[holler]

What problem was Discord solving when they launched? Twitch already existed, Slack existed. Asking because it's a similar question I'm asking myself as I build https://sqwok.im, a news-focused public messaging app. I chose to use "bleeding edge tech", and have been challenged by peers about whether it would have been wiser to just use some off-the-shelf solution for parts of it vs architecting a fully custom a-z platform. I guess it depends. I don't see a site like Discord or Sqwok having a chance without a certain threshold of engineering to support the early product. That said, there's always the chance it doesn't matter because it's not solving a pain point for users. Sometimes it feels hard to answer without a tangible product to show.

[Macha]

* Skype sucked. Voice call audio quality was unreliable, managing lots of disparate groups sucked, if you had some random join your raid group (its initial market was FFXIV raiders as the initial team had previously worked on FFXIV utilities with guildwork) for the night you didn't really want to add them to your group chat for a voice call, it leaked information that was actively used to DoS people.

* It's users were consequently having to use multiple platforms, with teamspeak or vent or mumble for voice chat and Skype or Facebook for persistent text chat. This was inconvenient adding everyone twice.

* It's hard to explain how much it helped for the "bringing a random into your gaming group" scenario. You could just drop a link into the games text chat and people could join for the night and you didn't have to worry about if they had teamspeak or mumble or whatever installed.

* Teamspeak's free tier had a limit of like 10 users known to the server. Discord did not.

* Slack wasn't a competitor for Discord's initial market. Having to sign up for each instance was a deal-breaker. Discord originally allowed guest accounts, and I think it still does. Also the overhead to creating/managing a new server and adding people is really low comparatively.

* Discord doesn't really compete with Twitch much? People stream to their friends sure, and I have known people who had unlisted twitch channels for like jackbox in the past but that's a relatively late addition, and twitch is much more interested in the big streamers than the long tail anyway.

Obviously discord have significantly expanded their market a few times from FFXIV raiders to all mmo players to all gamers to everyone, but they started with clear problems to fix and fixed them well

[holler]

Thanks for the solid recap, for some reason I forgot how voice chat was a big focus of Discord in the beginning. That might be because I mostly use Discord for non-gaming oss servers where voice chat isn't really a focus, and rather it's just a chat app.

It's interesting how they started out focused on gaming and have since moved away from it. I discovered a new Discord competitor, Guilded.gg, that sprouted up with marketing claiming Discord has abandoned gamers and they're going to recapture them.

It just goes to show that you never know which direction it's going to truly move and you have to be able to pivot. But having a core initial user group that you solve a problem for is key, and having a working product is key as well.

[ldeangelis]

Discord was heavily marketed towards the gaming community that was split between Skype, Teamspeak, Mumble and maybe some others that I don't remember. All of them had some flaws while Discord just worked.

[holler]

Excellent point and that makes sense.. I remember using Teamspeak way back in the day.

[gverrilla]

From my experience only, Discord was the successor to softwares like Teamspeak and Ventrillo for gamers, built as a social tech experiment. It also always had a FUN component to it, so it incentives creativity and people not taking stuff too serious. Children/teen seem to like it a lot.