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Comment by midislack | Hacker News Reader

I’ve always wondered about building a startup on another startup’s back. What happens if they cut you off? Is getting bought up by Slack the end goal here? Seems like a big risk, one whim at Slack and you’re toast.

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We have seen Slack start investing in this area with their own Workflow Builder they announced last year. One of the big use cases they highlighted was incident response. We haven't ran into any customers trying to leverage that just yet though as still a lot of heavy lifting required.

IMO what makes Slack so power is their app ecosystem. We aren't too worried about them shutting that down or competing with us. We see the awesome folks on the Slack Platform team continue to invest heavily there.

But if Slack wants to seriously compete in this space we'd welcome it. The more attention and competition the better. Most accounts we approach we've found they didn't know off the shelf solutions existed!

I'm not familiar with Workflow Builder. Does it have a separate data retention scheme? Slack seems to have a big problem in that information quickly ages out, the search is pretty bad, and, in some cases, the data is actually ephemeral and will just disappear. Incident response is one of the categories that I want to preserve. Does Rootly address any of these problems?

OK, I see at the end of the demo that there is a chat transcript, so that's useful. Does it differentiate between incidents if there are multiple active incidents? Where is that archived stored?

Rootly would address that problem, we keep a database of all of your incidents and metadata (impact, timeline, participants, metrics, etc.) on our Web platform separate from Slack. You can customize a data retention policy with us if you want but it's helpful to be able to quickly search for similar incidents without trying to find it in Slack channels.

It does differentiate between incidents if there are multiple too. We'll even warn you if you're opening an incident and another one that could be related is also active to avoid duplications.

And of course we keep the garden walls low on the product. You can export any of this data out via CSV, JSON, API or via our integrations (Airtable, Google Sheets, Looker, etc.).

> information quickly ages out

Only on free plans. Corporations that have customers with SLAs that they're doing incident-response for probably aren't using Slack's free plan.

But even if they are, the data's also not actually purged from their systems. It's still in the Slack-workspace archive export, if/when you do one of those. They just hide it from you. Paying for a plan un-hides it.

It’s actually pretty common to start on the back of an incumbent. As a startup gains success it can do more to reduce dependency by building more of the end to end experience and distribute risk to more than one partner.

That is spot on. We're investing in our Web platform which has the exact same experience and quite a few companies running incidents from there.

But the Slack ecosystem has been great for us so far. Easy to develop on and fairly flexible in terms of what we can do. I think the most challenging part is going through the review cycle, can take longer than expected when you're constantly shipping new features!

The risk is lower when you're not actually competing directly with that platform. For instance, if you're building a Twitter client reliant on the Twitter API, that's a bigger risk since you're directly competing with Twitter.

Unless Rootly is grossly doing something negligent, the chances are extremely low that Slack will not allow Rootly to build a Slack app.

Yup that is a very good point. We make Slack even stickier for their customers and ours alike.

Let's hope slack itself doesn't start using rootly for incident response :)

Although this post is largely focused on our integration with Slack, we have a standalone Web platform that does the exact same. We have quite a few companies (especially MS Teams shops) run incidents solely from there.

This also serves as a backup when Slack goes down, users can continue using Rootly (top 5 most common questions we get).

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