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Comment by dchuk | Hacker News Reader

We're using Campfire currently, and had used hipchat before that for a few months. Hipchat was fine on desktop, but holy shit their mobile apps are terrible. They were so bad that we had to move away because we're a fairly mobile group.

Honestly, the group business chat niche is just riddled with "incomplete" products in my opinion. Some are great in the browser but have no native web apps (Flowdock), some have shitty mobile apps with mediocre web versions (campfire and hipchat).

I hope someone with a good set of developers, cash in their pockets, and an eye on simplicity would come in and build a full suite of desktop and mobile apps on the back of a good chat system one day. It's absolutely not a solved problem at this point.

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To be honest, I expect that team to be hipchat. They've got cash now since their acquisition, and they're making steady improvements to their desktop app.

Personally, I wouldn't enter this market, regardless of how good my devs or how much money I had. There are at least 3 polished and loved products. The problems you describe will probably be fixed before another team could come in with a good solution.

Just because there are at least three other services out there means you can't also enter the space and try to disrupt it still?

Campfire is made by a company with a massive and rabid following, and is cross-sold to the users of three other popular products, two books, and a massive blog.

Hipchat is an amazing product which is steadily getting better under the steam of great developers. It is also owned by Atlassian, a company with great execution and a strong track record of successful cross-selling.

So under these circumstances, no, I personally wouldn't enter this space.

You're stuck in a bubble.

Campfire gets a fair bit of attention here, but is unheard of outside the 'startup'/B2B space. The stats they post are laughable - last time I checked it was a few thousand messages a day - which is pretty minuscule.

Hipchat fills a hole as well, but there are literally thousands of different ways to spin 'webchat' and carve a big following out.

Massive market than is open for disruption. Especially when you consider the real incombent is Microsoft in most corporates.

> The stats they post are laughable - last time I checked it was a few thousand messages a day - which is pretty minuscule

That is laughable - as in it can't possibly be right. Can you provide a link to this?

From campfirenow.com: "Over 100,000 people have used Campfire to send more than 60,000,000 chat messages"

Campfire was released in 2006, 67 months ago.

60,000,000 messages, over 67 months, works out at 895,000 a month - approx 28,000 messages a day.

Or one message every 3 seconds. Campfire could be run from a single small VPS.

I think it's entirely believable that the usage of campfire is that low. All credit to them, they've managed to get people to pay for something people don't actually use very often.

You can't just average them out - you think they have the same number of customers now as they did when they started?

Let's assume they doubled in size every year - I think that's a good if imperfect approximation. That would mean 30m messages sent this year, 80K sent today. A far cry for "a few thousand".

80,000 messages a day is still ridiculously minuscule. It's a rounding error. Average them how you like. Assume exponential growth. Whatever. It's still around the same number of messages that go on in say a single channel on freenode.

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