Honest feedback: seeing the promise of 'free, forever' as a selling point on some early-adopter SaaS actually puts me off. It's a promise that is always broken. I don't buy it.
I also think that the marketing is pitched too heavily towards what Slack is, and what this product isn't. It's target towards someone who hates Slack rather than someone who wants the product for what it is, but most people who hate Slack are probably using it because their org says so, and their org doesn't think it sucks (because it has stuff like compliance and auditing and other legal what-have-yous).
Maybe I'd use it for some low-key personal thing, or maybe I'd just host an IRC server for the hell of it, but if I was running a startup I'd hold off on signing up until it matured a bit.
One of the ideas I have if I ever build a Saas or any tech related service is sustainability. I have written extensively about it but I am gonna be transparent about how much would be our costs, what tech stack we are using and literally everything and projections about it and how much we reasonably profit from our work on a project.
I don't want to screw over someone but I want my project to be sustainable and that too preferably without requiring VC funding ever.
Heck, I might even raise a kickstarter with all the info before I would require VC funding.
But also, I do feel like that there are services which can really reduce the cost of servers and I love cost optimizing servers (Read my other comment where I recommend some european services to them which might even be cheaper than their current stack but I do think that cf workers are very heavily subsidized by their CDN/security feature selling to entreprises where I have seen their contract sizes even go into 200_000$ or sorts)
> most people who hate Slack are probably using it because their org says so, and their org doesn't think it sucks
I agree in part but you are underestimating the power of inertia. A lot of organizations use Slack because they use Slack. Moving from Slack to something else is a headache. The OP could build an objectively better product than Slack by every single measure as accepted by every single stakeholder in a business, and still not take business away from Slack.
The current positioning is probably the best for right now. The people launching new startups who don’t love Slack might come across Dock and the pitch may resonate. As a mature product with thousands of paying customers, positioning as “Slack that doesn’t suck” won’t work to steal away Slack’s customers and Dock will need to mature their positioning, but that’s a future challenge for a different stage in growth.
I'd also love to see some Slack interoperability. We use and pay for Slack, only because our customers use Slack.
It is a competetive advantage to reach our customers via their chat platform. Slack being the walled garden that is, it's basically a Slack-tax we pay.