[padseeker]

The best engine for generating a startup idea? Find a successful company that charges per user, then build a competing product, and don't charge per user. That's it.

It would be nearly impossible to this for Salesforce. But for a lot of other applications like Slack and Dropbox, you could carve out a profitable niche.

[ddorian43]

This is just "replicate a startup cheaper" with extra steps.

[EGreg]

We did that at https://qbix.com

As part of it we released open source platform covering all use cases from chat to events, videoconferencing, etc. And it interoperates with Discourse and other open source projects, in case you want to use them instead.

See the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LvbFg1aaFE

[ilrwbwrkhv]

What is your MRR?

[EGreg]

You mean for the company itself? Not revealing that publicly just yet.

But as for the open source platform, for products like Linux or FreeBSD or Discourse, what's the MRR?

[steveBK123]

agreed, and the moat around slack is much smaller than they think it is

[EGreg]

didn't Microsoft Teams eat their lunch already?

https://medium.com/swlh/why-microsoft-teams-has-been-overtak...

[PedroBatista]

Not quite but they are trying.

Microsoft Teams now has the most users but they have been pumping money into it like it's free. It's a typical SV move, let's see how long it's sustainable, ie. enough time to kill everyone else.

[akmarinov]

Teams is so awful. It constantly logs me out, while I’m in the middle of a meeting, talking.

From the perspective of other users, I just quit the call all of a sudden. How can that be acceptable UX?

[paxys]

And how are the hundreds of Slack clones that did this working out?

[padseeker]

Notice I said profitable niche. You won't magically become the profitable behemoth that Slack will. But you can build a company just on this one angle.