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Garret Heaton

HipChat is 2 Fast 2 Furious

By Garret Heaton | 2 weeks ago | 3 Comments |

Happy 2nd birthday, HipChat! We launched two years ago today and have been working nonstop to help your team get things done, stay in touch, and have fun. Here’s what we’ve been up to since last year:

We’ve also made major improvements to the reliability and speed of our service and have over 10 times more people chatting every day than we did a year ago. Almost every week in the past year was our biggest ever (apparently everyone goes on vacation during the last week of August). Here’s to another exciting year! We’re grateful for your support and are excited to share the wonderful things we have on our roadmap with you.

Pete Curley

Price changes, they are a-comin’

By Pete Curley | 3 months ago | 29 Comments |

UPDATE: The new pricing is now live! Let us know if you have any issues signing up under the new system or upgrading from an older plan.

Why are you changing your prices?

When we first launched HipChat, we based our pricing model on what similar companies in the space were doing (it seemed like a good place to start). The general trend seemed to be that you have several tiered plans based on a number of factors like number of users, storage, and miscellaneous features.

After living with the current system for the past year we’ve found that it fell short in a few areas:

  • Small teams were paying for the Plus plan to get additional chat history, even though they had nowhere near the 30 user limit. That’s lame.
  • We have a lot of groups with hundreds of members now. Our current system doesn’t work well at that scale, which means we actively spend a lot of time doing custom billing. We’d rather be building features.
  • It just feels complicated. You have to compare number of users, features, file storage and all this other stuff just to get your team on board. Our actual product is far simpler than our pricing.

So we’re switching things up. Not only is our new system a lot simpler, we believe it’s more fair to smaller teams, good for our business, and better for our product.

What are the changes?

We’re scrapping the complicated plans and feature-limiting and switching to:

  • $2 per user, per month.

Every user will get…everything.

  • Unlimited storage
  • Unlimited chat history
  • Unlimited SMS messages

We’re also keeping our free plan around (for 4 people) and added support for yearly billing.

When will this be happening?

November 25th, 2011 (two weeks from today)

Do I need to do anything?

If you’re already a paying customer: Nope, you’re good. You have the choice of upgrading to the new pricing model or staying on your current plan. If the new pricing is cheaper for you (which it probably will be if you’re a smaller team), then go ahead and upgrade to the new pricing when we roll it out on November 25th. If you prefer to stay on your existing plan, you can do that as well.

If you’re on our free plan: The good news is that the free plan now includes unlimited storage, chat history, and SMS. However, we’re changing how we count users. It used to be that you could have many users in your group but only four could be signed in at a time. In the new system, you can only have four total users in the system.

If you’re currently on your 30-day trial: You should check and see if our existing plans are cheaper for your team than $2/user/month. If they are, upgrade before November 25th you’ll be locked in at that price. If you don’t upgrade before then, you’ll pay $2/user/month.

If you have any questions or feedback feel free to contact us.


Pete Curley

A tale of a ridiculous billboard

By Pete Curley | 7 months ago | 12 Comments |

If you drove up 101 North in California between Palo Alto and SFO in the month of April, you probably saw our billboard. Then you probably thought: did this stupid thing actually work? How much did it cost? Should my startup get a billboard? Here’s what we learned.

Billboards are expensive. In the SF Bay Area, they can cost upwards of $30k/4 weeks depending on location and availability (Apple pays almost $50k/4 weeks for theirs and have them leased out all year). Those prices were out of our range. But like any scrappy startup, we figured we could outsmart the system and get big impact for relatively little money. I had a theory that sometimes billboards get booked, but for whatever reason the buyer backs out or doesn’t get the artwork done on time. The only thing worse for CBS than selling a billboard for cheap would be having a big blank billboard. I asked our CBSOutdoors rep to ping us if this happened. It only took a few weeks before they needed to fill some space.

Our billboard’s info:

  • Size: 12′x40′
  • Run time: 4 weeks
  • Total cost including art work and taxes: $6,999

The design

I had just a few days to finalize the design and get it off to the printers. We had a big decision to make. As a relatively low-profile company, should we clearly present our value proposition? Point out our competitors many weaknesses? The problem with billboards is that your audience can take very little action. They have to actually see the billboard, remember the name, and search for it when they get to their final destination. We thought that if we could get some press and buzz online, people could click through to our website resulting in far more actual visits. Crazy billboard was the way to go.

We’re big fans of the online community Reddit where users make “Rage Comics”. They’re crudely drawn characters developed by the community that are used in comics that any user can create and share. We used one of our favorite characters, the Y-U-NO guy for our billboard. He basically just asks why people aren’t doing something (like using HipChat).

The response

The response far exceeded our expectations and continues to pay off today. Just to be clear, we didn’t tell anyone about it. We didn’t submit it to Reddit, Digg, or any news site. Shortly after it went up, it was all over the place: Twitter, Tumblr, FAIL Blog (in the “Wins” category), and every startup’s dream, TechCrunch. It also caused a ridiculous rise in searches for “hipchat”. The billboard has been down for weeks but when we’re wearing our HipChat t-shirts, we still have random people come up to us and scream “Y U NO USE HIPCHAT” in some sort of confused Spanish/Italian accent.

Most importantly we got a lot of new, happy customers (the actual goal of any advertising campaign).

There was also a slightly negative reaction. People thought that we were a huge company and that our marketing team was ruining an internet meme. The reality is that we’re just three guys that thought it would be really funny. Although it made us sad that the Reddit community didn’t like it, we know that the overall title of a post dictates how people will react to it.

What happened to the billboard?

I’m actually not sure. We were told they’d be able to use it again if we contracted another billboard. I was hoping to get it fleece-backed and use it as an enormous blanket.

So, should your company get a billboard?

Maybe. You have to be really confident that you can come up with something crazy enough to create buzz, online and off. A helpful exercise if you do get a billboard: drive up and down 101 looking at existing billboards to see which are the most effective.

Here are my observations:

  • Don’t overdesign - You’d think that if you’re making something 40 feet wide, it better look great. This isn’t the case for most billboards I notice.
  • Use big, sans-serif fonts – You have just a few seconds to get something across. A name, an idea, a feeling. If you need to use text, make sure people can read it.
  • Dark text on light backgrounds are the easiest to read. Avoid using a blue background, it blends in with the sky.
Pete Curley

We’re not like Yammer or Chatter, and we don’t want to be

By Pete Curley | 12 months ago | 16 Comments |

We go to a lot of networking events to pitch HipChat and there’s one question we always get: “Oh, so HipChat is like Yammer?” This is quickly cleared up by asking them if they know the difference between Twitter and AIM, which they do. I ask if they can imagine using something like Twitter to replace the IM tools they currently use with their coworkers (AIM/Google Talk/Yahoo!/Skype/IRC). It’s always a “no”.

I don’t blame them for not knowing the difference between all of these tools. I blame the hot space and all the buzzwords that get thrown around: team collaboration, real-time, social business, etc. Salesforce even has a competing product to Yammer called Chatter, despite the clear absence of any chat functionality. As soon as people hear that a company does some form of “communication for companies” they just throw them all in the same bucket. Well, let’s clear this mess up.

How is microblogging different than group chat and IM?

Microblogging (Yammer and Chatter) – the sharing of short status updates that can be directed to followers, groups, or individuals. It’s a nice  replacement for non-critical emails (think of your Facebook News Feed). For example, the CEO of a company wouldn’t email employees every piece of news about their competitors, but he might post it on Yammer so the people following him can see what’s on his mind.

Group chat and IM (HipChat) - real-time, synchronous chat with people or teams. Departments and teams can share code, files, and ideas to work and make decisions faster. It’s also a great replacement for face-to-face meetings.

Here’s an example of a recent team chat we had while shipping our new features page. Imagine if we had to collaborate on this through email or microblogging, it would have taken forever.


There is more than enough room for both IM and microblogging

Don’t get me wrong, I think a lot of big companies can benefit from Yammer and Chatter. It’s a great way to keep everybody in the loop without blasting them with emails. They bridge the cultural divide between execs and the employees that follow them.

Nearly 100% of companies, regardless of size, need instant messaging and group chat. So although microblogging will be a part of how companies communicate in the future, I’d be betting heavy on IM and group chat (and we are).

Garret Heaton

What’s HipChat made of?

By Garret Heaton | 1 year ago | 0 Comments |

At meetups people are always asking questions like “Hey, what’s your stack?” or “What do you use for analytics?” It’s a great way to learn about worthwhile tools and services (and sometimes start a heated debate.) We thought it’d be fun to share our technology profile to satisfy your curiosity and support the awesome services we use.

Services

Languages

  • ActionScript – desktop client (AIR)
  • HTML/CSS/JavaScript – website
  • Objective-C – iPhone/iPad app (coming soon!)
  • PHP – website
  • Python – chat server and other services
  • Ruby – for Chef

Server software

Anything else you’d like to know? Have a tool we should check out? Please let us know.

Chris Rivers

Giving back – 5 reasons to be free for non-profits

By Chris Rivers | 1 year ago | 1 Comment |

(Hip) ChatAs some of you may know, we offer the HipChat Ultimate plan for free to non-profit chartiable organzations (note: this doesn’t include every non-profit, like schools and government institutions). While you could probably get dozens of reasons why this is a good or a bad idea, here are some of the top reasons we decided to work this way:

1. Charity

The work done by many non-profits is invaluable all over the world. Making it so those organizations can do their work better, easier, and faster is our way of giving back. Often, non-profit employees are separated by great distance (hosting events, providing charity to impoverished areas, etc.). Having a tool like HipChat can really come in handy when keeping everyone in the loop.

2. Exposure

Whenever we provide HipChat for free to non-profits, we ask only one thing: if you use it and like it, let other people know. Whether it be chatting at an event, a tweet, blog post, or forum thread, letting people know what helps you get work done is good for everyone involved. Lots of companies tout their sponsorship of non-profit events or associations, but without lots of cash in our bank account (yet!) philanthropy is a little beyond our scope. This is our own way of ‘sponsoring’ the good work that these organizations do.

3. Sometimes you get a paying customer

It’s true – some non-profits have lots of money. And sometimes those organizations will gladly pay for your product, especially if it’s a time-saver (and money-saver). To be clear though, we never demand that any qualified non-profits pay for HipChat.

4. Free feedback

Lots of non-profits are set up just like normal businesses. There are departments, teams, projects, etc. We’re always looking for feedback in everything we do and just like our paying customers, they offer it up.

5. It’s easy

Some people might say, “Well, you should make non-profits with money pay for HipChat. Only give it to the ones that can’t pay.” We’d agree with you, but in reality, it’s easier to offer it for free to anyone that fits the criteria. We’re here to help other businesses succeed and there are lots of companies that are willing to pay for HipChat. Our business isn’t going to live or die by getting a few more non-profits to pay for it.

Are you a non-profit looking for a communication tool?

Check here to make sure you meet the criteria, sign up for HipChat, then contact us to get the discount. That’s all there is to it!

Garret Heaton

Happy 1st birthday HipChat! – A year in review

By Garret Heaton | 1 year ago | 0 Comments |

Wow, what an amazing year it’s been!  Today we’re happy to celebrate the one year anniversary of our public launch. In the past year we have received an incredible amount of feedback, learned a ton, and changed the way that thousands of businesses communicate.

There were many important features that didn’t make it into the initial launch (gotta get that minimum viable product) but we’ve had a productive year. Big additions include:

Behind the scenes we’ve increased our servers 5x, moved from a dining room into a real office, and raised $100k. We gave out tshirts to awesome people at SXSW and sent stickers to users all over the world. We’ve also had a few late night server fixing sessions, fixed some seriously annoying bugs, and had a ton of fun.

Our users have been busy too. Many teams have sent hundreds of thousands of messages while working to launch impressive products of their own. We’d like to thank all of you for making us a part of your business. Your bug reports, patience, and help in spreading the word about HipChat have been a big help.

We’re growing quickly (every week in 2011 has been our biggest ever) but know there’s still a lot to do. Keep an eye on this blog and Twitter so you’ll be the first to know when we release our native iPhone app, XMPP access, and all the other goodies we have planned.

Garret Heaton

The Way Things Don’t Work

By Garret Heaton | 1 year ago | 0 Comments |

Last Wednesday we were painfully reminded how much it sucks when your service goes down. We lost a server that was a single point of failure and had to move all of its services to a new machine. It kept us offline for about an hour. The next day GitHub and Facebook both suffered surprising outages and confused many programmers. No matter how big you are or how much money you put into your architecture, things are going to fail.

Obviously your just-launched startup isn’t going to have the availability of Google, and it shouldn’t. Maybe you’re bootstrapped and running on a single server — that’s fine (and a great way to save cash). But as you grow you’ll need to remain aware of your service’s weak spots and incrementally improve its ability to handle failures. ‘Incrementally’ is a key word here. Your service doesn’t need to be capable of five nines of availability before you’ve seen if the idea is even going to work out. On the flip side, it can’t have weekly outages once you have traction and paying users. In the middle you’ll go through various stages of improvement which probably look something like this:

  1. The “epic fail” stage – Everything’s running on one server. If it goes down your entire service and homepage are unavailable. Users don’t even see an error message. This is usually where you start.
  2. The “oh crap” stage – If a critical service is lost the service is mostly unusable but can at least let users know there’s a problem going on.
  3. The “uh oh” stage – Critical services are highly available and it’d take a major infrastructure failure for the core service to become unusable. Things may be a little slower during a failure but many users won’t notice.
  4. The “smooth sailing” stage – Your system can self-heal and recover from all expected failures automatically and users are unaffected. You only have to get involved when sh*t really hits the fan.

At any startup infrastructure upgrades must fight for time alongside new features, bug fixes, performance improvements, PR, and a million other things. There’s always a risk of downtime, just like there’s always a risk of losing customers, an employee, being the target of an attack, etc. It’s all about balance.

As for us, we obviously still have a service that’s a single point of failure and we’re working to fix that. Thanks for your patience during the outage last week.

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.

Pete Curley

Does your web service need a desktop app?

By Pete Curley | 1 year ago | 2 Comments |

Most “influencers” out there will tell you to stay away from making desktop apps. They’re hard to program, a pain to update, and just aren’t as sexy as web apps. We agree with that advice most of the time (we love Gmail and despise Outlook). But at some point the benefits of desktop apps are undeniable and laziness of influencers becomes apparent. We set out to build the best instant messaging and group chat service and our desktop app is a big part of that equation.

The benefits of a desktop app

  • Notifications – We used web-based instant messaging at previous companies and we missed a LOT of messages. This leads to an email or even worse…the tap on the shoulder. “Hey, you get my message?”
  • Runs when you start your computer - We typically don’t like apps that invite themselves to the restart party but imagine trying to get 60 people at your company to keep one web page open, all day, and you can’t message them if they close it.
  • Speed – Web apps have to do more work to communicate with the server (at least until all browsers support HTML5 WebSockets). Everything is slower as a result.
  • Consistency – With Adobe AIR, we know our app will run almost exactly the same on Windows, Mac, and Linux (notifications are handled differently on each OS).
  • Drag and drop file sharing – A real timesaver, now available in some browsers with HTML5.
  • Clipboard paste - Designers rejoice! Take a screenshot (or layers from Photoshop) and paste directly into HipChat. We convert it to a file to be shared in seconds.

Why do you also have a web app?

When we launched HipChat in January, to my surprise, the loudest feedback we got was about the lack of web app. We banged out a near clone web version of our desktop app in a few weeks to a happy crowd. Based on the loudness of the outrage I predicted that HipChat users on the desktop app would be 50% and 50% on the web. I’m glad I was wrong. 93% of HipChatters use the desktop app. These numbers could also be because our desktop app is seriously amazing, or conversely, that our web-app is seriously terrible (which it isn’t ;) ). Most people use the web version when they’re out of the office or if their workplace doesn’t allow them to install software.

I hope this gives you a little more courage to wander into the realm of desktop apps. But remember, don’t build one just because you can.

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