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Comment by elevaet | Hacker News Reader

As a counterexample, Slack started as in internal tool (from what I've heard), and turned out to be a very successful startup. And it wasn't the kind of thing engineers don't want to build, nor an integration of a legacy system.

Maybe all of the low hanging startup fruit of that variety has been plucked.

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> Maybe all of the low hanging startup fruit of that variety has been plucked.

I felt that I agreed, but then I would have equally agreed right before Slack got so popular, so ... maybe not? We often don't see the long hanging fruit until it gets plucked.

Or rather, it's not as low hanging - just that the difficulty is not technical, it's that building something nice that works well together is just not easy, regardless of the vertical.

I'm of the opinion that engineers just don't understand how much ease of use is worth. The infamous Dropbox comment for example. Countless number of successful companies make tools that are not technically amazing but they just work and are designed well.

yet here we are in 2024 emailing ourselves files

iirc, dropbox was actually very technically challenging, which is why they tested the idea with a mock landing page first before building it (source: Lean Startup) and steve jobs famously spoke with drew about what he'd built early on

Not quite. Slack's roots are in a video game called Glitch. The game never made it out of the gate, but its messaging system found new life as Slack. Fun fact - this was Stewart Butterfield's second attempt at making a game. The first one ended up pivoting to Flickr.

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