Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by rgthelen 1470 days ago
Congrats on the launch. How is this different than FireHydrant?
2 comments

The CEO of FireHydrant had a less charitable answer last year:

https://twitter.com/bobbytables/status/1403090735038189573

I've been a victim of this too and it sucks. People will flat out copy your business, and while they're at it, they'll go and copy and paste your painstakingly-written documentation as well. This really leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

I always try to go with the OG when I find these types of instances, since they're likely the one actually innovating (I know nothing of FireHydrant, so this is just conjecture).

Apparently not just FireHydrant either. Someone posted on YC about 8 months ago Chris Evans from Incident.io calling them out for copying their Slack and Changelog formats literally word for word.

https://twitter.com/evnsio/status/1442908782405701634

Standing on the shoulders of giants huh

FireHydrant was my worst experience out of every incident manager I experimented with - literally nothing worked during our tests - and after two months of asking they're still refusing to remove our account; we still get a weekly email dashboard.
Yikes! Never like seeing that. Can you email me directly and I will get this sorted? robert@firehydrant.com
Tickets #1452, #1454, #1588. Was told "the account has been removed" on March 22nd, but I continue to receive "Last week on FireHydrant" emails specific to our org, most recently on May 29.
Thanks, emailed you as well. Sorry you ran into this!
Sorry to hear that. I'll do my best to resist asking if you'd like to chat instead ;).

We try to take a very "partnership" centric approach. What that looks like day-to-day is our engineers/success/leadership team collaborating in a shared Slack Connect channel on new features. For a lot of our customers we get deep into the problem and bring in outside speakers from the industry to come do workshops, AMAs, etc. that might align well with the challenges.

This is the fun part about the job!

>Sorry to hear that. I'll do my best to resist asking if you'd like to chat instead ;).

Wow - you're looking for dirt on a company in the EXACT thread that calls out some shady things you've done against them.

Thank you!

Great question, There are quite a few differences, namely in our product design focus. We've taken a more configurable and flexible approach that focuses on plugging into a companies existing stack and their process. Often times we'll have customers send us their entire playbook on what they have now and ask us to automate that as a starting point (e.g. rename Slack channels to my Jira number for incidents, etc). We do this to hopefully reduce the amount of change required when a new tool is brought in. As a result we focus on features such as our Workflows engine that allows for this customization. Another big area of focus for us is unsurprisingly Slack, we think of the other areas of Rootly such as our Web platform to be the backend that powers this.

FH does a lot of things well and has great customers too. They have a sleek UI, strong security posture, and more. Their approach is more opinionated in guiding you through incident best practices. There is no wrong answer here as we hear plenty from customers that want both.

Why did you or your team copy & paste the FyreHydrant docs?
Thank you.