These engineers quit their jobs to start LeChat

http://www.hunterwalk.com/2013/03/these-engineers-quit-their-jobs-to.html

by Qwl • 13 years ago

26 28 13 years ago

jfim2• 13 years ago

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.

Qwl7• 13 years ago

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.

jfim2• 13 years ago

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.

[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).

tedchs• 13 years ago

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!

dguaraglia• 13 years ago

Haha, not any cat either: that looks like a fairly decent logo rendition of Grumpy Cat. But yeah, it kind of works nicely with the name.

karterk• 13 years ago

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.

lechat• 13 years ago

Could you please elaborate on this?

proexploit• 13 years ago

You're not going to make enough money.

ximeng• 13 years ago

What does "We perform continuous encrypted offsite backups for customer data." mean?

Qwl7• 13 years ago

We perform backups of chat history, accounts and any other customer data, encrypt them and upload to multiple locations outside of our data center.

samstave• 13 years ago

Under what circumstances are you going to decrypt those and hand them over to federal officers/LEO that ask for them?

avree• 13 years ago

There's a lot of good discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5202381

(original LeChat announcement)

I'm pleased to see that Qwl has a different stance on XMPP than the 'lechat' user posted in the thread.

Helianthus2• 13 years ago

Is this anything other than LeChat's advertisement for angel investors?

I'm with the folks in avree's linked discussion. IRC already does this for a dollar less per month.

hunterwalk• 13 years ago

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.

Qwl7• 13 years ago

I guess similar argument can go for GitHub/BitBucket versus internal Git server, yet GitHub and BitBucket are very popular for private repositories.

Helianthus2• 13 years ago

Uh. I don't see the relation. You can run your own IRC server.

richardkmichael2• 13 years ago

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?

Qwl7• 13 years ago

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.

richardkmichael2• 13 years ago

You have an opportunity to do interesting experiments with your pricing model.

znq• 13 years ago

What's the differentiator to HipChat? https://www.hipchat.com/compare

rekoros4• 13 years ago

Much better search

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.

These engineers quit their jobs to start LeChat

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