SupportBell

Contemplated this for a few days; decided to go ahead with it.

Product Hunt launches have been a milestone for Makers, and this is the first-ever product I'm bringing to the platform. It's nerve-wracking and exciting to share your baby with the world, especially one built in such a short time frame!

As of the time of this Milestone, we're trending as #5 Product of the Day, with 27 upvotes!

No matter the outcome, this entire experience of building SupportBell has been an amazing learning experience, culminating in this very launch. Really couldn't ask for a better Capstone for the end of my ODNC Fellowship.

Wow what a weekend!

Surprised myself by managing to finish an MVP in just 4 days.

By the end of the 3rd day, fatigue was starting to kick in. There’s good lessons in product management here.

While I managed to finish an MVP, I downscoped significantly what I had initially planned to build. The singular objective of wanting to ship an MVP served as a good forcing function.

Here’re just some of the features which I left out:

• Publishing an App Home within Slack
• Making the app mobile responsive (left a message indicating it’s built for desktop only)
• Inviting users to the Slack channel within the app (left a link with instructions on how to do it within slack instead)

Often it goes against base instincts to ship something that you don’t feel is ready. But in a similar vein, as makers we tend to let that fester and projects don’t get shipped.

After leaving out the above features, to me as the product owner, the product still feels complete. It remains to be seen if there's enough value to justify a price, but from a feature set perspective, definitely MVP worthy!

Now the question, still unanswered: Should I launch on Product Hunt?

Decided to give this another go. Giving myself an extension; going from 2 days to 5 days. Let's do this.

Had a chat with some members of my Mastermind group from ODNC2. Was quite encouraging and that conversation led to giving this project a second breath of life.

Also contemplating if I should launch this on Product Hunt (if I do get around to finishing it). Think it'd be quite a good story!

Will post updates when I finish things up this weekend and about whether to go about launching on Product Hunt.

Sadly, 2 days was too little. I couldn't finish.

There are some learnings and high points though!

This is my second Bubble app, after RewardNation. In these 2 days, one thing that really stood out was how much faster I have become (despite not finishing)!

When I first started building with Bubble, it took me 2 weeks to build OAuth with Slack. This weekend, it took me 1 day to build both Slack OAuth and Intercom OAuth. Insane!

My design skills within Bubble have also improved! One of the focus points for this weekend was that I wanted the product to be aesthetically pleasing. I even planned a full half-day to just work on making the product aesthetically pleasing to use.

I'm very proud of myself on these points.

The day of the challenge!

I had spent Friday night scoping and refining the idea in more detail.

Turns out, there's a lack of integrations between Intercom and Slack. Given how robust the ecosystem is for both software, this came as a surprise.

In my past experience using Intercom, it houses a wealth of data once a company starts to use it at scale. However, few support agents are aware of this data, nor do they have access to it. We've seen how the empowerment of individuals in an organisation can improve a team's performance, and I thought to bring this data to better visibility within teams in Slack.

To scope the project within a weekend, I decided to focus on a very small feature within Intercom - Conversation Ratings.

Decided to challenge myself to a mini hackathon. Using Bubble, I would try and build a SAAS within a single weekend - 2 days.

I would take the 7th and 8th and spend 8 hours each day working on it.

Spent the night brainstorming ideas within the B2B space that might be doable. The scope had to be small, given the severe time limit, yet be able to provide some value to somebody.

I had just been setting up Intercom for RewardNation (my full-time startup) during the week and it came to me to try and build something for the Intercom ecosystem.