It really depends on what you want to get out of chat
$2 is a good price to pay if your team chatting needs are minimal. But as your organization grows, especially if it starts to involve a larger team and projects with larger scope and interdependent pieces, your chat needs evolve into more of a communications need. In such cases it may be worth it to look into a more comprehensive chat tool since it gives you a much more powerful communications platform than your AIM or even email.
If a significant chunk of your company's discussion is taking place in chat rooms, it may be time to look into an upgrade.
You'd want something that gives you some standard next-gen functions: great global chat history search,video conferencing, screen sharing, markdown support, distributed team presence tracker, advanced noise management tools, dedicated integration efforts (integration to basic collaboration tools like asana, trello, etc should take minimal effort)
Keep in mind Slack is hardly the only other alternative in this game. Zapier gave a really good overview the other day, including Kato, who (full disclosure) I work for. https://zapier.com/blog/best-team-chat-app/
also @shalmanese makes a good point about justifying the cost.
the barriers to entry are not as you may think. Yes, anyone can set up an etsy/ebay store, with some paypayl express check out thrown in. But if you'd notice, it's not often that women complain about the price of tampons (though they are getting more and more expensive), it's really the entire experience that is dreadful.
To actually bring forth a useful subscription product that's delightful, and always delivered on time requires thoughtful design and implementation. Every woman is different, they require different numbers of tampons each cycle, of different absorbencies, and in their preferred brand. They don't want a backlog of products in their own bathroom that takes up room for months at a time, only to run out unexpectedly when they most need it.
This may seem like a laughable or even trivial issue to tackle, but half of the population has periods and everyone complains about them, why not do something to improve that situation?
Lynn Tao, here, CEO of Juniper (www.getjuniper.com). I figure I’ll chime in and address some of the questions and comments here:
1. Yes, the majority of the women I’ve talked to have thought that we have a brilliant idea.
2. Why not just buy from Amazon subscribe and save? Of the women we talked to, many have little insight into how much they use. This is not because they’re dumb — if I were to ask you how many bottles of shampoo you use in any given month or year, you can probably estimate, but you may be off. That’s something you use on a daily basis. A box of tampons is something you use every 28 days — estimating how and when to tell Amazon to deliver that seems trivial, but in practice, one ends up with either a shortage or more likely, backlog. Inconvenient.
3. This leads me to my next point: why is this a tech culture vs a culture culture issue? Because tampons are needed by different women on different cycles. You can use paypal or shopify or maybe even an esty store to deliver this type of thing once a box. To actually get it to the set-it-and-forget-it state, and scale it up, you’d need to invest in infrastructure that’s a bit more involved than an internal wiki. Tampon delivery and Late should never be in the same sentence together. We comp all the Juniper boxes that are delivered even one day late.
4. Why not just buy a huge box? Like someone already said – there’s a space issue. Some women, my self included, like to switch between different products during the course of a period, which means they have to buy different bulky boxes that has to take up a lot of space. Again, inconvenient. Juniper eliminates that need.
5. While some women are embarrassed to buy it, that’s not the biggest pain point. My customers are not timid girls, they’re women. However, being busy women, it’s inconvenient to not have them when you need them the most, and convenient stores only carry a limited number of brands, Walgreens and big-box stores will carry more brands but consumer still have to go to them. In Manhattan, there’s a drug store on every corner, in other cities and towns it’s not the case.
6. re: Gourmet snacks and Tampons being a weird combination to ship: Our customers love that they get to savor high quality treats around the time of the month when it feels extra stressful. Our treats rotate every month to feature something new, so there’s a surprise element to it as well. A good surprise.
7. Washable tampons? Unlike pads, tampons go into a sensitive ph-balanced body cavity. Washing it and reinserting it may introduce bacteria into that cavity and cause infections and even TSS. Diva cups are wash-and-reuseable, and some women love them. However, other women are used to pads or tampons and simply do not prefer them, even if they like the concept.
Bottom line: Yes, chuckle worthy subject. But this is far from trivial. Half of the population has to deal with a monthly period, and everyone complains about it. If we can have pizza and books delivered to us, why not tampons? I could go into a fem-empowerment rant on why we didn’t have this service earlier, but it’s 9am on the west coast and I have to go run a company now.
If a significant chunk of your company's discussion is taking place in chat rooms, it may be time to look into an upgrade.
You'd want something that gives you some standard next-gen functions: great global chat history search,video conferencing, screen sharing, markdown support, distributed team presence tracker, advanced noise management tools, dedicated integration efforts (integration to basic collaboration tools like asana, trello, etc should take minimal effort)
Keep in mind Slack is hardly the only other alternative in this game. Zapier gave a really good overview the other day, including Kato, who (full disclosure) I work for. https://zapier.com/blog/best-team-chat-app/
also @shalmanese makes a good point about justifying the cost.