areichert

We have API docs [0] and webhook events [1] so it's possible to integrate with something like Dialogflow for chat automation :)

[0] https://docs.papercups.io/api-endpoints

[1] https://docs.papercups.io/webhook-events

Thanks Collin! Glad you're enjoying it so far :)

Haha sorry to disappoint :P

Yup! To be honest, a lot of the smaller teams using Papercups with our Slack integration rarely need to interact with the admin dashboard if they don't want to. (But it turns out that having a dashboard to manage unresolved questions, add private notes/labels/tags to customers/conversations, etc. is still pretty helpful)

Thanks Satam! We're always happy to chat :)

We're pretty similar to Chatwoot in some ways - Kam described some differences here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26503697

To reiterate some of the differences, or why people might choose us at the moment:

- A lot of our users really like our Slack integration. For small teams, this means they don't even really have to use our dashboard if they don't want to, because they can do everything from Slack. [0]

- We offer a live screen sharing feature [1]

- We're working on a library to offer complete customization of the chat UI on your website [2]

[0] (We need to set up a better recent demo video of our Slack integration, but if you skim our changelog you'll probably get the gist: https://github.com/papercups-io/papercups/blob/master/CHANGE...)

[1] https://storytime.papercups.io/

[2] https://github.com/papercups-io/chat-builder

Yeah I agree, we're planning on updating the landing page to include a lot more screenshots/videos/demos :)

In the meantime, here are some screenshots from our GitHub wiki: https://github.com/papercups-io/papercups/wiki/Features

And our demo page: https://app.papercups.io/demo

Alex from Papercups here :)

My guess is partially what vardaro mentioned (to hedge their bets), and partially because the space is really, really "wide" (not sure if that's the right word) in the sense that products like this could go in a million different directions... for example: email marketing, CRM, session reply, chatbots, etc. etc.

That's to say, even though Papercups and Chatwoot seem pretty similar at the moment, I wouldn't be surprised if that changes quite a bit in a year or so!

(Also it's no secret that YC invests in a ton of similar companies :P e.g. our batch alone had at least three video conferencing companies iirc.)

https://github.com/agenda/agenda might help you out with persistence and supporting more specific schedules :)

I know PostHog is only lightly mentioned in the article, but I would highly recommend checking them out! [0] (They're also open-source and provide a self-hosted solution. [1])

[0] https://posthog.com/

[1] https://github.com/posthog/posthog

This is great advice -- thank you :)

It's amazing to me what a skill it truly is to be able to talk to customers/users, and come out of those conversations with valuable/actionable insights.

As an engineer, it's _so_ easy to fall into the traps she mentions ("not really listening to your users and [...] building something you think people want", or becoming "more focused on the excitement of the technical challenge than your users").

Until I actually tried starting a business, I always scoffed at this advice -- "obviously I won't make those mistakes!" But I still find myself goofing up over and over. It's so attractive to think that "this one new feature will make all the difference, so I should probably just focus on coding rather than talking to users."

Has anyone found a particularly effective way to overcome this? Is it just a lack of discipline on my end? (Maybe I need to reread "The Mom Test" a few more times...)

Yes, we are working on exposing our API :)

If you email me at alex [at] papercups.io I can keep you posted on our updates!

We just released Storytime last week in beta, so it's still quite basic in its feature set :P What kind of hooks would you like? (e.g. on certain events, trigger certain callbacks?)

Thanks for the feedback! Here's a little blurb about us if you're curious https://papercups.io/blog/story

And we'll get on setting up an About page soon :)

Not sure if this is something you'd find useful, but we (Papercups) recently released a product on top of our live chat tool that allows you to view what your users are looking at in real-time while chatting with them :)

Details: https://storytime.papercups.io/

We were probably writing the first few lines of code for Papercups around the time this article was written (in July), but we're another Intercom alternative :)

Like Chatwoot, we're open source and have a free tier on our hosted version for anyone who'd like to give us a try!

Here's the repo [0], website [1], and demo [2].

[0] https://github.com/papercups-io/papercups

[1] https://papercups.io/

[2] https://app.papercups.io/demo

Alex from Papercups here! Thanks for mentioning us :)

Here's the repo [0], website [1], and demo [2] for anyone who wants to check us out!

[0] https://github.com/papercups-io/papercups

[1] https://papercups.io/

[2] https://app.papercups.io/demo

Storytime [0] is a new screen-sharing product that we're adding on top of our core offering, which is an open source live chat tool [1]. Our long term goal is to provide an open source alternative to Intercom, but this is something that a lot of our users have been asking for in the meantime :)

Storytime is built on top of the amazing rrweb [2] library, which captures snapshots of DOM mutations and streams them over a secure Phoenix channel (websocket over wss) [3] to a page in our dashboard.

It doesn't persist any of this data, and the streaming only starts when you trigger it (so your website isn't constantly streaming these events through a websocket unnecessarily). And since we're open source, if you're concerned about privacy, you can always just host it on premise :)

Would love any feedback!

[0] https://github.com/papercups-io/storytime

[1] https://github.com/papercups-io/papercups

[2] https://github.com/rrweb-io/rrweb

[3] https://hexdocs.pm/phoenix/channels.html

We're working on a self-hosted alternative to Intercom if you'd like to check us out :)

https://github.com/papercups-io/papercups

Nice! Makes sense.

> Before YC, I sat here at my desk. During YC I sat here at my desk. Now I still sit here at my desk. This is perhaps the hardest aspect of doing anything remotely, you don’t have any tangible memories of going to a place, shaking hands with a person, coming away with a YC souvenir.

This really resonated with me. When people ask me, "what's it like now that YC is over?" I really don't know what to say, because it barely feels any different :P

What are some common use cases for the voice functionality? Is it mostly for speech-to-text features, or doing calls through the browser?

Thanks! Going to add the links here as well :)

1. http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html

2. http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html

3. http://www.paulgraham.com/vb.html

Hmm that's a pretty interesting way of thinking about it, I didn't even consider it from that angle.

Might be a silly idea, but I wonder if more companies would benefit from doing something like this on a semi-regular basis, i.e. giving unhappy employees the opportunity to leave with a decent "severance" package?

> “I’m worried that the severance package was too good”

Yeah... I'm genuinely curious how many people actually quit over the "apolitical" stance, vs employees that were just unhappy with the job in general and took this convenient opportunity to leave with a pretty sweet deal.

Thank you :)

Pretty stoked for this. I started learning Elixir a few months ago [0] and it's been a great balance of fun + practical. Way easier to get up and running compared some other FP languages I've dabbled with in the past :P

Also shameless plug: we're currently working on an open source messaging product called Papercups [1] if anyone is looking for an Elixir project to hack on!

[0] https://www.papercups.io/blog/elixir-noob

[1] https://github.com/papercups-io/papercups

We launched Papercups back in August [0], and wanted to share some of the metrics and learnings from the experience, along with expressing our appreciation for the HN community's support!

Also included some updates on what we've been working on since then :)

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24133719

I started building our product about 2 months ago, and basically learned Elixir as we went. It's been great fun, and a wonderful way to learn a language quickly! I'd love to see greater adoption of Elixir :)