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Comment by centizen | Hacker News Reader

I do not use Slack, Ryver or any other similar product, so I think I can safely say I don't fall in to the "slack fanboy" demographic that this article claims are upset by their ads.

That said, I think that running negative ads about your competition only shows weakness in a company. Don't use your marketing to tell me negative things about your competition, use it to tell me positive things about you. If you can't do that, then the problem isn't that Slack is bad, it's that Ryver is not strong enough to stand on it's own.

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Negative ads can make sense if you're going up against one or two entrenched competitors that own most of the market share.

That being said, the example ad shown in the article ("Slack is so last year. Now it's Ryver") just made me angry. Anyone who has been in tech a while has experienced this neurotic, senseless need to switch tooling every year because some middle manager decided to.

As you say, it hits a nerve... But what's there to be angry about, when that happens anyway?

I suspect that said "neurotic, senseless need" to keep up with the corporate Joneses is what drove many organizations to adopt Slack in the first place. That leaves them feeling vulnerable about the next thing that might be coming up, which they don't want to miss out on. IMO Ryver is being rather clever by playing on that insecurity so openly.

> Negative ads can make sense if you're going up against one or two entrenched competitors that own most of the market share.

Like what Gett is doing: "We pay more than Uber!"

"We pay more than Uber" isn't really, or at least not purely, a negative ad. It's making a comparison, one that Gett comes away looking good in; and it's really pointing out something that Gett does better than Uber, not just something that Uber does poorly.

I think that's a pretty strong approach.

I am now required to use Slack for communication at work. It replaces the previous chat tool I was required to use to communicate at work and is, in fact, the fourth communication tool that I have been required to use for work in the past 12 months. Needless to say, I can't communicate with anybody.

The only killer feature I would have any interest in would be syndication across various communication tools.

Our Ads saying positive things about Ryver are ignored. Why spend money on those?

And if the product sucked no one would use it which would be the ultimate slam against Ryver. But the opposite is true. Some Slack teams are converting and most because they like it better not just because it is free.

Then why didn't you just say that? You wrote a whole article defending your negative campaign when in reality you are doing it because it is the only campaign that works for you.

This is a smoking gun for in that you are only justifying your actions.

I explicitly state that in the article.

"Why do we keep running that ad, despite the occasional social media potshots ranging from snarky platitudes to frothing fanboy rage? It’s simple: That ad outperforms every other ad we have tested 5 to 1. "

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