That’s a fair critique if the goal was 1:1 feature parity with Slack (2,400+ integrations, workflows, huddles, etc). If that is the definition of maturity, we will indeed never catch up—and that is by design.
As an ex-Salesforce team, we are well aware of the legacy architecture constraints that Slack operates under and how that drives up their infrastructure costs per user.
We spent months building a custom sync and storage engine from the ground up specifically to avoid that legacy tax. Our pricing isn't a 'deep discount' strategy to mask lower quality; it reflects the fact that our structural cost to store and search text is orders of magnitude lower than the incumbents.
We aren't trying to build a 'cheaper Slack clone' with all the same bells and whistles, we are building a focused, high-performance tool for teams that just want the core communication experience to work perfectly, without paying for the decade of technical debt.
I wasn't defining as feature parity and didn't think you implied that anywhere.
If you've come up with a way to perform as well as Slack at the basic multi-client message service at launch, that's great. "that doesn't suck"/"that just works" reads to me like more the claims of a low cost MVP that hasn't solved those issues yet. (Probably because they're overused.)
Only speaking to your marketing and not intending to impugn your team credentials/experience.
The main feature you seem to be interested in is the fact that you’ve saved yourself 100x infrastructure costs on your back end and that the app performs well. But that doesn’t benefit end users at all, that isn’t a solution to business pain.
That ability to integrate is the core of Slack’s identity. That’s the main reason to use Slack instead of its predecessors. Slack competitors like Teams, Zulip, and Mattermost all offer easy ability to integrate with anything that can make a web request.
You site’s marketing copy dunks on Huddles but I think it’s the other essential functionality to include in a chat application. You’re saying I can’t have a video/screen sharing call on your application when I can do that for free with Discord?
IMO this package you’re advertising is kind of a contradiction and/or a no-man’s land.
It’s like you’re charging $20 for Notepad.exe when the Microsoft Office suite is $100, and then your selling point is that it’s fast and lightweight. But then your customers could just get Notepad++ for free elsewhere.
I’m concerned for you as far as having a buyer persona or ideal customer profile.
People who buy your product for its low price have to supplement lost features by paying for other stuff.
People who don’t need all the features of Slack could just use something free like Signal, WhatsApp, Matrix, Discord, etc, and they might actually GAIN some features in comparison.
People who buy your product to avoid bloat arguably don’t really avoid it because they have to constantly leave your app and use other stuff to supplement it.