Show HN: Launching Struct – Knowledge-Rich, AI-Powered Chat Platform
Interesting framing, I appreciate your perspectives on knowledge in chat platforms. I&#x27;ve been looking at AI-powered searches over internal chats (such as Slack) myself recently. However, I do have to wonder a few things.<p>Did you do much research on competitors when coming up with &#x27;scores&#x27; for them against your framework? You define<p>&gt; Contextual Clarity: Each conversation should have a defined title and summary for immediate understanding.<p>And then for <i>both</i> Slack and Discord you give:<p>&gt; Contextual Clarity | 0 | Bad. Must read each message to understand if it&#x27;s relevant.<p>Despite the fact that Discord&#x27;s threads are literally given defined titles (and indeed there&#x27;s a whole forum style channel approach that is literally thread-first as Struct claims to be). I&#x27;d also argue that Slack threads are focused around one initial message which gives a fair amount of context to it, they aren&#x27;t on their own.<p>Similarly you define:<p>&gt; Isolation: Enable clear separation of concurrent conversations to maintain focus and avoid confusion.<p>Giving <i>both</i> products a 0 again:<p>&gt; Isolation | 0 | Bad. Channel level isolation is too broad.<p>Even though both products have threads (not just channels) which are heavily used, and as mentioned Discord has given an entirely new channel type &quot;Forum Channels&quot;<p>Now, I know you come back to some of those points later on in the post (after giving a score that, in my opinion, is very misleading).<p>&gt; Lately, Slack and Discord, have both added threads to allow some level of isolation. But, to achieve that, they had to break away from what made them special -- the liveness of conversations.<p>I mean, Slack has had threads for years and years, and Discord&#x27;s aren&#x27;t <i>that</i> new either. You then say that these break away from liveness of conversations and reduces them to numbers, and yet that seems to be what Struct does for <i>every</i> single conversation?<p>I appreciate this framework is very loose and you&#x27;re trying to make a point to sell your product and way of thinking, but I find it difficult to trust you when you pose analyses such as these.<p>---------<p>However, despite all of the above, the thing I am most concerned about is your pricing. You&#x27;re trying to sell it as &quot;innovative&quot; when you are literally charging $0.13 <i>per thread, per month</i>. The entire point of realtime chat-based applications like Slack and Discord is to facilitate fast moving, frequent conversation, rather than the slow responses of forums and emails. If Slack was constrained to being thread-first, you&#x27;d likely see tens to hundreds of threads a day for a tiny company, let alone a giant one.<p>I&#x27;d love to see if you&#x27;re willing to post some estimates as to how much you expect your early customers&#x27; monthly bills to end up as. This feels extortionately expensive. (And just in case you think I missed it, I did read about &quot;intelligently&quot; forgetting threads but that feels so hand-wavy I don&#x27;t even know how to address it, and part of having the history of something like Slack is that you can realise later on that you need information you previously said, even if you didn&#x27;t think it important at the time).