

These engineers quit their jobs to start LeChat - Qwl
http://www.hunterwalk.com/2013/03/these-engineers-quit-their-jobs-to.html

======
avree
There's a lot of good discussion here:
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5202381>

(original LeChat announcement)

I'm pleased to see that Qwl has a different stance on XMPP than the 'lechat'
user posted in the thread.

------
karterk
The actual app itself looks pretty neat. However, I see their pricing and it's
"$1 per user per month". If anyone from LeChat is reading this - you should
charge more. Although it appears like having a lower price is a
differentiator, in reality it will hurt you.

~~~
lechat
Could you please elaborate on this?

~~~
proexploit
You're not going to make enough money.

~~~
rekoros
We ran some numbers and as long we run our own boxes (and buy our own RAM),
our margins look pretty good.

But we'll see, obviously. We don't have enough data to dispute your prediction
at the moment :-)

~~~
JEVLON
You may want to research how perceived value can be derived from price.
However, your current price may be right for other reasons.

------
richardkmichael
I agree to date chat hasn't been done well enough: cross platform, fast
effective UI. Looks like LeChat is making inroads, and I think the focus on
search is a very good idea.

How are you planning to monetize everything that everyone says? (I presume
you're planning to do this, since you have all the data.)

If I quit LeChat, what happens to what I've said? Do I get a copy? Can I
remove it from histories?

~~~
Qwl
When people have great search at their disposal they actually start relying on
chat to keep their important assets. This enables nice dynamics--the more
history they have over time, the more valuable it gets.

If you quit LeChat, or at any other point in time, you can download full
history in plain text and in JSON format, which retains important metadata.

~~~
richardkmichael
You have an opportunity to do interesting experiments with your pricing model.

~~~
rekoros
We're not planning on selling ads based on the contents of your conversations,
if that's what you mean (or the direction).

------
znq
What's the differentiator to HipChat? <https://www.hipchat.com/compare>

~~~
rekoros
_Much_ better search

The ability to view multiple conversations at the same time

Better support for pasting and copying code

Hopefully much better reliability (we use Erlang and do proper OTP release
upgrades)

We're pretty fanatical about fixing bugs.

------
jfim
I was pleasantly surprised to see that LeChat's logo is a cat, even though it
looks a little bit funny.

I am curious, are you planning to add integration with external protocols,
such as XMPP or IRC? It doesn't seem to be mentioned anywhere on the FAQ page.

~~~
Qwl
Our immediate plan is to provide great native apps for mobile and desktop that
will use our proprietary protocol. We like to think of LeChat as "Dropbox of
chats", you never leave your conversation as you move between desktop, web and
mobile devices. Gateways for XMPP and IRC are further down our list and are
more on API/integrations side.

~~~
jfim
Interesting, I can see how that would be useful, although some of that is
already working using XMPP (Google Talk, really).

Is there a way to be notified when you have XMPP integration? Most of our dev
tools integrate with it[1][2] and having some of those notifications(build
failure, issue fixed) stream into a common area would be very cool.

[1] <http://www.jetbrains.com/youtrack/whatsnew/> [2]
<http://blogs.jetbrains.com/teamcity/tag/jabber/>

Edit: wrt/ YouTrack, it doesn't support group chats yet(see
<http://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/JT-18866>).

~~~
Qwl
Sure, if you sign up we are sending announcements about new features.

Dev tools integration is our big focus. So far we have GitHub, BitBucket,
CloudForge and Airbrake plus raw HTTP and direct email address for each chat
room. One of our customers created a Ruby Gem [1].

[1] <http://rubygems.org/gems/lechat-rb>

------
ximeng
What does "We perform continuous encrypted offsite backups for customer data."
mean?

~~~
Qwl
We perform backups of chat history, accounts and any other customer data,
encrypt them and upload to multiple locations outside of our data center.

~~~
samstave
Under what circumstances are you going to decrypt those and hand them over to
federal officers/LEO that ask for them?

~~~
Qwl
When we get subpoenaed by the court.

------
Helianthus
Is this anything other than LeChat's advertisement for angel investors?

I'm with the folks in avree's linked discussion. IRC already does this for a
dollar less per month.

~~~
Qwl
I guess similar argument can go for GitHub/BitBucket versus internal Git
server, yet GitHub and BitBucket are very popular for private repositories.

~~~
Helianthus
Uh. I don't see the relation. You can run your own IRC server.

~~~
rekoros
Hi, I'm the other LeChat founder. The issues with running an IRC server:

1\. you still have to run it somewhere

2\. you have to support it

3\. there's no search (grepping through logs is not search)

4\. you have to use screen/tmux to not miss anything

5\. your CFO will probably never use it

I think there definitely is a need in a chat tool that is "easy" to use.
Having said this, I think IRC is invaluable, just in a different context.

