Hacker News Reader

Comment by Abishek_Muthian | Hacker News Reader

Congratulations on the launch, Papercups.

I want to pick your minds on a tangential need gap - 'Customer Messaging on a website without website owner's action'[1] i.e. Enabling anyone to chat with other visitors of any website, unlike customer messaging this will be consumer focussed and there seems to be some products addressing it but naturally affected by Chicken and Egg problem.

What's your take on that need gap?

[1]https://needgap.com/problems/141-youtube-like-public-chat-fo... (Disclaimer: This need gap was posted on my problem validation platform).

View on HN

Maybe there is a way to utilize the website owner to bootstrap the chicken and egg problem.

So i'm assuming 'Customer Messaging on a website without website owner's action' would be a browser extension? If so, what if you made the pitch to website owners that if they signup and just embed your chat on their site, then they are allowed to moderate the content. Otherwise, users that have the extension will be able to just chat about the website owners products without moderation.

Once you get embedded on a bunch of websites, then you can offer an upgrade path for those users to get the extension and chat on any website.

Just an idea!

OP of that need gap explicitly cited Amazon, chatting with amazon customers when buying a product instead of relying upon reviews which are often fake.

Sites like Amazon wouldn't bother to enable such provision and hence the need for 'without owner's action'.

Right, but imagine the product would work on any website and you got a bunch of users (by bootstrapping with those website owners). Now those users can visit amazon and chat with each other because they have the extension installed.

Basically, imagine if Honey added realtime chat between users who were on the same website. That would solve OP's need. Question becomes how do you get the install base of Honey? If I had to do it, I'd try to get website owners to embed my chat and have the embed promo users to download the extension.

This is a really interesting idea! Never thought of doing something like that, but if enough people want it, we'd probably be happy to build it :P

You're welcome to join the discussion at needgap to follow what's happening with this problem. I feel, you have the necessary tech already, just need to figure out how to crack the Chicken and Egg.

Sounds a lot like Dissenter https://dissenter.com/

Thanks for sharing it, it does seem to have that feature built-in the browser instead of an extension. Now the Chicken and Egg problem is shifted to browser adoption instead of extension!

You can post it in the thread if you would like to or I can do it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com