ChatFox
Conversations that build Remote Team Culture
We've just launched a Google Calendar integration for our Coffee Chats!
This will let people just connect their Google Calendar and never have to worry about picking a time for a Coffee Chat ever again.
We're still waiting for the Google OAuth approval process - but hopefully that arrives soon!
Another one of our requests from larger companies is implemented - the ability to customize the Icebreaker Questions and Shout Out Values!
What set this off was one larger company that wanted to put their company values in place of the Shout Out Values - what a great use of your company values!
When I was originally building the MVP of ChatFox I decided it was a good time to try out Google's Cloud Run service. It's serverless but with the added bonus of being able to use normal Docker images!
After feeling a LOT of growing pains with Cloud Run - including issues with CRON jobs, slow load times, and general unreliability when interacting with the Slack API - it was time to move on.
I've been using Kubernetes for the last few years and it was the obvious choice to move to! Using Gitlab's amazing Auto DevOps it was a breeze to get it setup and configured.
ChatFox is now running much faster and more reliably!
We've launched a handy feature for Slack admins now - An easy high level overview of how engaged your team is!
We offer three different charts that you can interact with - How engaged your entire team is with ChatFox, Week over Week engagement information, and a breakdown of what activity has what percentage of the usage this week.
After talking with a lot of larger customers with 100+ users in their Teams we've heard a LOT of feedback about how we handle Icebreakers.
Previously every user would get asked to answer a different icebreaker and each answer would get shared in a channel as an individual message - creating a LOT of messages with a large team!
Now we're doing just one Icebreaker per team per week - and instead of sharing the answers individually its all in one thread!
We're excited to see the impact this has on engagement with the larger teams using ChatFox!
After some conversations with some larger teams that are testing out ChatFox we've learned that more settings are needed! We've added the ability to customize what channel is used for what activity.
We've also heard that you're not always giving a Shout Out to one person... Sometimes you want to give it to multiple people! So we've got that added in with this release as well.
Next up - Another feature requested by larger teams, a different format for how we handle our Icebreakers.
After some conversations with early customers we discovered a big need for a lot of them is to customize what day each activity happens - and to be able to opt out of activities they aren't interested in!
We've whipped it together as part of our onboarding process and will be notifying existing customers that they're now able to update these settings.
Very excited to have ChatFox live and published on the Slack App Store! After a few weeks of back and forth with their review team we just got published.
All in all the process with the Slack team was much friendlier and more productive than any review process i've been through before on the iOS or Android app stores!
Finished our initial version that has icebreakers, coffee chats, and shout outs! Built on NodeJS using Typescript and the Slack NodeJS SDK.
We've launched with a few test customers to get feedback on how different types of remote teams are using our features to learn what really works and what really doesn't.
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