OneSquad
Collect data, manage suggestions & appreciations in Slack
We got our first legitimate signup. It was from Georgia and it was through the Slack directory. The team has 400+ users.
They faced an issue while adding recipients to a survey. They contacted me on Intercom. I saw the message 7 hours later due to the timezone difference. But as soon as I did, I deployed a fix. Waiting to hear back from them.
Felt amazing to see a proper user with a real need for the application signing up without any marketing 😍
After making sure everything is A-okay I submitted the app to Slack directory. We had a few back and forths. I had a update the directory listing information a few times until it looked fine.
The app got approved soon. I think Slack directory is the holy grail of Slack bot marketing, obviously. I see this as a soft launch before a ProductHunt pitch.
After a short break from the sprint for 2 weeks, I was back on track and worked on adding the Kudos feature.
Users can use the /kudos command, @mention someone and add a message to give them a kudos. Teammates can join in on the appreciation by clicking on the clapping button.
Use /kudos-stats to get an overview of the leaderboard.
It was an instant thought and I decided to build it ASAP. I wanted a way for users to send out anonymous messages to the admin.
One immediate use case I could think of, was the ability to have an anonymous AMA session.
Users could use the /anonymous command followed by a message and the admin can reply to it without ever knowing who sent the message.
I built the MVP in a week's time.
MVP had the following functionalities:
- Send out custom data collectors
- Recurring schedules
- Get results in desired channels/DMs
- Show aggregate reports
- Show individual responses
Rails made a lot of things easier and I only had to worry about the core functionality.
I started spending 4-5 hours a day after my primary job to build the product 🎊
I decided to go ahead with Ruby on Rails for the ease of bootstrapping the product. I'm quite good in React so choosing the front-end framework was a no-brainer 😄
I went ahead with Heroku and set up the deployment pipeline on the first day itself so that I could use my friends' help to validate the functionalities.
I wanted a simple to use yet powerful data collection tool for Slack. Initially my plan was to build just a standup bot since it's high in demand everywhere.
But then I realized it could be made into something bigger and better. I decided to build a data collection bot that can serve multiple purposes.
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