areichert

Thanks guys!

Hi everybody!

Last week we launched on HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24133719) and got a lot of great feedback from the community :) (here’s our main repo: https://github.com/papercups-io/papercups)

One thing that stood out was the request for React Native/Expo support, so we decided to hack together a working version of our chat component in RN so that people could start playing around with it!

Here’s the repo: https://github.com/papercups-io/chat-widget-native

And here’s a demo: https://snack.expo.io/@reichertjalex/papercups

(I’m kind of a React Native noob, so any feedback or contributors would be great :P)

If RN support is something you're actively looking for, I'd love to learn more about your use case if you want to email me at alex (at) papercups.io :)

We'd love to get this working as soon as we can!

Do you personally have a use case for this? I'd love to learn more if you want to email me at alex (at) papercups.io

We would have to make some slight tweaks to get our chat component working in React Native, but we definitely want to support it!

I'd love to learn more about your (or anybody else's) use case if you want to email me at alex (at) papercups.io

We're big fans of supabase :D

Glad to hear it!

<3

Thanks for the reply! This is super helpful :) The defmacro article was a great read, definitely some great points in there.

We're starting to realize how important having a good filter is -- a ton of people have opinions on what we're building, and we have to figure out how to distill/filter that feedback effectively (because a lot of it likely falls into the "distraction" bucket haha).

re: analytics, that's also something we're trying to figure out how to do well -- like you said, it's tricky if folks can just rip out that code if they want to, but we're hoping that we can set up analytics tools that are beneficial to both us (for product insights) and our customers (e.g. to make sure everything is working well for them, alerting them to updates, etc)

Thanks again for your thoughts!

We definitely want to make our chat widget as unobtrusive and customizable as possible, so that our users can choose exactly where it shows up... I can sympathize with how annoying it is when these chat bubbles get "aggressive" e.g. by automatically opening and then sending me a bunch of messages from a bot.

I really like the idea of just adding a nav item/link that goes to a page dedicated to messaging. Perhaps at some point we'll create a hosted page that does exactly that (e.g. maybe a custom "contact" or "FAQ" page where customers can ask questions, etc)

In the meantime, our users should technically be able to set up a dedicated page for this, and just embed our chat widget on that specific page :) but we are going to keep thinking about how we can improve the UX for this kinda thing!

Sounds like a good problem, if we're one of the few shops offering Elixir jobs :P

This is a really interesting idea! Never thought of doing something like that, but if enough people want it, we'd probably be happy to build it :P

Makes sense! Would love to learn more about how you're using Intercom if you're ever down to chat :)

(Feel free to email me at alex@papercups.io if you're interested!)

Have you looked at PostHog? https://github.com/posthog/posthog

Seems very similar to what you're describing :)

Intercom also does a lot of things on top of chat like email campaigns, FAQs ("articles"), chat bots, and is somewhat evolving into a bit of a CRM.

Chatwoot focuses on chat as far as I can tell (and so do we at the moment!), so it is certainly another viable alternative if that's what you need :)

Great feedback, we're definitely planning on taking that advice :)

To add on a bit -- it ~seems like chatwoot is just focusing on chat (which is exactly what we're starting with), but we do plan on expanding to other products beyond chat :)

(chatwoot may be doing that as well, but just wanted to mention it!)

Interesting! I'm honestly pretty unfamiliar with C#, but I'd love to check it out and I'll definitely look into SignalR :)

I think one thing that's been really nice about Elixir is how helpful the community has been, and what an approachable language it is for someone like me coming from a Node/Ruby background (and dabbling in some Clojure :P). It's been really easy to get up and running, and also is just a fun language to work with.

So far finding developers to work in this stack has not been an issue, and we're hoping doing a project like this will attract even more developers to Elixir :)

This is great feedback, and definitely something we'll need to think about. I had a similar issue at a previous startup I worked at, where we were basically building SaaS tools for logistics departments at commodity trading companies, and everyone had different edge cases/integrations they wanted from us. It's definitely a rabbit hole I want to avoid...

You mentioned Gitlab, and we're trying to figure out how we can borrow from the playbooks of companies like them (e.g. Mattermost, PostHog, etc.)

For now, we're just focused on getting users to figure out what the most common feedback and feature requests are, but longer term we plan on carving out a smaller niche and figuring out what our "target persona" is.

Curious, do you have any advice on how to avoid these pitfalls?

We'll definitely check it out! And yeah, one of the top complaints we heard from people when doing user research was how expensive Intercom is, so definitely going to try to ride that wave as much as possible like you said :P

Integrating with Dialogflow is definitely on our roadmap! We were thinking of starting off with a relatively simple bot that uses your FAQ to automatically answer common questions that come in, as long as the NLP model has a confidence score above a certain threshold. But certainly something like Dialogflow would give our users a greater ability to customize their bots, so we'd love to do that as well.

Creator here!

As developers, every now and then we come up with cool ideas of things to automate. I remember a few years back when I first started learning how to code and was looking for an apartment in San Francisco, I felt like the world’s cleverest hacker when I set up a script to email every new listing on CraigsList in the neighborhoods I was interested in living in. (This had some disastrous consequences, but that’s a story for another time.)

My only problem at the time was that I would have to manually run this script myself every day. Now, as a more experienced developer, I know enough to know that one approach to this problem is to set up a cron job, or something similar. Recently I found myself wanting to do this again… but every time I want to do it, it takes some effort to remind myself how it all works. At first I thought, maybe I’m just an idiot. But after talking to a few friends, we realized that a bunch of us have the exact same issue. (Though maybe we're all idiots, haha)

So we figured, why not build a little tool that makes this process extremely simple? This is what led to the creation of Taro.

We'd love to hear the community's thoughts on integrations that would be particularly useful (e.g. alerting with SMS, lightweight storage, etc) as we continue to hack on this!