Smithy

🏆 Exit: Smithy was [micro] acquired.

Originally, https://smithy.app/ started as a very simple concept: force threading in a few Slack channels purely at the company Sam and I worked for (Hospitable.com). A quirky internal tooling add-on coming out of the team dynamics at the time, no plans for a full product.

Almost exactly 2 years and several feature iterations later, a few hundred teams have added Smithy to their workspace, and a modest but significant percentage have converted into paying accounts.

Although we had a vision for where we wanted to take Smithy, how we would gradually expand its feature set, our passions were elsewhere and we didn't have the mental real estate or time to give it the attention it needed. We agreed that the moment had come to let go and find a new home for the project.

🎉 We're happy and proud to report that a few weeks ago we finalized a purchase agreement with an acquirer through MicroAcquire.com.

The sale process itself was fairly smooth, if a little long-winded. Most of the time was spent on finding the right fit from several dozen interested acquirers. A few weeks on walking the buyer through the product on a technical level and making sure all accounts and credentials were accounted for.

Apart from the time sink, it was honestly smooth sailing. I highly recommend using MicroAcquire. The platform does its job, and Andrew and his team are great. 👏

From zero, to functional and valuable internal tool, to customer-service product, to profitable SaaS, to micro acquisition in 2 years.

It's very far from a life-changing sum, but an achievement nonetheless and we can now claim the "exit" / "acquired" badge on our entrepreneurial bios. 😉

Keep shipping value.

Quite a few came through our Betalist submission, but many others from talking about Smithy in various communities as well as directly from searching in the Slack App Directory.

Some have just a handful of members, others... well, let's just say A LOT more.

Not all stick around, that's to be expected with any SaaS.

We're now working on setting up calls with some of the teams to figure out their usage better and see how Smithy can help them even more.

About a month ago we submitted our entry to Betalist. Today we got pinged about finally being live on the site!

Check us out here: https://betalist.com/startups/smithy

An upvote would be super helpful if you have an account!

Along with being featured, we rolled out a new landing page design. And, uh... we totally weren't scrambling to finish it in the last couple of hours, nope.

The idea behind the redesign was to have a distinctive look and feel that we could call our own, and which we would be happy driving ad traffic to (which we'll start in the next few days).

A couple of weeks ago we started getting the word out about Smithy in some Slack communities that we're a part of, as well as to our LinkedIn network, and in a Reddit post on /r/slack.

The result: daily signups. At least 1 team is signing up to try Smithy every day, regularly 2-3, and on a few days even bigger signup spikes.

Yesterday we had 9 teams adding the app to their Slack workspaces.

Next milestones:

• Reworking the landing page to better explain how Smithy works on Slack (screenshots and video)
• A better onboarding experience within Slack
• Getting more feedback from current users in preparation for switching to paid plans

Smithy's update was approved by the Slack review team and went live this morning. We rolled out:

• Support for private channels. We launched with public channels only.
• Resolution messages when closing threads. We believe this is huge.
• Auto-closing stale threads.
• Granular, optional permissions. We received feedback that one of the app scopes that Smithy used was causing concerns with the user's security team.

There were a few challenges before reaching this milestone.

1. Granular channel permissions on a Slack app are not trivial to get right if you want a good user experience.
2. We needed to adjust our privacy policy. The adjustment was minor, but this came up in the review, which resulted in a resubmission and a further delay.
3. Supporting private channels and closing messages on threads required reworking some of our tables and code significantly.

Next steps: getting serious about marketing and implementing subscriptions.

Progress on Smithy has been slow. Still zero marketing and still 1-3 days between every install. Plus things are tough at home and work for both Sam and me.

We've just been gathering feedback from the few early users who are willing to chat and slowly working on some necessary improvements to Smithy here and there.

Nevertheless, an interesting insight has emerged from looking at who has gone ahead and taken the plunge with Smithy on their Slack workspace. We're looking at smart grids, energy efficiency software, design agencies, NGO's, and research projects. We were expecting startups and product teams (albeit due to our bias coming from a product team at a software startup).

This is great news for our monetisation plans.

After launching the MVP, we were putting Smithy through its paces on our day-job workspace. Then, suddenly, a wild outsider appears! 🐯

We had set up a Slack webhook to notify us about new signups on a #signups channel in our Smithy workspace. We had done zero marketing up until that point, not even a tweet, so it was both a shock and pleasant surprise when we got pinged that Smithy was just installed on a Slack workspace that wasn't one of ours!

After that, we started getting 1 install every 1-3 days.

It's live on https://app.slack.com/apps/AT1NHTAAE-smithy

This was the first "proper" Slack app that we built, and in particular one that extended core Slack functionality in a mostly invisible fashion, so there was a lot to learn and a lot of trial and error.

Originally, the MVP was meant to be just creating Smithy threads as an authenticated users and automatic non-threaded message cleanup. We quickly realised that threads on their own were only half of the story and a way to mark threads as closed provided a significant amount of additional value to a channel's conversations. So that was the third MVP feature that we decided to launch with.

Smithy was born from the realisation that we needed this sort of tool on our Smartbnb.io Slack workspace. Although over time we reached a point where many conversations in product- and engineering-focused channels were indeed threaded, we still got messages that derailed a channel's flow and organisation. Plus, even threaded conversations were hard to keep track of.

Smartbnb is a fully distributed, remote company with (as of August 2020) employees across 8 countries and 5 timezones. Clarity and focus in communication is vital for us.

Sam and I started hacking away on Smithy in early February, a few evenings per week. Both dads and working full-time.