I wonder if it's the same wind whistling sound effect I've been hearing repeatedly since the 90's!
I think I first heard it in a very early game I played.
I'm going to say Ultima, but potentially Diablo.
I distinctly remember being stuck in a part of the game where my character was on a dock or sea shore type area and the wind sound just kept repeating over and over while I figured out how to get past that point.
Then over the years, I've noticed it in so many movies and other games etc.
You hear the initial wind noise, which quickly transitions into a curve that peaks up and down, a short gap of silence and then a second quieter part where the sound curves down and trails off.
I'd love it if there was a similar history I could learn about on it!
Edit: Amazingly, I've just managed to find the exact part of the game I was thinking of [0]
Organisations that don’t use Slack aside, driving this from Slack is a real benefit in my experience.
A system like this lives and dies on the team actually using it, and by allowing them to drive it from where they already are (Slack), we’ve found the team are actually using it and don’t have many complaints about the workflows either.
We've been using AccessOwl since March (came across them via the Slack app store while searching for something to help with SOC 2).
My thoughts:
- The founding team seem to know what they're doing. I've put forward a number of feature requests / bug reports over the last 5 months and they've generally very responsive, often fixing bugs the same day
- They've added a number of larger feature requests over the last 5 months—one in particular being something to help with quarterly access reviews, which has helped to alleviate a real pain point we had
- Driving it from Slack seems to works pretty well for the team and people seem to be using it
- AccessOwl see themselves as a single source of truth for vendors, however, the reality is that it's the vendors themselves that are the source of truth. The accuracy of AccessOwl currently relies on the team using it 100% of the time.
- The design of the product is a little rough around the edges, however, as they seem on top of the product generally, I'm personally happy to work around that for the time being
- Most of the workflows work well enough. Offboarding users for example is better than what we had before.
- Onboarding a new team member is one area that currently falls short. You're able to setup templates to onboard people with, that contain a bunch of apps you want them to have access to, however, you're only ever able to select one template—in most cases for us, that means you can use a template to quickly onboard a new user with about 1/3 of the apps they need, but for the rest of them you're forced to do them one by one, and need to keep track of where you're at outside of the product—it's extremely slow and cumbersome and much worse than our previous method.
- On balance, they have got a promising product, and provided the new user onboarding issues were fixed, would generally recommend it
There’s an update regarding this at the bottom of the post:
> Update edit: A few people have asked me or remarked about the lack of bounty. To be clear, I never actually submitted this bug via their bounty program (but was invited to do so), as was holding out for their new program (see post), and fell down the cracks a bit. Zoom didn’t decide against awarding a bounty – I never submitted for one, and disclosed here instead.
I feel like I should post here as a sort of public service announcement.
If anyone reading this is considering trying or moving to HubSpot, I urge you to take our experience as a warning and seriously reconsider.
We moved to their sales CRM 2 years ago and have been filled with remorse ever since.
It’s hands down the most poorly thought out software package I’ve ever had the misfortune of using.
Aside from our sales performance taking a nosedive, it’s painful to use in a multitude of ways, and everywhere you turn is frustration, inefficiencies and dead ends.
Such was the frequency of our frustration with nearly all aspects of HubSpot, the phrase “fucking HubSpot” even became a meme in our office.
I just found this [0] in their forums from Sonos employee:
“In May, you’ll be able to decide if you want to keep your legacy devices operating with your modern devices, and you’ll be able to put them all into a non-updating legacy system”
So they are actually reversing course to a certain extent.
If there’s one thing Sonos has shown throughout this mess, it’s that they’re really quite poor at communicating things clearly.
They’re admitting a misstep, but they’re not actually changing much.
At best, there’s a vague pledge to update legacy players a bit longer, but they’re still breaking your current whole home audio system, because legacy and modern players will need to be split into two separate systems.
The headline makes you think everything is back to normal, and that they’ve reversed course, but I can’t actually see that much has meaningfully changed.
It sounds like all your speakers will work after May, but if you have a mix of legacy and modern speakers, you’ll be forced to split them into two totally separate systems.
I have to disagree on Hubspot CRM. We moved to it on the startup plan you mention about 7-8 months ago, and have found it very difficult to use in a fast, intuitive and streamlined fashion.
There are key areas that are missing basic functionality (EG: being able to see a list of deals that haven't been contacted recently) and if I could turn back time, I would not have made the decision to move to Hubspot.
A quick note...on your Twitter auth page it's not possible to paste usernames and passwords into the fields. Probably not a huge problem for most but my passwords are at the long and un-typeable end of the spectrum and I normally paste these in from a separate password manager app.
We covered why we're selling in a previous post[0].
The concerns that we have at the moment revolve around the actual process of selling a property on Flippa, for example:
- How do we securely handle the transfer of the website? (it looks like we can take care of domain name transfers with Escrow but what about other parts of the business (e.g. the code, social media accounts etc)
- There seems to be a risk on Flippa that your auction will hit the reserve, you'll be obligated to sell and will be liable for Flippa's 10% success fee and then the sale could subsequently fall through from what I can see, Flippa wash their hands of the process after the auction is finished.
- What other risks are there with selling a SaaS business on Flippa / what steps are critical to a successful transfer / sale that we may not have covered?
Customer support is all dealt with directly via email. In most cases we have canned responses for a lot of the typical support requests that we can respond with.
We're committed to our B2B project so the answer would have to be no.
That said, while working part time on it, we've tried the following of your suggestions:
- We've experimented with pricing for circa 12 months. We've tried our Pro accounts at $9.99, $14.99 and $19.99. Both the higher prices have resulted in a significant drop off of Pro account upgrades. We've also had a "contact us" Studio plan at $79.99 with no takers.
- We've been using Ghost Blog Writers[0] to create content on our blog (great service BTW) which has resulted in an upswing of organic traffic. We've also used this content in monthly newsletters to our customers although we haven't really offered up-selling or discounts via this channel.
- We do interviews with existing Pro customers[1] and post these on our blog.
- From 2008 until late 2012 we ran Facebook and Adwords campaigns. A considerable amount of our customers has come from this channel.
It's closer to $2k per month. We raised our prices recently (e.g. our Pro accounts went from $9.99 to $19.99) but we grandfathered all existing customers at the original price meaning our MRR is less than our current pricing would indicate.
Thanks for the Flippa suggestion...hadn't previously heard of them.
It's not growing organically. Storage & server costs are roughly $150 - $200 per month.
We also have domain costs (we register domain names for our customers so they don't have to deal with the technical side of that) which probably run at around $150 / month.
I think I first heard it in a very early game I played.
I'm going to say Ultima, but potentially Diablo.
I distinctly remember being stuck in a part of the game where my character was on a dock or sea shore type area and the wind sound just kept repeating over and over while I figured out how to get past that point.
Then over the years, I've noticed it in so many movies and other games etc.
You hear the initial wind noise, which quickly transitions into a curve that peaks up and down, a short gap of silence and then a second quieter part where the sound curves down and trails off.
I'd love it if there was a similar history I could learn about on it!
Edit: Amazingly, I've just managed to find the exact part of the game I was thinking of [0]
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9AaSIwGGys&t=455s