Botswick

Today is an exciting (and scary!) day for us, as we've now got Botswick beta launched on https://botswick.com, and are actively seeking early adopters among the Indiehackers community to help validate the product out with us as we iterate on further versions of Botswick.

We know that just because we've launched our beta doesn't mean that our work is over by a long stretch. We've got a lengthy roadmap of features and improvements that we want to be doing over the upcoming months; but at some point you just have to get your work out there into the eyes of the world and start getting real feedback, otherwise you'll never really know who you're building your product for.

Finding out the answer to that question is exactly what we're doing today, and we can't wait to hear what feedback we get from the community and it's users, and collaboratively grow this product together to provide as much value to as many businesses as possible.

If Botswick sounds like a product you'd be interested in, please reach out to me at pieter@pt.studio! We're offering the software for free at this time as feedback from our customers is more valuable than any amount of revenue we could earn at this stage, so please don't hesitate to jump right on in.

Since Botswick started out as a small scale project within PT Studio, it took some time to get some significant momentum and resources going with it, as that's just the nature of the business when you're running an agency. We have to balance both client work and the internal product work we do, so while the first three months were more exploratory and slow going, things really started to pick up pace when we got a very basic proof of concept working that allowed for posting to Slack via webhooks.

Once this concept was realized we actually started using it in our own internal workflows to get notifications about simple things like when a user signed up for a product of our clients, or when an issue happened in one of our CI pipelines, it would go to the proper slack channel for that product and we could take action on it accordingly. The really nice thing with this was that due to the first trigger we implemented being from webhooks, integrating this within our CI was as simple as doing a curl request when we detected an error; and just like that we had error coverage and deploy notifications supported across the entirety of our organization's projects.

With the basic MVP completed and a robust CI infrastructure in place at our studio, we knew that it was time to start working on getting this production ready and into the hands of some actual users so that we could start getting some real feedback.

As our studio has grown, we've found that it's been difficult for us to keep track of the different day to day events that are happening across the entirety of our business. Those events are very important for any business to keep track of, and they were currently buried in a multitude of different services that we had to keep paying for each month.

While it's a completely valid strategy to leverage multiple services to run your business, we found ourselves yearning for a solution that let us pipe events that happened in our key services (Stripe, Google Cloud Platform) into our main communications service (Slack). We also wanted this solution to allow for us to easily interact with those services directly from Slack, and to be able to take action on events that were of importance to us from directly within our Slack without having to hop over to some other service.

Our thinking behind doing this was that if we were to design a solution like this well, we could not only use some of our internal programming knowledge to strongly streamline our internal business workflows and automate away more of the day to day tasks of our business, but we could also do away with some services entirely as they would become redundant.

One such example of this for us was being able to do away with the need for a service like Pingdom. Why pay for something to monitor your uptime when you can have Google Cloud Platform post a message right to your Slack when a site's health check failed? Why not even go further and do proactive integrity analysis on our clusters to see if we can get any early indicators of potential issues before they happen?

As we thought more about Botswick, the possibilities really seemed endless and would add immense value to our business as well as others. It was then that we knew we had to build Botswick.