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Derek Shanahan
@dshan · GM @ SuperRewards
Two of the smartest founders I know are back at it with Memo, a note-taking app that's built right into Slack. Great post on building this + the challenges of building for Slack here: https://blog.memo.ai/10x-your-sl...
These guys built on top of Twitter back when that was cool. Mircea & Cristian, what is it about building products that work well on larger platforms that keeps you doing it? How do you navigate the risks of building on top of emerging platforms?
And having first released Pogo, what made you pivot towards Memo?
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Mircea Pașoi
@mirceap · Co-founder Memo.AI
Thanks @dshan for the kind words! ❤️
The tl;dr behind our pivot from Pogo (a Slack bot) to Memo (a note-taking app integrated with Slack) is that bots and conversational interfaces are deeply limited, and that more often than not interactions are better done through GUI than language. We go deeper into that on our blog:
https://blog.memo.ai/pogo-web-ap...
Great question regarding building on top Slack! Besides the distribution potential, we think it's worth the risk for two reasons:
1. B2B software doesn't have the same network effects as B2C software, so it's unlikely that any player will have a monopoly on the market (like Facebook has for example). Basically, there will be multiple players in team communication (Microsoft Team, Hipchat, etc.) and in productivity in general (Google Apps, Dropbox, Github, etc.) and we plan to integrate with each of them (we started with Slack, since that's what we use day to day).
2. For now they have a very clear and consistent platform strategy (public roadmap, ideas, etc.) that is fundamentally aligned with their business model. More integrations are good for Slack since it makes their product stickier, but, since they don't make money off ads, they're not competing with developers for attention (unlike social media).
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Ben Mehling
@bmehling · Healthcare @ Crossover, Reflexion, Mirth
@mirceap Very interesting concept here. Due to cost and ability to run 'on prem' (for security reasons), we're on HipChat. We are evaluating "Hangouts Chat" too. Would like to hear any details you can provide on roadmap/timing related to HipChat
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Mircea Pașoi
@mirceap · Co-founder Memo.AI
Hi @bmehling , we haven't looked deeply at Hipchat, but we do plan to support it later down the road. In the short-term, we'll add support for G Suite and GitHub login, do you use either of them?
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Ben Mehling
@bmehling · Healthcare @ Crossover, Reflexion, Mirth
@mirceap We are invested in the G Suite ecosystem. It sounds like you're focused on integration w/ them as OAuth providers (great!). I'm really hoping that "Hangouts Chat"* provides 'good enough' functionality for us as there's a lot of advantages for us to stay w/in one "suite". Perhaps as Hangouts Chat becomes more widely released, you'll consider supporting that. Thx!
* https://www.producthunt.com/post...
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Mircea Pașoi
@mirceap · Co-founder Memo.AI
@bmehling Yeah, Hangouts Chat looks very promising, I'm not sure if they have a developer API yet though. As soon as we get access to it, we're going to investigate and see how deep an integration we can build.
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Ben Mehling
@bmehling · Healthcare @ Crossover, Reflexion, Mirth
@mirceap 👍 thx!
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