These engineers quit their jobs to start LeChat | Hacker News Reader

These engineers quit their jobs to start LeChat

hunterwalk.com

26 pointsQwl28 comments

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.

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.

Could you please elaborate on this?

You're not going to make enough money.

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 :-)

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

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?

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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).

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

I would be a possible customer for this. I use Campfire today, and I looked at your homepage and it looks very similar... can you give some points on which this is different/improved? Thanks!

Major differences:

- We strive to have the best history search experience. As-you-type very vast search that does not obstruct you conversation view.

- We want to enable having more than one concurrent conversation without needing to constantly switch between tabs.

- We want to provide state-of-the-art API and integration with tools you are using.

Haha, not any cat either: that looks like a fairly decent logo rendition of Grumpy Cat. But yeah, it kind of works nicely with the name.

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

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

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

When we get subpoenaed by the court.

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.

hi, i wrote the post. As many engineers try to decide what's a "side project" vs startup, i thought it would be interesting to share one team that just made the decision.

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

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

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.

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