General Consultant Discussion

Yea Pat, the world needs a 20th 'team communication tool' looking for the billion dollar acquisition payout... To our friends from the days of Contatta. You probably are aware we chose not to market Contatta and instead chose to focus on Team Communication with a product we now call Ryver. Imagine many streams of communication flowing into a single place for your whole team. Email simply is no longer good for your most important communication. Ryver is the answer to everyone's email problem. As most of you know based largely on your feedback, last fall we decided to transform Contatta into Ryver, and focus all guns on the Team Communications space. This is a new huge software category and we intend to be one of the big winners. Slack is a new product in this category and had a great start. I respect what Slack has done, but Ryver is a superior product and here is why I believe that. Contatta was loved by many during it's beta phase. Our collaboration features are what most of our users welcomed. With Ryver, we took the best of those features and improved them at least 10X. The Task Manager introduced with Contatta will find it's way back into Ryver in the early part of this year. Contact Management features will follow that. The best news is that we made Ryver entirely free. Team Communication spreads through out your entire organization and out to your customers, partners and vendors because you don't have to worry about what it's going to cost to do that. And I mean really free, for teams of any size... not a crippled trial version like Slack's ""free"" version. Here is why Team Communication needs to be free to work best. How can you try Ryver out (if you haven't already)? Easy, just create a Ryver account. Invite some of your team members and start using the best Team Communications product on the market. I think you'll be amazed. Yours truly, Pat Sullivan.

And the way we are going to succeed is to charge nothing, because, hey if WhatsApp can be worth 18 billion with almost no revenue, why can't we??

Maybe they can make it up on volume. ??

Someone invite me - I'm always looking to evaluate these free business models. I think team communications is an exceptionally crowded space. There's a high likelihood Facebook for Work could be the last man standing if they keep a price of free.

Oh, cry me a Ryver, @MarkChinsky - I couldn't resist.

Too funny @BrianKelly ! I'd like to see it too.

I tried creating an account and never got the notice that it was setup

I was able to get in. Looks like Slack with threaded comments - you can reply to specific comments versus just having one ever increasing cheat stream.

Isn't that what Socialcast basically is?

It's very similar - but Slack got a lot of hype because it offers a cheap (free) option that a lot of blogs/journalists use. There are several downsides to Slack (a) Free has VERY limited history retention and (b) No way to reply to messages so if you are in a busy Slack you are forever playing catch up to follow the conversation.

I am curious to know what sort of experience you guys have had with such tools. Have you used them in your organizations? What sort of customers have you experienced with them?

The biggest problem I've seen is getting people to all use them. Unless you have a 'dictator' at the top, people usually fall back to email

Mark is right. People like to email (cc the world and forget to reply all) and use Microsoft Office and send files as attachments. This is a tremendous barrier to break through. I have used Slack for a couple groups and the only way to drive adoption is to make it be the only way to communicate otherwise everyone back to reply-all / ""oh shit I forgot to hit reply-all"". I have used Basecamp with a few customers but largely find that most customers feel they are paying us to fix a problem and are not all that interested in collaborating online. To drive adoption on any group collaboration you have to put your foot down and show that there's no other way to communicate. If it's a volunteer group just forget about it and use email reply all the world / MS Office attachments (aka who has the most current version of this spreadsheet).

Good information. Thanks. I wasn't interested in it as a tool to use with customers, for the reasons Wayne mentions. Ryver's perspective is likely that, since there isn't a clear leader in this new space, they could make headway. Do you have ay thoughts on what 2-3 things they should make happen to not fail? I find it hard to believe that email will always be the preferred way of doing collaboration. IM is quite limited, and so is Twitter, even if they drop the 140 char limit. But I also see all the inertia in Outlook's favor. So, thoughts?

The "" not another account to sign up for and remember a password "" barrier to entry is strong. I suspect email will be around for quite some time to come. Unfortunately Ryver is a pretty obvious clone of Slack. I think most of these group communication tools are trying really really hard not to become irrelevant so they clone the market leader and proclaim that they are better.

Makes sense. Thanks. I understand this better now. I did a search on Slack alternatives. In one site, 3 of the 10 alternatives are MS products. Really doesn't bode well for the others long term...

MS has a terrible hodgepodge of collaboration tools. Off the top of my head: Skype, GroupMe, Office 365 Groups, Yammer. I've probably forgotten 3-5. It's not entirely clear which one(s) may emerge as the preferred solution for MSFT.

Yes, MS has too many. But seems likely to me that eventually they will pull it together. It makes too much sense to have this functionality within the Office suite. More so now that MS seems pretty committed to making Office pervasive regardless of OS.

I'm still amazed that Microsoft hasn't done diddly squat with Outlook since about 2003. Other than face-lifts and slow downs, there is no real functionality improvement . They own exchange server which has huge penetration so it would make so much sense to put skype/lync, remote control/ yammer, a slack like to do list management, and even light crm all into a new outlook

I admit @MarkChinsky that I snickered at this ""Yea Pat, the world needs a 20th 'team communication tool' looking for the billion dollar acquisition payout..."" The thing is that Pat is a smart businessperson and knows that it's irrelevant. If he can build something with even the tiniest bit of substance, he could capitalize on his reputation and flip it to some other company and make a tidy chunk of change. Hard to argue with that approach (and his previous successes).

Yea, but since Saleslogix, has he really had anything (not that he isn't living comfortably on his Act! and Saleslogix cash. He had some kind of flash solution that died. I do give the guy credit, he could just be working on his handicap, but instead is still trying stuff

I'm with Mark. He basically repeated ACT with new technology (SLX). Since then several swings at pitches but memorable hits.