Thoughts on the future of the Slack app marketplace?
I've seen several successful indie Slack apps (Standuply, Pull Reminders, Hey Taco, etc.) that make real money, leverage the marketplace, and stay relatively simple.
Of course there's always the risk of Slack messing with their APIs.
Hi Ryan, I’m the founder of HeyTaco! and thought I’d chime in here. Slack’s app directory has been a huge source for growing my business. It along with word-of-mouth are the two main marketing channels. I spend $0 on marketing HeyTaco!.
With these business platforms (e.g Slack, Microsoft Teams, etc), they’re discovering the importance of the app ecosystems. Apps increase platform adoption, help build brand, and improve overall user experience.
I think the future for app marketplaces in general is very attractive. I’m betting on more competitiveness amongst platforms, deeper relationships with app developers, and better opportunities for new apps.
App developers are going to build where they can make the most money. This makes the marketplace a really important factor for the success of each platform.
Cheers!
Whoa, awesome! Your story and product are very motivating. I'm also hopeful for the future of Slack apps, so glad to hear the theory reaffirmed by someone who's found success in leveraging it.
Taco does pretty well on BotList as well. https://botlist.co/bots/hey-taco
@dougdosberg Doug, your story is super inspiring. I'm embarking on a Slack bot journey now. I'm in DC, can I take you out for lunch at your earliest convenience?
The Slack app directory has been the number one driver of traffic for me with https://appreviewbot.com so far so naturally I'm bullish. I'm curious if we are going to see them try to monetize it in any way.
Have you tried putting it on BotList.co?
Just went to list the bot but I forgot that BotList requires you to pay a membership fee to list your bot. Probably not worth it for me at this point in time!
No worries. Just an indie hacker tying to pay the bills.
@sethlouey - I'll be launching my bot soon and BotList is on the list of places for me to consider listing it on.
What sort of audience are you pulling in?
It's like IH but for automation. Anyone who really wants to automate.
I think I did look into it at one point but I will do so again!
Very cool and good to hear!
Technical question about Slack app development: is the only way to maintain dev and prod Slack environments really to have two totally different apps, and having to manually keep prod matching what's been set on the development app? Sounds fun....
@dougdosberg @freezegun
I have two Slack apps and one codebase.
I like what Microsoft has done with their app manifest. I run a Gulp command locally and it generates both a dev and production manifest and packages them both up.
I personally only have a single Slack app at the moment which has been fine but I haven't had to modify anything major on it since launch so that could change in the future.