Intelligent chat that makes your team communication twice as fast | Hacker News Reader

Intelligent chat that makes your team communication twice as fast

chatgrape.com

109 pointsblosa76 comments

What's the exit strategy for customers?

The biggest problem for a potential customer of a new service like this is that there is a high probability that the service won't be around in two years. The cost of the service itself is almost irrelevant: the cost of switching to something else can be very high, especially if the customer has more than a dozen users.

That's why XMPP is so attractive, even though there aren't many features built on it: you can run your own server, on metal or a VM platform, you can buy service with a guarantee that someone can take it over smoothly if one business model fails.

What's the exit strategy for customers?

I might not choose those exact words, but IMHO the fundamental issue this raises is something any SaaS company ought to be addressing in a transparent and up-front way these days if they want any credibility. Unfortunately, there aren't many who do yet.

Looks like chatgrape is positioning for a Goog acquisition, I don't think I would use a service this important w/o owning the software. Or at least an escrow.

Can you point to any SaaS best practices in this area? One example I read was that Everpix sold IP to finance the development of tools for data archive/export, before winding down. It would be instructive to survey wind-down scenarios.

Can you point to any SaaS best practices in this area?

That's surprisingly difficult. IMNSHO, most SaaS fails completely on this count, and my businesses use very few of the trendy services for exactly this reason. Of those we do use, every single one is either (a) convenient but expendable without compromising the business, or (b) both well established and having some form of legally binding statements along the lines below.

What I would ideally like to see in most cases would be a guarantee that if a service were to be taken down then its source code would be released with some form of open licence so that any service you relied on could reasonably easily be converted to self-hosting. Obviously this isn't worth much for services that are essentially proxies, such as most payment services, but it's sufficient for continuity in many cases.

Otherwise, as a minimum I'd like to see automated tools for exporting data in some open format so it can be transferred to an alternative platform where this is a reasonable possibility. Where there are non-trivial issues relating to data export, such as with PCI DSS for the various card payment services, I think the most plausible approximation would be a legally binding promise to help transfer the data to an alternative provider.

Obviously if a start-up fails suddenly then even legally actionable promises aren't going to be worth much if anything, which is why we won't rely on any SaaS from a new start-up for anything essential no matter what their terms say. However, properly worded guarantees would at least stop exit strategies like acqui-hire or sell-to-competitor-who-shuts-you-down from screwing the customer base.

One good example IMHO is MailChimp, which provides a straightforward mechanism for customers to back up all their important data, not just mailing lists but also things like e-mail templates and stats that normally live on the remote system.

Another one that seems reasonable is Stripe, which has explicit wording in its (UK) legal terms guaranteeing meaningful notice under fair conditions if they're going to terminate an account, and guaranteeing that they will facilitate transfer of card data to another payment service also under reasonable conditions if a merchant using their service decides to terminate.

Thanks for the detailed response.

hey dsr_, Silhouette and sitkack,

I'm Felix, the CEO of ChatGrape.

That's a big pain point we also had with a lot of services. Not necessarily when they were gone, but simply when we decided to try something new, which is part of the SaaS-Game imho. We are currently working on a convenient XML-Export that allows you to easily extract your Users, public discussions, etc. (no private conversations tho) at any time. To make the switch between ChatGrape and other providers easier, we'll have an option to export the data as Hipchat-XMLs, as they are already widely supported by almost every service.

Expect this to be out within the next two months.

Cheers, F

My main complaint is that services such as yours are not extending XMPP! By god, it's begging for it! Imagine if every e-mail service was a walled garden. Differentiate on features and user experience and otherwise embrace interoperability and you'll be better than the vast majority of chat startups out there.

I feel your pain, undata.

I think the biggest reason for many modern chat services to disregard XMPP is, because they fear that most advanced users might resort to their Adiums & Pidgins and wont use their web-services or Apps at all, resulting in half of the customers not experiencing the UX or unique features and therefore the value.

We had a long discussion in the beginning of the project and decided to make our architecture XMPP-friendly, but release it later in the future, as we need our early adopters to use the system.

So the answer to XMPP is "Yes, but after we gathered enough feedback"

most advanced users might resort to their Adiums & Pidgins and wont use their web-services or Apps at all

Oh, noes, that would be terrible. I cannot explain in words how much I loathe the Slack app and by extension how much I loathe their "UX experience and unique features."

Since my company just recently left HipChat for Slack, I think the odds of switching again this year are pretty slim, so I haven't evaluated your app. I just want to ensure that you have considered that a non-trivial portion of the engineering group of a company may want to resort to their Adiums.

I use slack, and I think it's pretty cool. Can you tell me what I'm missing out?

I think some of it is "worse than what": we were on HipChat, and it was not very nice, but at least they made an actual OS X application and allowed one to customize its behavior on my machine. The Slack "app" is just a packaged version of WebKit and has almost zero customizations. Worse of which is that there isn't a per-channel setting to hide images by default, since I've had no luck getting folks to stop posting animated gifs into the general channel. I'm not at work right now in order to speak to the specifics, but the Slack app doesn't handle that situation correctly at all.

And the notification is merely a red dot. Oh, you only want the red dot if you're at-mentioned or someone posts in your team's channel? Too bad.

If you just distribute your site's webpage as an app, you're phoning it in. And that is why I want a chat company to use XMPP so that I can use Adium to manage my interaction (or lack of it) with the chat service.

I'm glad you like Slack. I'm sure they're going to do well, given how many folks sing their praises.

The problem is these custom apps and web services are usually pretty poor compared to things like pidgin.

For some of us if it's not FOSS it's not going to be used.

I get that you want to showcase your features, but speaking for myself at least, choosing not to support XMPP means you don't even make the list of possible alternatives to what we have now. Making that promise is nice (if we can agree to call that a promise), but I have to make a decision based on what you provide now, not what you promise to provide in the future.

I think your UX and other unique features should be so compelling that customers want to use your system (over than Adium or Pidgin).

Think GMail for example. It's got full IMAP and POP3 support, and people who want to use a mail client are free to do so. If they do (and I assume many people do), then Google doesn't get to serve ads to them. But Google still gives you the freedom to choose. And they've succeeded in alluring even the nerdiest of people to their web app.

In short, let your users decide. Make your UI so awesome that they want to use it. Having XMPP support will actually draw many customers to your service, since it's something that not all competing services offer.

Hi winter_blue,

You and others made some very compelling points in regards of XMPP.

We learned a lot from this discussion and I'll soon write a post about the takeaways we got from this HN-Thread at our blog - http://blog.chatgrape.com/.

Thank you for your sophisticated feedback.

-f

It is much easier to differentiate a service if you don't need to take other clients that are out of your control into account.

One of the most time consuming things you can do is to diagnose, fix or work around issues in other applications that you don't control or even have source code access.

Slack and Flowdock have been around for a while and I don't see anything novel here. Also, "high-level security"? Security could be a novel selling point but your copy around it feels dubious.

Maybe "Slack" for enterprise? For Law Firms? Where security is extremely important and they are willing to pay? Not just OTR and encrypted chat but stuff not even YOU can read, maybe self-hosted licensing or in-browser locked keys for encryption? /me is not an expert here but those seem like valuable features that I don't see in Slack or Flowdock.

[EDIT] When you have pre-existing competitors in a space, particularly a space focusing on developers, if you can't provide a feature that would compel (me) to switch (which I won't, I love Slack, unless you've got something amazing Slack doesn't) then you need to focus on a different target.

I've seen a lot of powerful tools for developers and software teams pop up but I almost NEVER see those similar tools being pushed hard for other types of teams. Like Law Firms. Or politics. Or R&D labs. Scientists. So many out there!!!!

Speaking of copy that's off-putting, the "makes your communication twice as fast" makes me immediately dubious and seems sort of amateur/icky. Twice as fast as what? Via what metric?

The other day I saw a billboard on the side of the freeway for a casino which stated in big gold lettering, "HIGHER CHANCES TO WIN!"

ChatGrape - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjvQFtlNQ-M

You have a point, but they could compete on many grounds even with developers. From the top of my head: better UX, self-hosting option (AFAIK Slack doesn't offer this - and it would be a huge point to us), advanced usage metrics,... I am not saying that they will be succesful, but they are not doomed from the start.

Never heard of Flowdock. Checked iOS app. Zero reviews, ever. So, "been around for a while" doesn't feel like a true validation.

It has 42 reviews, total. The App Store only shows the reviews for the most recent release on the first tab. If you go to "Reviews > All Versions" you can see the older ones.

Hi Ixiaus, amenod, lepht and jvagner,

MARKET

Good point. We have a strong competition in this area and are facing a marketing challenge in the US with the hugely successful launch of Slack (I think that Hipchat and Campfire are still bigger atm).

We are currently reworking the landing page, but this concept video might explain a little bit better what we are after: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFJBadyrTmI&list=UUaBvfEGLT1...

We make all company data available right as you type. The time you are switching back and forth between browser tabs to search for issues or appointments is a huge waste of time and - more relevant the bigger your team gets - of money.

SECURITY

> Not just OTR and encrypted chat but stuff not even YOU can read

We are currently working on an encrypted solution for OTR-Conversations that - thanks to WebRTC - uses p2p-connections and uses your wifi, if you are in the same office. This allows you to communicate internally with us only providing the client. This isn't as secure as an on-premise solution (we are working on it, but this will def. take a little more time), but it's a good way of giving customers the advantages of cloud software with an optional switch for an on-premise-like behavior.

MARKETING STATEMENT

> makes your communication twice as fast

Yeah, a blunt marketing statement like this needs to be backed up, or the bs-markers are over 9000. During the planning phase we tested with a couple of businesses what happens, when we integrate their most commonly used data into a facebook-like autocomplete. The results were, that the initial time they spend using the prototype was reduced to 52% (notable: They were still sharing the same amount of information). I think the reasons for this was a reduction of back-and-forths, misunderstandings and that they generally kept their conversations shorter.

Maybe we should make a short clip, explaining the research that led to the assertion.

By the way, thank you guys for racing your concerns. This sounds cliché but I rather have somebody tell me what he doesn't get/like about ChatGrape than having somebody dismiss our product without us knowing, how to improve.

s/racing/raising/

(posts can be edited for a short time after posting)

Apparently I was too late. Thx for the heads up :)

Quick note... your pricing page references discount if signing up by 1-Sep which has already past (unless you meant 1-Sep 2015).

Most people I know in 'big law' here in NZ (in quotes because NZ) are using Lync or similar for IM.

Not sure the niche that people like us like to imagine is actually there and underserved by the big enterprise players.

Hey guys,

Leo from ChatGrape here. We're focusing on two areas of innovation, to add a certain level of intelligence to chat based team communication:

1. Deep Service Integrations: Our integrations of tools and services like Gmail, GitHub etc function on a much more integrated level than what has previously been achieved. For instance, on ChatGrape, all your issues (GitHub) and files (Google Drive / DropBox) are available within the chat, thanks to a smart auto complete that attaches or references all your documents - right as you type.

2. Speech Act Detection (Natural Language Processing): This is all about the triggering of workflows based on normal, "day to day" communications. For example, if I were to write, "Hey Tobi, let's meet up tomorrow at 2pm to discuss the front end issue!" three things will happen: First, you'll be notified, second a calendar event will be added to your Google Calendar and third, the topic or issue will be automatically referenced or attached.

Natural language processing within ChatGrape goes much further, anyhow, and is a topic where our engineering team has gained many years of experience with previous projects.

We're using to make communication simpler and more efficient, whilst not disrupting your normal flow of conversation. (Another example of this is to automatically detect and mark whether / or questions, and mark them as such.)

ChatGrape went live in an Early Access Phase (Pre-Beta) phase about six weeks ago and not nearly everything of what'll ultimately make ChatGrape the first smart communication solution for teams is fully operational or even deployed yet.

However, what I wrote above will give you guys a better idea of it is that sets ChatGrape apart from all existing solutions like Slack or Hipchat.

I'm looking forward to your feedback and questions and I'm always available via lf@ubergrape.com! And we'd of course be happy about you guys joining our Early Access Phase to provide further feedback.

JIRA integration seems like a no-brainer since that's such a common tool in startups and other development shops. Why isn't it mentioned on the signup page where you list several tools? All you're doing there is asking which tools the users use, so it seems there would be no harm in letting people give you the input that they're using it, even if you don't integrate with it yet.

Hi natch, thanks for pointing this out! We set out initially with compiling a small survey of the tools that are most widely used among startups, since we figured they're the ones who're most likely to become Early Adopters. Doing this, we saw that most (some 90 something per cent) where using GitHub, DropBox and Google Drive, so we set out to add these first. However, we're of course always trying to figure out what our potential users might be most interested in so we're asking everyone what their favorite integrations would be - hence the feedback box during the sign up process. We've already identified a dozen tools and services we need to integrate with (Trello, for instance, will go live early next week) and we're working full time on adding as many as possibly as soon as possible. If you'd like to, I'd be happy to personally notify you once JIRA is live?

Stop selling so hard. Use your regular voice.

Point taken! Guess I was a bit too exciting about being on the frontpage of HN, that's like a dream come true, hehe :-)

Seems like your strong selling point is the NLP stuff.

I think that the vast majority of your target market is already using Slack or Hipchat or something like that, and switching chat systems is a big deal. It's a pain in the ass and not something you want to do.

So, is the NLP feature good enough to make people switch? I would argue that it's not. But, if your NLP actually does add a lot of value, then it's probably good enough that it could be an addon feature to Slack or any of the other chat services.

So, here's my idea: make a hosted NLP bot that integrates into whatever chat system you're using (super easy with Hubot). Then, I can continue to use Slack/IRC/Jabber/HipChat, but I could also buy your chat bot to augment with NLP stuff.

It opens up your market by not requiring people to switch chat apps, and lets you focus on what it seems like you want to focus on the most anyways- NLP.

Mmh. The auto completion can be a nice feature, but how do populate the dictionary for auto complete of jira/github issues ?

A homepage with a loader that obstructs the content (which doesn't need JS to be usable) and won't hide unless JavaScript is enabled... Nice start.

I struggle to see why you would sell this as a SaaS app.

I like the idea of using various forms of markdown to call out to other data sources, and run in what seems to be sentiment analysis and other work across a chat client - it's a really good idea for enterprises over a certain size - but any enterprise over a certain size will laugh at the idea of having it's informal but utterly core competancies stuck on a server in SV next to its competitors chat records.

This sounds like it's crying out to be an internally managed service with a bot in every room. That way the benefits accrue and the data stays in house.

But love the feature concepts - chat is part of what I am calling the "Open Methodology" and a big win for most companies that embrace it

Did you really have to hijack the scroll on your website and make it faster?

This needs to stop, and it needs to stop immediately. Native scrolling has a lot more considerations than any of your designer will ever put into your website.

This scrolling feels god-awful on a high speed trackpad AND a free-scroll mousewheel. Awful. Congratulations on giving a stupidly bad first impression, guys.

I consider it an excellent feature. Just a single mouse scroll is enough to tell me that the company isn't competent enough to engineering a usable website.

I was thinking the same too. Never mind chatting twice as fast I was scrolling twice as fast and missed the sales pitch

Interesting that they are working on OTR. I generally applaud any OTR implementations (or any form of encryption), but why would a company need plausible deniability?

OTR is something a lot of people use and trust. It also makes it easier for users to use our service with third-party clients later that already support OTR. Plausible deniability might not be very important for companies, I agree. We are also looking into other protocols, for the same reasons TextSecure decided to modify OTR: both parties need to be online to exchange keys.

Stefan (ChatGrape)

I think you can tone down the hype a bit for example "communicate twice as fast" comes across as a number off the top of your head and not an actual metric.

"Deep services integration", where is the API? Hipchat is able to integrate with 50+ services because they have an API which let's other people do the actual work, how can you compete with that level of integration without one?

Hi Wyck,

Thanks for the feedback.

I tried to answer the first one in the longer paragraph -> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8312972

Regarding the API:

We actually have an activity API (similar to Hipchat), through which any service can connect and push activities into our client.

The "index API" will take longer to release, as it is a lot more complex and less explored.

You see, Hipchat/Slack/etc. only allow you to see the latest activities of your service. As "Deep Service Integration" means that you can access the Service's data as you type, integrating a service into ChatGrape is a lot more challenging.

With Google Drive, for example, we have to index the files, and update said index on actions like file renames, deletions, movements, and many more - additionally to displaying activities.

The good thing is, we are getting a lot better at it and the more we grow, the more services will hopefully try to exploit our richer interface.

I see it like this: The 50+ integrations of Hipchat don't matter to 90% of the people, if we integrate the 10 most commonly used services 10 times better.

Best, F

Thanks for the reply ,this type of integration sounds like it would in fact speed up the work flow, it sounds very interesting.

"Don't waste time where it matters!"

This sounds odd to me (not a native speaker). Waste time where it doesn't matter, instead?

It's bothersome when pricing pages strike out a higher price and display a lower price - like a fabulous discount offer - when there are as-good-as-free services like https://www.svyft.com/ and https://slack.com/. Even https://www.hipchat.com/ is free.

Hi kajarya! Well, for once, we're only displaying a discount for committing yourself for 12 months, that's fair, wouldn't you agree? Furthermore, neither Slack nor Hipchat are available for fee if you want to use it at its full potential.

Most importantly, with ChatGrape we're going beyond of simply providing a chat based communication solution. On ChatGpape, we're offering a smart engine that automatically triggers workflows based on your communication, such as, let's meet at 2pm tomorrow - automatically adds a calendar event.

There's more than that, of course, but the essence is that we're running a quite extensive engine in the background to make your team's communication easier and more efficient, and that takes up actual processing power.

Finally, considering that our aim to to save you time that you can use better on building your own baby, instead of wasting time searching for documents you ant to share and issues you want to reference - the average startup using ChatGrape has access to all the features for around 35 bugs per month, which is really a reasonable price, don't you think?

35 bugs per month!

Yeah, it's either 35 bugs or 35 bucks per month, the choice is yours :-)

let's meet at 2pm tomorrow - automatically adds a calendar event.

How does that pan out when 2pm is not good for the other person?

"Hey Greg, let's meet at 2pm tomorrow."

"Sure, great. Wait, I have that code review starting 1:45, so 2pm is not a good time. Shall we meet at, say, 11am instead?"

"No, 11am is not good for me. Let's meet around noon tomorrow?"

"Got to pick up the kid at noon but I'll be back at work around 12:30pm. Can we meet over lunch at 12:30pm? I am free till the code review starts."

"OK, let's meet at 12:45 then."

"Cool!"

Does this add five calendar events to the calendars of both the people in the conversation?

Glad that you ask! Let me explain. In fact, "automatically" is actually a bit misleading. The correct term must be "half-automatically", because everything triggered within ChatGrape still requires your confirmation. (If not, we'd be flooded with false-positives.) Think about tagging on Facebook, specifically, writing a status update and tagging a page of a friend. If you start typing his / her name, Facebook will add a drop down menu and suggest the name(s) - you can select it or choose to ignore it - and the drop down will disappear again. This said, if you were to type, "No, 11am is not good for me. [first drop down with calendar event suggestion, which you simply ignore and go on typing] let's meet around noon tomorrow?" [second drop down with calendar event suggestion, which you confirm, and thus send me a calendar event invite]. Does this make sense?

I'm in! I'll pay with 35 grasshoppers.

We use Slack extensively at our work place. We moved from Campfire.Slack has more features than Chatgrape(come on they've just begun), but i don't see the USP for any one who searches for a "slack alternative" or "campfire alternative". Slack have deeper integration, for ex updating tasks on Asana right from the Slack.

I'm curious to know what exactly this makes this suited for agencies moreso than something like Slack, Lync/SharePoint, Basecamp, etc. etc.

I'm trying to figure out if I can get Slack into the workplace but if ChatGrape has something that's very agency-specific, I'll be more likely to recommend it instead.

I've only heard of one agency-specific product out there... but the name escapes me. Will try to search for it.

As far as differentiation, there are some services with unique features and some that are offering good products for free, no string attached (restrictions on message history for example). I would check out Kato (kato.im) and if you are more interested in a "Twilio for chat" try Layer.

Looks very similar to https://slack.com/

I was looking at using Slack but wanted an OSS version - can anyone recommend one? I like that OTR is going to be an option with chatgrape, my team uses Adium with Jabber, but it could be a lot better.

Our team has been using Slack and we love it.

What is difference here? Why would we switch?

Video is not working. "-50% for a half-year commitment - only if you sign up before the 1st of September!" Is no longer valid yet it's on the pricing page

Thanks for pointing that out, that should say before the 1st of October! I'll make sure to change it asap.

Cheers,

Leo (ChatGrape)

That sounds great Leo

Id like if all these services were compat with IRC or XMPP.

This looks incredibly similar to Gitter[1]. What about this justifies the much higher price point?

1. https://gitter.im

We started with the GitHub integration but there's a lot more to come. Also see Leo's comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8312356

From the website (before signing up) I have no idea if it's a desktop application, a web application, a phone application, and on what OSes does it run.

Do you have something like presentation with comparison with such widely used (sadly) tools like Skype and Lync?

What's the technology stack?

I wrote a small summary of the areas of technology where we're adding innovations to the topic of team communication or chat based communication. Check it out and let me know if you have further questions, I'd be happy to answer! Cheerio, Leo (ChatGrape.com)

Backend: Django 1.7, Postgres, ElasticSearch, Redis. Running on hetzner root servers in germany.

Frontend: component (https://github.com/componentjs/component) with a lot of custom components, no frameworks.

Using https://codeship.io/ for continuos integration/delivery

Stefan (ChatGrape)

It's nice to see an austrian company posted here!

Costs more than Slack with less service integrations.

Does it make people type twice as fast?

A valid Flowdock competitor

Reply on news.ycombinator.com