Garret Heaton

Hey smart guy – stop trying to do it yourself

By Garret Heaton | 1 year ago | 5 Comments |

When we’re at conferences and meetups there are always a few people who come up to us (probably because of our awesome shirts), hear what HipChat is, and say “Couldn’t I just setup my own Jabber or IRC server for free?”

“Yeah, but you wouldn’t get the slick UI, drag-and-drop file sharing, searchable history, and all that. Plus, you’d have to manage the system and teach people how to use it.”

For some reason these points never resonate with this type of person. Solving 10% of a problem by themselves is good enough. What they don’t realize is that people are very willing to pay for the convenience of a hosted service and the things that come with it: a cleaner and more consistent interface, support, frequent updates, and peace of mind. I imagine many startups run into this type of response at some point. Here’s how a DIY mind may have responded to some services which are now very successful:

  • Cloud computing – “Couldn’t I just buy a cheap machine and stick it in a colo?”
  • Flickr – “But I could build my own photo gallery using PHP in 20 minutes!”
  • GitHub – “But git is open source software. Why would I pay you when I can just run it locally?”
  • Google Apps – “Can’t I just run my own Postfix server and set up Horde?”

I’d like to challenge all you do-it-yourselfers to think about the problems you’re capable of solving and how many people could benefit from the solution. If it’s a fair number of them you probably have a great idea for a startup. There are a ton of people and companies out there. Sure it’s fun to solve problems yourself, and it’s a great way to learn, but keep your mind open. There’s always room for improvement and that’s a great way to make money.

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  • http://twitter.com/slevenbits Alexander Ljungberg

    On the topic of not doing things yourself, any chance we could get a Jabber adapter so we can connect using e.g. Adium? Your client app is a commendable attempt but it has a long way to go on the Mac and I’m sure you’d rather focus on what you do best – making it easy to set up centrally controlled company friendly persistent chat rooms.

  • http://powdahound.com Garret Heaton

    I’ll email you instructions for connecting with Adium. Unfortunately when you connect using a generic Jabber client you don’t get all the good HipChat features: file sharing, inline image previews, HTML system messages, history for private chats, YouTube/Twitter previews, @mentions, etc.

  • http://twitter.com/slevenbits Alexander Ljungberg

    Thanks for the email! I’ll be sure to revisit the desktop client as it continues to evolve.

  • Anonymous

    This is unfortunate that you can’t file-share while using a third party IM client.  A lot of us chat on other platforms as well, making universal IM clients ideal to reduce desktop clutter….other IM platforms do this just fine (including other XMPP servers), any chance this will change in the future?

  • http://powdahound.com Garret Heaton

    We’d love to allow for file sharing through other clients, just haven’t had time to build it yet and there has been little demand. By the way, this is the most updated info about our XMPP support: https://www.hipchat.com/help/category/xmpp. Not sure how you ended up at this old comment. :)