We didn’t mean to build another product, but here we are

If you've read some of that Paul Graham lore you know how important it is to build a product people actually want.

In this case, it's a product we ourselves wanted/needed (another popular principle of his).

At DailyBot, we were just trying to keep our more "white-glove," Slack-based support channels from falling into oblivion. Mere, our Head of Customer Success, needed a way to track this type of requests without adding more tools (or headaches) to her day. We were already using Zendesk and as you may know, it can get pretty pricey and it still doesn't cover this kind of use cases by default.

So we hacked internally a bot that would turn Slack threads into tickets and help with replies + documentation. It wasn't anything crazy at first, just enough to keep things tidy for us and our customers.

Fast forward a few months… it turned into Syntro.

Now other small teams, solopreneurs, IHers etc. also have the option of a lightweight support assistant without the crazy overhead of more complicated tools. We want to keep it simple, a tool that doesn’t punish you with seat-based pricing, and that avoids the bloat of the more enterprise-y support platforms.

Funny how things you build for yourself often end up being useful to others.

Curious: has anyone else here built something internal that snowballed into a product (even accidentally)?