Ask HN: What's holding your startup back from using Discord instead of Slack? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What's holding your startup back from using Discord instead of Slack?

2 pointsrd4 comments

Curious to hear from founders of say, sub-100 employee count companies what concretely Discord is missing that makes you use Slack instead? I'm more curious about the things beyond the very obvious (no SSO, lack of enterprise plan, the gaming focus).

I'd love to hear about things like unintuitive UI, the way notifications work, Slack channel integrations required from 3rd party vendors, Slack bots, permissioning, etc. - the actual business logic that's holding you back I suppose.

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1. Slack has network effects: we connect with customers on Slack (or M$ Teams for enterprise…)

2. I don’t want to innovate on “back office”. Slack works, is sufficiently affordable, and costs no social credit with employees.

3. I know I won’t run into problems in the future. This kinda ties into (2), I don’t want to innovate on back office, but to make it concrete: Deel, Rippling and the other M$ AD clones all integrate with Slack to set up permissions and SSO with zero effort.

4. Slack has lots of sensitive info about us and pur customers, which makes it SOC-2 relevant. I want to use “industry standard” tech for anything compliance related. Though I don’t recall that this would have ever been a problem on security questionnaires, and not many years ago Slack was the “young kid on the block” themselves & managed, so idk if this is actually a valid point.

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If you give me a feature parity clone of slack for half the price, I’d certainly switch, but anything less than feature parity and I probably wouldn’t. I don’t need to or want to take risks on internal tooling.

I don’t need to or want to take risks on internal tooling.

That's an interesting take. I'd argue that there's nothing more important to innovate on. The reason? Because I believe that "the ability to learn faster than your competitors is the only true source of sustainable competitive advantage" and, concordantly, that your internal tooling and processes are crucial embodiments of your organizational learning.

Of course that learning and improvement on "back office" has to be in service of delivering better products, or reducing expenses, or better understanding your customers or something in order for the payoff to manifest.

the actual business logic that's holding you back

If the reasons for choosing Slack instead of Discord are business reasons, the choice is not holding a business back. If a choice is not holding a business back, then that's the very obvious reason.

We’re implementing Discord for our community actually.

Right now Instagram is our Bread and butter for communicating with the community but there are limits.

Truthfully, I want to migrate more Folks to Fediverse

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