I quit my engineering job at Slack to build a Slack bot
Before I started at Slack, my dream was always to create my own business, but I lacked the skills and the understanding of how businesses actually worked.
After 4 years at Slack as an iOS engineer, I'm now the founder of a business that runs on it. I learned a ton of skills; technical skills and how a business and team works together.
But I also saw opportunity in the product in itself, as a platform for other businesses to thrive — and the results have shown with examples like Halp being acquired by Atlassian and Slack's own investment in businesses built on their platform through Slack Fund.
Seeing Slack serve as a home base to hundreds of integrations and services opened my eyes to the potential of building a business that can serve its customers primarily through the Slack platform.
We think bringing a first-class product experience into Slack where businesses are already doing their work will make teams and organizations much more productive.
We're launching for early access and would love for your feedback on our landing page: https://www.clap.team
Roast us if you have to, I can take it.
Love the landing page! Great job!
Feedback:
Keep up the good work!
I appreciate the feedback Scott and thank you! We definitely need to explain the need of the product better.
Very inspirational!
🔥 thanks Michael!
Solid product, think appreciation is not happening often enough unless people force themselves or you force people to do it in regular intervals.
Hopefully this will help make it a habit
Thanks Stefan!
Good strategy Anthony, get the experience first and learn from being out there working for others. Then do your own thing. It can make all the difference to win or lose. sadly a few do try to startout on their own too early and without that experience and realise they don’t know what they don’t know.
Exactly! Going into the job knowing what I wanted to get out of it made all the difference.
Someone with a long term plan ;-)
How have you tested your pricing? I am always amazed how much people will pay for add-on bots, but $33/month seems a fair bit?
Second quick question if i may,... by day i am cto at www.clickacall.live and we’re currently brainstorming platforms with marketplaces where we could add our ‘click to make a video call’ widget. Do you think Slack is somewhere to consider?
The vision is key!
This actually is my test with pricing, I haven't seen pricing by channel (I've only seen per user), so we had some wiggle room to play with the price here. We ended up on this price making an assumption about the average size of the team in the market we are targeting and charging similar to what it could cost if the model was per user instead. It ends up being more beneficial for larger teams, but we're okay with that and we think there's value in the simplicity of the model and we'd love to grow with any team or organization. But of course - we plan to play with this model and were always open to more premium (or less expensive) plans in the future.
TLDR; we made an educated guess, but we hope to work through it with our customers.
I do think Slack is somewhere to consider if Slack provides the audience you're looking to target, but I have to add that Slack has a strong partnership with Zoom which I think would compete in this space. I don't think that is a reason not to do it, but I think it should be taken into consideration of how you would approach this audience and platform.
I love these bots, they really mean a lot to people working alongside you and breaking their back to make the work/culture better by going the extra mile.
So thank you for working on happiness and team-culture products!
I do however have one question:
How do you prevent the same person from winning over and over the kudos? I remember working in a remote-first company where every Xmas the same engineer would win literally 80% of the awards, year after year, sure he deserved them but the rest of the team literally felt demotivated.
They would never win.
So the managers decided to limit the amount of nominations so that if someone was nominated too many times they would automatically remove the nominations from the count.
I think it was smart, a nice way to re-propagate the kudos so to speak.
(I was part of the team and one of the people who never won anything)
That makes me super excited to hear someone has experienced this problem before and I’m not crazy! So I really appreciate you taking the time to comment.
This is something we’ve been thinking about but we haven’t gotten around to building a solution yet. Our plan is to have appreciation posts at some arbitrary cadence where people that don’t win, still get recognized for the votes (their contributions) publicly in channel.
The solution you had on your team is a great one too! And something we will talk to customers about and consider for sure.
Landing page looks good. I got a good idea of what the product does in a few scrolls.
I would add 2 sections on this page:
Thanks for the feedback!
We actually have a pricing page attached to the navbar at the top of the page - maybe we should make the navbar stick.
A section for our target audience is a great idea - are there any examples of this that you could share?
Super cute and interesting concept. You definitely has the advantage to take a slack app the next level. Keen to follow your journey! @Welliamanthony
Thanks Felix!
Congratulations. What does Clap do?
Good luck on the new beginning!!
I appreciate it!
That's why for some, it's important to have a job before going all-in building something.
Yeah, I definitely agree, I wouldn't have been able to do it without getting my foot in the door, getting an understanding of the industry and experiencing the ups & downs of building a product at scale.
This comment was deleted 4 years ago.
Thanks Elyse!