Just in 8 months, we grow our Slack bot from zero to $25,000/mo. Moreover, it keeps growing like crazy.
Based on our learnings we prepared a step-by-step guide on how we did that. I hope it will be useful to you.
We've seen plenty of people going all in building their business on a platform they don't control, then getting mad when the platform they depend on changes how things work.
With that said, are you guys also targeting other platforms than Slack?
I'm sure MS Teams, Discord, etc provide the same foundations for an even larger reach?
FWIW, I'm not sure I'd recommend that. For things outside your control, you've got to deal with the world as it is, not how you would like it to be. Slack own the game for chat bots right now - I think the advice you got from Des Traynor to double down on it is spot on.
That is so true. We were building for Telegram before Slack and was very disappointed business-wise about it.
Now we're fully focused on Slack and it helps us in building a great product for the narrow use-case.
However, of course, we're looking for ways to expand our market.
I'm not sure about Discord (how many of you guys are using it?), but MS Teams, Google Chat, and Stride are the other players that in my opinion will be able to compare with Slack in terms of features and market size.
During an interview I had at Discord recently the lead engineer mentioned they had exceeded 130 million users. Though, there was also a recent bump by almost 70 million people that left Skype and joined Discord in the news recently as well. He told me that Skype is the 800 pound gorilla to beat and that they have around 300 million users or something. They're definitely gunning for them, and Microsoft has changed Skype so much that they've alienated much of their user base in addition to having lots of security flaws. Discord touts their security, two factor auth, IP address hiding, plus having all the features of Skype in addition to the concept of slack-like chat rooms. More than just gamers are starting to use it.
At the moment, Discord is ad-free and other than Nitro subscriptions which let you have animated profile images and use emoticons in any server, which he admitted was an almost unnoticeable revenue stream at the moment, they don't really have a way to monetize the platform. When I asked how they were planning to generate revenue and whether my job would be secure he said they haven't settled on any ideas yet but have a few bouncing around that he wouldn't tell me.
He mentioned that once they reach 600 million users they consider that the break-even point where they've succeeded as a platform and can start considering putting possible plans into action. My guess is that advertising will play a big part, and possibly various other techniques like microtransactions, platform integrations, affiliates, partnership deals, content distribution (movies, music, games), etc. It is probably the break point at which you can afford to anger a percentage of your users in exchange for enough revenue to establish themselves as a self-sufficient organization.
It's sad what Microsoft has done to Skype. I wish they'd stop screwing it up and fix the gaping security and performance issues that were just not there before they bought it and screwed with it's design (probably to merge it into their legacy corporate chat system). Thankfully they made Teams which I think is fine.
>He told me that Skype is the 800 pound gorilla to beat and that they have around 300 million users or something.
>He mentioned that once they reach 600 million users they consider that the break-even point where they've succeeded as a platform and can start considering putting possible plans into action.
He needs to become a 1600 pound gorilla just to hit break-even?
I've used Discord since sept 2015. It's been an interesting journey (my friend develops a bot and has reached 26,000 servers and 3 million users.) It's quite good, but still does not support stereo audio input inside of the client. Canary build has a new experimental audio subsystem so it may be now, haven't tested yet.
Could you tell us about monetization of that bot? Does it make any money? It would be interesting to see whether Discord is already a platform to build a business on.
He doesn't make any money at all as far as I am aware. I think he may have 1-5 patrons on patreon, otherwise it's only ads on his control panel from a small ad company.
I think it depends on what you consider a worthy market -- My daughter, 16, doesn't know a single friend who doesn't have a Discord account. Moreover, the 'group chat' in subreddits is, more often than not, powered by Discord.
Of course, those users are probably using it for its free service, and aren't a terribly attractive market on their own, but if they're at all representative, there are a lot of people using Discord, so maybe a low-effort MVP to prove out the market might be worthwhile.
I think the problem (or should I say "the difference") with Discord is that they don't position it for business communications. However, the product is fully capable of doing that.
So there are some teams using Discord for business communications, but it's not the default use-case. You can prove that by looking at Discord bots on the market and feature requests at https://feedback.discordapp.com
>We've seen plenty of people going all in building their business on a platform they don't control, then getting mad when the platform they depend on changes how things work.
I've always wondered about this. When you depend on another, already-monetized platform to build on, your livelihood depends on a variety of factors not in your control.
What if they decide to make your functionality part of their core product? Charge for API access? Limit/remove API access?
You always depend on something: traffic acquisition channels, competition, market size, etc.
Choosing Slack doesn't mean it's the only platform you're developing for. You can expand the same value proposition to other platforms with the same business users (I can't say the same regarding other b2c chatbots/platforms, though).
My company has a Slack bot product and we've found that we are able to drive lots of clicks the "Add to Slack" button but a very low percentage complete the installation.
Our assumption is that this is because most users that get to the "Add to Slack" button are not administrators and most users won't go through the (frankly poorly designed) "find an administrator" flow... but of course we have no visibility into what happens after the user clicks "Add to Slack" as they leave our control at that point.
Did you have a similar experience and/or do you any advice?
Hi Igas. There could be several reasons in my opinion:
1. You ask for too many permissions. It makes a lot of sense to ask for less because people don't like to share their sensitive information with the product they don't know/trust yet.
2. It may depend on your target audience, but our users in most cases are able to install the bot on their own. So it doesn't hurt our (not yet perfect) onboarding flow.
I'm curious if you could talk about your unit economics: 14,000 teams are using your bot (including some big brand tech companies), but its translating to what feels small, 25k/mo for a 7 person operation.
Here's a quick update on the most popular questions.
1. Are those numbers real or fake in favor of content marketing?
Numbers are real. Anyone from this forum can book a call with me, and I will do a screen sharing of our Stripe/Baremetrics panel. My email is alex at standuply.com.
2. It's not a trend, but a peak number in revenue.
Our revenue breakdown: Feb: $7k Mar: $9k Apr: $19,5k May: $25k June: $13k (as of 20th June). So we'll get a bit less in June. You decide whether it was a peak or it's a trend.
3. It only cost us $23,000/month in advertising
In 18 months we spent less than $2k on paid ads and didn't waste any dollar in 2018.
I love your story! I also have a bootstrapped Slack bot that's been growing well organically.
Question – what's been the best way to find customers aside from the Slack App Directory? And, is the Slack App Directory still your #1 driver of new customers?
Here’s an opinion: it was not very wise to disclose how successful of a concept this has been. It would have been better to cash in under the radar than invite low-end competition from solo developers.
I don't particularly enjoy these articles, but they're hardly unethical. Saying you make X/month is very similar to splashing company logos on your homepage. Service companies typically want to try to demonstrate that they're successful to attract more clients.
With startups/apps it's now popular to brag about your revenue. Keep in mind, this isn't profit, so I find the articles pretty useless. I could start a million dollar revenue company by losing money on each unit sold, but what's the point in that? (unless I'm VC-backed and have a long-term strategy for growth)
When someone writes an article about how much profit they've made per month, then I'll take notice.
Why do people need to know about this magical thing?
Isn't that enough if you solve a problem? Interested people will look for solution and find your magical thing, no need to add to the general cancerous spam of "hey, I'm sure you're going to find that thing awesome, even if you don't need it"
If this is true, why is it so easy to name genuinely good products that failed because of lack of visibility? How do you differentiate your product from that of competitors? How do you get seen in the first place unless you own a very good domain/have a massive sales force?
>I put out several long reads. It helped us to improve our SEO and led decent traffic to our blog on Medium. Overall, my posts received 150k views in 2017.
My takeaway is that it helps people find the "magical thing" in the first place, especially the people who didn't know they were looking for the magical thing.
Of course someone with an existing problem is most likely seeking a solution, but not everyone realizes there is a problem (especially if the existing solution works) until a better solution is shown to them.
How about how we conduct business:
Face to face meetings -> phone/mail -> email -> online meetings, for instance. I'm sure people thought during their time periods that there could be better ways to do this, but they need to see the solution before they jump on board.
Write meaningful / in depth content that is valuable to someone? It worked for Joel on software and 37signals.
It's hard and can be a larger investment, but seems that writing spam content and then spending day/days on optimize ways to spam it through different channels is not that great way to spend your time.
Google should have a better spam filter. Basically all "content marketing" should be classified by Google as spam and get trashed on search results.
After that, perhaps people would learn to search for stuff they need, and find what you built.
--
OR: We could have trusted people who analyze tools that exist and recommend those, not based on who paid more to them or their personal preference, but based on its suitability for such and such tasks.
They decide they want to provide the features you provide directly? See Twitter, Google, Apple, Microsoft etc. It's a very old game at this point and you really should be aware of your risk in being so dependent on what is effectively a closed platform. (i.e. an API does not make a closed platform open) They're providing APIs right now to help fuel their own growth but once that growth levels off, or worse reverses, watch out... they may decide that they want your business and then there will be very little you can do to protect yourself from that.
No problem. BTW, I didn't want to discourage you: it's great that you've got a successful service and it's often a smart move to start on a well known platform. (many of today's successful companies started that way... see Microsoft and IBM ;-) Just be sure to diversify away from the platform lock-in ASAP (i.e. build a bot business rather than a Slack-bot business) so when/if the rules change you're not doing a followup post titled 'Slack destroyed our bot business' down the road.
For example, they've seen how popular your bot is and have taken your idea and implemented it right into their platform. Even if they might not outright block your bot, it will certainly affect your product's future.
It is truly hard to comprehend that one of the most common things successful startup founders recommend is that your startup should have a blog and talk about the company and the product and the engineering, but when that gets shared suddenly it's spam and everyone is crying for blood.
Remember when this used to be a friendly startup forum full of people who liked hearing about interesting technology and how it was made?
Yeah, but let's just listen to those positive commenters and disregard haters. I think if you talk about your story educating others, it brings value to the ecosystem.
I respect companies like GrooveHQ that share their experience and don't conder it as a marketing or spam.
It's probably true and a marketing effort. Keep in mind that it's rarely averaging X/month, but they made X/month at their peak.
I had a great month in my previous business that was 2x all other months. If I wrote an article about that month, I'd probably seem way more profitable than I was.
We use a similar product (Geekbot). It reassuring to see companies like this succeed. A fear is always adopting a great tool into your workflow only to get that "our incredible journey" email.
We use a similar product, and it works great for async "standups". Solve a problem well (I peek at our standup channel - I don't have to screw around with logins or config screens or dashboards), solve it simply (don't try to be Basecamp), and keep it cheap enough - there's a ton of opportunity there.
I can quote our user: "My team are consisting of remote resources, and scheduling a standup suitable to all timezones was a nightmare. And it always ending up as a regular meeting not a standup. Standuply had solved that."
So, for remote teams it can be a huge problem even though it doesn't seem like that.
congrats on your success! Can we see your baremetrics panel?
I think for non technical founders you skipped a very important part of the story - how did you find your initial devs and how did you figure out how to work with them? how much should people set aside for this kind of thing? that really matters.
Just in 8 months, we grow our Slack bot from zero to $25,000/mo. Moreover, it keeps growing like crazy. Based on our learnings we prepared a step-by-step guide on how we did that. I hope it will be useful to you.
Feel free to ask me questions here.