Do you use any tools to conduct async meetings? (Ex: Slack-bots for stand-ups)
Hi guys,
Since the beginning of the pandemic, async meetings have become a popular term across the board. A lot of tools and plugins have come out and a number of them focus on developer use-cases (like stand-ups and status updates).
However, I'm not seeing much usage data or feedback from real teams. So I want to ask -
- Are you guys using any tools or Slack/MS Teams bots for async communication?
- Have you tried any?
- What are your thoughts on tools like Dailybot, Range, AgilePolly?
I'm asking because I'm thinking of working on building one myself. Why? They can be cheaper and more flexible to accommodate different kinds of async meetings. Maybe a better dashboard. It's just a thought in my head right now.
I'm just curious to hear if you guys have used any tools for async meetings. And if yes, how has your experience been? Are they effective for you as a developer?
We've used many the async standup bots, but after hating almost all of them (or they wanted us to pay ridiculous prices we decided to release a better one for the community Standup & Prosper. The community edition is free.
There's something like over 1000 companies running it today.
My advice is, unless you are building it just for you and want the experience of building a slack bot that specifically does this, I wouldn't waste your time. It isn't financially viable as a product to run. It costs more than we pull in revenue, and it doesn't have much of an upsale.
Woah, this is really really interesting. Standup & Prosper looks really neat.
You addressed the exact fear I had - whether this can be profitable in the long run. Do you have any thoughts on why the bot has issues with revenue? Is it that people are generally unwilling to pay for bots? Is it the competition? Or is it the significance of the value proposition?
I'm also curious about acquiring customers. How long did it take you to reach the current figure? Was acquisition mostly organic or paid? I've never come across a lot of content about the Slack Marketplace.
I apologize if I'm asking a lot of questions. This was just really interesting to read and a lot of questions came to my mind. Thanks for sharing!
The cost to value just isn't there. No one wants to pay for this because they think it should be free, so we offer a free version and premium version. But let's assume ever member we have is paid. That's ~1000 companies at around 20 people users per company (sometimes a lot more).
So charging $1/user/month, nets us $20k MRR or $140k MRR. That's one engineers salary. That means we can't afford to have two developers. We can't afford to run advertisements, nor work on additional features, investigate or research in user groups. Not to mention here are costs to running the bot. While we are super cost conscious, it still comes to be ~$100/month. That's shelling out over $1k per year for something that doesn't return value.
Maybe we'll get there organically, and without effort, but realistically we still have support to do for about 2hrs/week, small feature improvements 3hrs/week. And that's it. Slack breaks shit all the time, it's a terrible development platform, and MS teams is worse. Also if we were to integrate with more than that, it would take ~6hrs per platform per week. Which doesn't seem like a lot, but again you have to remember you still aren't making any money with that. And that doesn't even start to come into opportunities to actually grow the business.
Really really insightful. Thank you so much for sharing this :)
I've thought about this a bunch and once wrote an article about it.
https://www.fitzsimons.dev/thoughts
One thing that occurs to me is that what I really want (as a developer) is a decision making bot, not a stand up bot. That 30 min meeting where a dev, designer and PO all have to get in a room to figure out what data we need and t-shirt size a feature. That's the meeting I'd like to go away.
I'm unconvinced there's a marker here but those are some of my thoughts.
I love the app idea, my question is how much will you pay for it? I'm assuming like $10 per MAU would work for you?
A developer is $100 /hr. A PO and Designer are $80 each. If I was going to build this app, I'd probably try for more like $100 a month.
If I build this, you will pay $100/month... so a team ~10 people. You are ready to commit to ~$1000/month. If you say yes, I will give this to you, and it will be best decision making app, you ever used. :)
Sorry you misunderstood me. I'm not going to make this app, but if I was, I wouldn't sell it for less than $100/mo. I'm also not going to buy this app, since I don't make purchasing descisions at my day job.
Exactly.
Email?
not really. we just do daily standups (we call them
#tatts) and then we meet once a week to talk product. pretty simple. just use our own communication tool.That's great! You guys have it figured out :)
it's working for us. i am looking for a
product manager:This is really cool. I just went through the company handbook and I love what you guys are doing (and how you're doing it).
I'm a PM and I'm doing something similar to what you're looking for. Would you be up for a chat?
what's your pm philosophy?
I'm afraid I don't have a clear answer to that. I'm a fairly new PM (graduated in 2020, started 7 months back). As the sole PM for a product that's still in beta, I think I have still a lot more to see before I can talk about my philosophy.
I think I'm too young for the role. But I hope I can work with a team like yours someday. All the best :)
:)