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Beautiful, but unfortunately it wouldn't be appropriate for my non-technical teammates, so I cannot see it beating out hipchat.

I love the concept though and I can see this being the tool of choice for technical teams.

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Hey there. We'll absolutely consider how non-technical folks can engage with this. Our current product, Troupe (http://trou.pe) is more along these lines, with GitHub webhooks integration.

We may look to fuse the concepts so that it works brilliantly for both the developers and the rest of the company too.

Yeah, that barrier is a tough one to overcome. We've found that having an easy entry point (nothing to install, one click signup etc.) lowers the barrier a bit.

Also having some kind of free tier could always be an advantage over hipchat...

HipChat also has a free tier (for teams of 5 or smaller). https://www.hipchat.com/pricing

Good point. The problem with a tier limited by the number of people is that you take away one of the best parts of a free chat service. Being able to freely invite _anyone_ into a conversation really opens up what you can do.

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