I was excited to launch my slack bot but only have 3 users after one week
Hello folks,
5 months ago, I decided to build this slack bot(https://ideaio.xyz)) to collect the team's voice without bias. Back to the time when I worked in corp, as an introvert, I was hesitant to share my thoughts in a meeting room, especially when there is a loud or aggressive person in.
This app allows participants to type their thoughts privately before discussing them in public so that introverts also have a voice in.
As a solo founder, from Feb to May, I wrote code, put up design, and did all the hands-on work. The messy Slack API (both old and new version are mixed) drove me crazy for a week. ;-) I also put up my website on betalist which got me around 50 signups.
Fast forward to one week ago, I finally launched and shared my release email with signed-up users. Unfortunately, during one week, there were only 3 users.
This is not a success story to share, YET. I wonder if anyone wants to try it and any feedback is welcome.
Thanks!
Thanks for sharing your experience! I do like the idea of secret / silent brainstorming, however my team is too small to make use of it.
We also released two Slack apps. Last year we created Loqbooq, a decision log for projects and this spring we released Macarons, a chat roulette app for Slack.
Our experience is similar to yours. (Including the trouble with the messy Slack API 😄).
We did get some signups, but it was quite underwhelming. Before we had only made apps for Mac and iOS and there it is much easier to get a user base because people actively search for apps in the App Stores.
I personally think the Slack App Directory is not used very much (but I have no data on that). Probably most Slack users only install the most common integrations that are recommended by Slack automatically like Zoom or Google Drive and never look into the App Directory. Slack is not promoting it a lot, either.
I think the only way is to make your app (or rather your landing page) findable in the web by people who try to solve this very problem. However, it is of course quite hard to get a high google ranking for a new page.
I have a small improvement suggestion to your landing page, though. Maybe you can zoom in on the screenshots or make them clickable for a larger version. It would be helpful if users could see more details of how the app works before installing it.
And just like you, I am curious if other devs have had similar difficulties with their Slack apps — or if anybody has a very successful Slack app, that would also be very interesting to learn from.
Glad to see I'm not alone in this world. ;-) Just visited your app, looks really nice! I'm thinking if there is any use case for your product - something that needs trackable records like financial/ethical/lawyer stuff.
I'm curious how long it would take Slack to approve the first version of your app. For mine, it's been two weeks without any response.
Good idea, I will create some high-resolution pictures for the landing page.
Yes, review times for the Slack App Directory are extremely long. For us it took 6 and 8 weeks, respectively. That's no comparison the Apple's review times for the App Store (1-3 days). On the other hand, contact with the review team was very pleasant.