I was pleasantly surprised to see that LeChat's logo is a cat, even though it looks a little bit funny.
I am curious, are you planning to add integration with external protocols, such as XMPP or IRC? It doesn't seem to be mentioned anywhere on the FAQ page.
Our immediate plan is to provide great native apps for mobile and desktop that will use our proprietary protocol. We like to think of LeChat as "Dropbox of chats", you never leave your conversation as you move between desktop, web and mobile devices. Gateways for XMPP and IRC are further down our list and are more on API/integrations side.
Interesting, I can see how that would be useful, although some of that is already working using XMPP (Google Talk, really).
Is there a way to be notified when you have XMPP integration? Most of our dev tools integrate with it[1][2] and having some of those notifications(build failure, issue fixed) stream into a common area would be very cool.
Sure, if you sign up we are sending announcements about new features.
Dev tools integration is our big focus. So far we have GitHub, BitBucket, CloudForge and Airbrake plus raw HTTP and direct email address for each chat room. One of our customers created a Ruby Gem [1].
I would be a possible customer for this. I use Campfire today, and I looked at your homepage and it looks very similar... can you give some points on which this is different/improved? Thanks!
The actual app itself looks pretty neat. However, I see their pricing and it's "$1 per user per month". If anyone from LeChat is reading this - you should charge more. Although it appears like having a lower price is a differentiator, in reality it will hurt you.
Did your calculation involve cost of customer acquisition? What's your marketing strategy? If it involves any form of advertising, you have to figure out how much it's going to cost you to acquire a single user. Your calculation should also involve things like churn, cost of customer support (even if it's your own time to begin with) etc.
I'm pretty sure you will find it hard to scale with 1 USD per user when most companies will gladly play much more for something that solves their problem.
hi, i wrote the post. As many engineers try to decide what's a "side project" vs startup, i thought it would be interesting to share one team that just made the decision.
I agree to date chat hasn't been done well enough: cross platform, fast effective UI. Looks like LeChat is making inroads, and I think the focus on search is a very good idea.
How are you planning to monetize everything that everyone says? (I presume you're planning to do this, since you have all the data.)
If I quit LeChat, what happens to what I've said? Do I get a copy? Can I remove it from histories?
When people have great search at their disposal they actually start relying on chat to keep their important assets. This enables nice dynamics--the more history they have over time, the more valuable it gets.
If you quit LeChat, or at any other point in time, you can download full history in plain text and in JSON format, which retains important metadata.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 50.8 ms ] threadI am curious, are you planning to add integration with external protocols, such as XMPP or IRC? It doesn't seem to be mentioned anywhere on the FAQ page.
Is there a way to be notified when you have XMPP integration? Most of our dev tools integrate with it[1][2] and having some of those notifications(build failure, issue fixed) stream into a common area would be very cool.
[1] http://www.jetbrains.com/youtrack/whatsnew/ [2] http://blogs.jetbrains.com/teamcity/tag/jabber/
Edit: wrt/ YouTrack, it doesn't support group chats yet(see http://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/JT-18866).
Dev tools integration is our big focus. So far we have GitHub, BitBucket, CloudForge and Airbrake plus raw HTTP and direct email address for each chat room. One of our customers created a Ruby Gem [1].
[1] http://rubygems.org/gems/lechat-rb
- We strive to have the best history search experience. As-you-type very vast search that does not obstruct you conversation view.
- We want to enable having more than one concurrent conversation without needing to constantly switch between tabs.
- We want to provide state-of-the-art API and integration with tools you are using.
But we'll see, obviously. We don't have enough data to dispute your prediction at the moment :-)
I'm pretty sure you will find it hard to scale with 1 USD per user when most companies will gladly play much more for something that solves their problem.
(original LeChat announcement)
I'm pleased to see that Qwl has a different stance on XMPP than the 'lechat' user posted in the thread.
I'm with the folks in avree's linked discussion. IRC already does this for a dollar less per month.
1. you still have to run it somewhere
2. you have to support it
3. there's no search (grepping through logs is not search)
4. you have to use screen/tmux to not miss anything
5. your CFO will probably never use it
I think there definitely is a need in a chat tool that is "easy" to use. Having said this, I think IRC is invaluable, just in a different context.
How are you planning to monetize everything that everyone says? (I presume you're planning to do this, since you have all the data.)
If I quit LeChat, what happens to what I've said? Do I get a copy? Can I remove it from histories?
If you quit LeChat, or at any other point in time, you can download full history in plain text and in JSON format, which retains important metadata.
The ability to view multiple conversations at the same time
Better support for pasting and copying code
Hopefully much better reliability (we use Erlang and do proper OTP release upgrades)
We're pretty fanatical about fixing bugs.