Startup Journey: Part 5
RIP liveslack.com. Hello chatline.io. Accepting signups
Skype with Slack
Earlier this week I skyped with @ph about us using the LiveSlack name.
It was a nice 50 minute conversation in which I got some good arguments to rethink the name:
- Slack’s brand guidelines are very clear
- There is a worldwide trademark on ‘Slack’
- Products with the name slack in it confuse people. Not everyone understand that the product is not operated by Slack
- If this idea works, we might not want to link our name to a single provider. Hipchat anyone ?
So enough reasons to rethink the name. Although Paul was very understanding he did point out that they wanted us to change the name before we launched.
Additionally I made use of the time to ask Paul about a lot of limitations (specifically channel management for bots) we encountered while working on the prototype. I learned that a there were a lot of feature requests and a few bugs rolling out the bot accounts. Things will get better over time.
Finding a new name
In the last few months I had numerous conversations about the name of our upcoming son. Due to time constraints (expecting the baby any day now) I did not want to spend too much time finding the perfect name.
Let’s just pick a common name everyone likes. Daniel, Jack or something.
You know the idea of this project was to validate our idea and figure out if it‘s worth spending any more time on. So how important is finding the right name ?
We decided to go for Chatline.io
Chat. Line. Chatline dot input output *gnifl*
I really liked the name liveslack.
Prototype ready
I got an email from Sam
Hi Gijs,
That landing page sure looks awesome! Collected any registrations yet ?
Listen I spent the weekend on this and came up with a working prototype. You can check it out at [link removed].
Thinking about the best flow to chat with visitors I think we need to chose from one of below options:
1) every chat get’s it’s own channel. During signup one needs to create a bunch of placeholder channels (chatline-[1–10]
2) all conversations happen in one big channel. Every visitor gets an unique name so operators can reference them.Oh. Make sure to join the #liveslack slack instance before you try it, the widget only pops up when there is an available operator, and I am away for the next few days.
What do you think ?
Opened the webpage to find a white page that showed a chat widget.
Update landing page
Without thinking too much about it I registered chatline.io and pointed it to the landing page. Did a find&replace on the landing page to remove any references to liveslack.
Accepting signups
In last post I talked about the low quality of the signups and the fact that a lot of people leave their email without thinking about it. We need a way to validate if people are interested in a product like this.
Help came when Sam offered me to redo the signup flow and actually get people to try the widget. More about that tomorrow.
The important piece is: We are accepting signups/beta testers! Head to http://chatline.io/ and try it out for yourself!
