him.". He channels
Steve jobs individuality by always wearing the same clothes but has external
validation with media.net.

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mankash666
If the only real differentiator is cost, I don't believe this to be scalable.
Take, for instance, the fact that Microsoft, Facebook, Google .... own
optimized cloud stacks (hardware, firmware, software, etc.). One can never
match their cost of ownership and operation. So a battle relying on cost is
not one flock can win, in my opinion

~~~
ktamiola
Excellent point!

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iamleppert
All that money and the best thing he can think to do with his life and fortune
is to....recreate Slack?

It makes me sad.

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openmosix
Their logo [1] is pretty much a copy + 45 degree rotation of Feedly's logo [2]

[1] [https://www.appsunveiled.com/wp-
content/uploads/2015/04/Floc...](https://www.appsunveiled.com/wp-
content/uploads/2015/04/Flock-Logo.png)

[2] [https://s3.feedly.com/img/partnerapp-description-
feedly.png](https://s3.feedly.com/img/partnerapp-description-feedly.png)

~~~
calvinbhai
Similar yes, but I really liked the way the logo embodies everything the
company is about. F for flock. The different sized lines look like message
bubbles. All enclosed in a bigger message bubble.

Probably this logo is more appropriate for Flock than Feedly :)

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calvinbhai
After the Theranos debacle, when I see "x pairs of same clothes to save time
and money" as a red flag for upcoming unicorn wannabepreneurs.

This piece of PR may have been more believable if they had skipped mentioning
how Mark Zuckerbergesque or Steve Jobsesque these founders are.

In either case, good luck to this startup. If they can come up with native
apps for their chat platform and thrive as a company without needing to resort
to gimmicky PRs, it's still going to be a win.

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soreq
[https://about.mattermost.com/slack-vs-
mattermost/](https://about.mattermost.com/slack-vs-mattermost/)

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ap46
I puked at the countless clothing references. Just another paid for article
which didn't even showcase the tiniest detail of Flock or whatever the hell it
is.

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kawsper
Just buy Flowdock and market it better, they are already having a better
client with proper, working "multiple thread in the same room"-support.

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adeptima
[https://github.com/mattermost/platform](https://github.com/mattermost/platform)

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madshiva
I don't see any advantage on chat, who is using this in a company? it's not
serious people don't know how to use it and they don't focus on work but
chatting instead. Lost of time, lost of productivity. Don't want do a service
request? yeah write me an Skype message instead... it will increase my work
rate and put value in the business.

~~~
thriftwy
Chat allows to broadcast questions which is invaluable in information economy.

And just, you know, talk to coworkers.

~~~
madshiva
The system need to be easy and people that have question can search Inside the
FAQ. Why asking when you can search for that damn process, guideline. I check
slak and the first that I see is a personn asking if he can bring the dog or
cat at work. Who is stupid enough to ask these question and ask for something
that he should know where it is. But no ask people for that they give
shortcut, link. So much value added!

It's almost the same with email, people have never been trained and still send
file over and over, don't communicate with the whole team, you need to push
and ask the information because it's a nice tool but not correctly used.

~~~
thriftwy
I don't know, maybe the job you do is so trivial that you can put every
question ever into a medium-side FAQ with added benefit of being able to
employ dullards.

It's not like that at most Software Engineering places and knowedge
transmission via common chat is invaluable.

~~~
madshiva
I don't say chat is not valuable. This can help is a quick / fast organization
very small compagny but the way the product is show in a big organization all
the documentation, procedure etc is a critical key for that employee can work
in a good manner. If the information is not well organize it's a mess, people
complain, people loss all the day to find a small answer. Yes, they can chat
and ask the question but I don't see value for answering question.

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ap46
GTFO out of HN you paid scums.

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Ultimatt
IRC is free and what Slack is based on. There are plenty of nice clients, and
it's easy to write "plugins" you just write for the protocol like a webapp.

~~~
lokedhs
We also used to use IRC, but then after realising that we wanted some of the
features of Slack (a persistent, searchable log of messages for example), so
we went and developed such an application that had all the features we needed.
It even has some features that Slack still don't have, even though they have
hundreds of developers and we were two guys working on the evenings.

We also released it fully open source.

[https://github.com/cicakhq/potato](https://github.com/cicakhq/potato)

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BerislavLopac
HipChat is a much better and cheaper alternative to Slack.

~~~
briandear
Does it support inline code formatting yet? It has only been years since that
feature has been requested. Have they fixed the performance problems? How
about notifications across devices?

Obviously “better” is subjective, but other than HipChat being installable in
premise, Slack wins in terms f features that actually work.

I know of a really large company not far from San Jose that uses HipChat for
the single reason that it’s on premise despite a number of teams that are
practically begging Slack to create an on premise version.

I don’t know a lot of people that actually want HipChat. It usually used
because it’s an afterthought add-on to all of the other Atlassian stuff.

------
briandear
Usually entrepreneurs enter a market because they find current solutions
deficient and they have a novel or exciting way to solve a problem.

Flock isn’t solving a problem. It’s just a me-too product — almost a copycat
built just to cash in. Utterly uninspiring. “But it’s better!” They will
exclaim. Perhaps. But if it is better, it is only marginally so. I can’t
imagine any 10x innovation they have developed. Slight business model tweaks
aren’t innovation. A super sales team isn’t an innovation. Nothing in the
article even suggests they have done anything special to differentiate their
product.

The the nonsense about the same clothes every day is just a Jobs and Zuck
affectation. It’s completely drole. Even if you did wear a daily uniform, it
isn’t worth mentioning in a Bloomberg piece. It’s like saying your office has
a Nepresso machine. Big deal. I wear the same clothes every day but I’m not
having my PR person mention it in interviews — it’s mundane. Nobody gives a
shit unless you are some uneducated villager than somehow things such habits
are relevant. It wad a bit interesting when Jobs did it in the late 1990s, but
even then, it was a personal thing and not something Apple PR wrote about.

The bit about identical offices down to the last detail; just nonsense, just
building an image of “quirky productivity monk” rather than “visionary tech
leader.” As far as the custom desk built into the car; not even the President
of the United States has that in his limos. If you are in the car long enough
to actually need a desk, that’s a bit absurd or your day is badly organized.
An actual desk? How about a fax machine too? They are “billionaires” — one
would think their commute wouldn’t be that significant.

I don’t know these brothers and I am sure they are perfectly nice and smart
people, but this emphasis on being hyper productive is just weird.

The photo with the founder in the back of what appears to be a Bentley just
reeks of Rich Kids of Instagram but targeted to common people in order to
protect an air of respectability and credibility. But to me it seems like the
entrepreneurial equivalent of a photo of a solid gold toilet.

