Review my startup: ShopTalk | Hacker News Reader

Review my startup: ShopTalk

30 pointsjamwt19 comments

http://shoptalkapp.com

ShopTalk is team-centered chat software for companies.

It's based on the founders' experiences working at an organization that deployed IRC company-wide, including for use by non-technical departments.

ShopTalk attempts to retain the elements of IRC that we found to be very successful, like team- and topic-centered meeting rooms, always-on communication, searchable histories, automated entities (aka bots), etc. At the same time, we wanted to change/extend the IRC model to address limitations we encountered, like true user-level authentication and group support, fine-grained room permissions, LDAP/AD integration, web-based SaaS model instead of installed client/server, general usability issues, and more...

The current state of the project is an early beta--it's currently a simple, but usable, subset of the target product.

At some point in the future, when we're ready to come out of beta, we intend to charge per-user monthly fees to companies, and offer a free trial period of some duration. It's not an ad-based or freemium product, and we're not targeting giant-social-network-scale adoption. More "Enterprise 2.0", if you can stomach the buzzwordiness (hey, it's cliche, but succinct).

The geek angle: the backend is a combination of python and erlang, using myraid libraries that the founding team has put together over the course of working together for several years.

As long time HN readers and occasional commenters, we'd (jamwt, dowski, mrshoe) value and appreciate any feedback or advice the community has to offer.

Thanks for checking it out!

There are a lot of reviewers here asking, "What makes this product different from ____?", which requires that you follow up to explain (in quite a few words) what makes this product different/better than your competitors. To me, this is bad, because your potential customers are probably going to wonder the same thing. If you're going to sell this thing, you need to make it clear to your potential customers exactly what your product is and what makes it great within seconds of them hitting your homepage.

In your case, I would think that the very least you will need to do is make your product look at least equally impressive to something like Campfire right off the bat (which will necessitate having a very well thought out, professionally designed homepage) that rivals what 37Signals has, so that people are at least intrigued enough to dig further to see what your product really has to offer.

I'm going to echo comments that have already been made about the site itself. I find the design bland and dreary. There also isn't much information on the site at all. What happens if I don't watch the video? I have no idea what the product is about or even looks like.

Couple this with the fact that many professionals don't even have speakers on their machines and can't use headphones at work and you've got a real problem.

Thank you for this very helpful thread of feedback. ShopTalk is better than Campfire in many respects (and there's more to come), but we definitely need to communicate that better on the site. We also need to do so without relying on the screencast.

Clickable link: http://shoptalkapp.com

I think the idea has promise. I could definitely see larger companies using it to communicate within departments on a real-time collaborative basis (versus in-person meetings or blasting a one-way email to a group and then having to resend any valuable feedback).

And while I'm no design expert, I agree with everyone else about the design. If your target customer is companies & it's going to be a service that they'll ultimately have to pay for, then the design should look professional. The current design doesn't seem like it represents an "Enterprise" offering. And I personally don't like the black background and the logo font/color/image.

Good luck!

Excellent video. Does a great job of explaining how it actually works.

Thanks--it was an eye-opening experience, learning how much work goes into making these things.

I never thought I'd know anything about things like interlaced/de-interlaced video, renderable vs. real-time formats, and NTSC/PAL standards, but here we are...

Looks very useful, my question is what makes this better than say Meebo, or other in-browser chat solutions?

Frontpage design is clean but it doesn't feel smooth enough. It seems rather flat I guess.

What are your plans for monetization? Sell memberships? You have no mention of this on the site now, if that is your plan you should probably make that clear before a company gets set up with it thinking it will be free.

I think meebo is an entirely different service. It's basically a web-based interface that allows communication on traditional IM protocols/networks, like OSCAR/AIM, XMPP/Google Talk, etc.

So, it's different in that it doesn't really provide company-specific networks, it makes traditional public IM networks web-accessible.

It also, like IM patterns in general, is one-on-one chat first, group maybe, in the kinds of workflow it promotes. If you've used IRC much, this is team- or group- oriented first, private maybe.

We tend to think this fits the real needs of workplaces better, because the group/team approach is more like a meeting (widely communicative, don't-repeat-ourselves, no secrets, etc) vs. hallway conversations (not well disseminated to all those who could benefit from it, inefficient from a repeating answers perspective, etc).

Thanks for the input on the frontpage. We're considering a redesign.

I mention monetization in the initial post. We're planning on charging per-user per-month fees to companies. Good point about being forthright about this; we should really give this thought, b/c we don't want customers feeling like we've pulled a bait-and-switch on them.

I agree Meebo is, in truth, different. But on the surface and at the depth I think most people think about, they see browser chat and browser chat (not to be confused with ceiling cat).

Looks cool, but while we're on the subject - what makes this better than the established players like Campfire (http://campfirenow.com/)?

We looked closely at Campfire before we started, and it's certainly the offering we've found that's the closest to what we're shooting for.

I think the target audience is one of the big differences. 37S, as usual, is targeting small teams with simple needs, and doing so with a diverse set of complimentary products, including campfire. They're doing 80/20, and doing it very well.

We're focusing on chat specifically, and we'd like to add a lot more depth--background room notifications, sophisticated group/room access rules, LDAP/AD integration, marketing ourselves to medium-sized organizations (several hundred users/company) that have higher standards when it comes to integration with existing systems, management ease, etc. We're shooting for a more complete solution.

So, I think Campfire is one comparison where recognize we're competing along a difference of degree, not really a difference of kind.

I think we do see Campfire as direct competition, but we believe this market to be largely untapped. As jamwt mentioned, we do serve a slightly different audience. I think (and hope!) that as more people start recognizing how useful this type of application is to their organization, some portion of them will choose us over Campfire.

Further ideas:

1) I appreciate the demo video and it's quite good, but you may consider doing a 30 second high-level overview. The demo is rather slow moving for someone who wants to get in, understand the product, and get out or get in further.

2) Logging. I think you'll be well served by offering logs of all chats to the admins for record keeping.

Thanks, trickjarret, for the useful feedback. I think a shorter intro would definitely be helpful.

We will definitely have searchable logs of all conversations in a future version. They will be searchable by everyone (based on room permissions). So, keep watching.

We also intend on offering downloadable archives, along the "your data belongs to you" lines. We're just a service.

Do you have an api or do you support some desktop/console linux clients? I prefer having a blinking icon in the taskbar when there is some non urgent activity demanding my attention and checking a browser tab every few minutes is inefficient.

Ya know, this brushes against two things we've been doing/talking about.

In our experience, the hardest (technical) part of developing this product has been notifications. There is no good way for background web apps to notify you, especially visually, when there is some event that wants your attention. Something like growl for the web would be awesome.

Anyhow, we have plans for a public API (in fact, we've had a bot in our test channels before, exercising some early versions of it). Unfortunately, it's not ready to roll out quite yet. We know it will be important for all kinds of custom integrations.

I liked it better when it was called IRC.

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