Hi folks! Just in 8 months, we grow our Slack bot from zero to $25,000/mo. Moreover, it keeps growing like crazy. Based on our learnings we prepared a step-by-step guide on how we did that. I hope it will be useful to you. Feel free to ask me questions here.
I love your story! I also have a bootstrapped Slack bot that's been growing well organically. Question – what's been the best way to find customers aside from the Slack App Directory? And, is the Slack App Directory still your #1 driver of new customers?
These marketing channels worked the best: Content Marketing, Product Hunt, Social Networks.
Congratulations! What steps are you taking to protect yourself from slack shutting you off? Not that they would but you have all your eggs in someone else's basket?
Why would a company that relies heavily on bots shut us (or another valuable) bot off?
What's the solution to the problem of hating the Content Marketing game? I think the fear of having to deal with writing spam blogs/emails is one of the bigger mental hurdles to my eagerness to build a product like this.
Stop thinking of it as spam and start thinking of it as customer outreach? I mean you have to let people know about this magical thing you've built somehow .
No, don't stop thinking of it as spam. It is spam, and you're part of the problem.
Unethical practices that work are still unethical practices.
Congratulations! What steps are you taking to protect yourself from slack shutting you off? Not that they would but you have all your eggs in someone else's basket?
Why would a company that relies heavily on bots shut us (or another valuable) bot off?
Maybe they want to start writing their own instead?
Congratulations! What steps are you taking to protect yourself from slack shutting you off? Not that they would but you have all your eggs in someone else's basket?
Why would a company that relies heavily on bots shut us (or another valuable) bot off?
For example, they've seen how popular your bot is and have taken your idea and implemented it right into their platform. Even if they might not outright block your bot, it will certainly affect your product's future.
What's the solution to the problem of hating the Content Marketing game? I think the fear of having to deal with writing spam blogs/emails is one of the bigger mental hurdles to my eagerness to build a product like this.
Stop thinking of it as spam and start thinking of it as customer outreach? I mean you have to let people know about this magical thing you've built somehow .
Why do people need to know about this magical thing?
Isn't that enough if you solve a problem? Interested people will look for solution and find your magical thing, no need to add to the general cancerous spam of "hey, I'm sure you're going to find that thing awesome, even if you don't need it"
We've seen plenty of people going all in building their business on a platform they don't control, then getting mad when the platform they depend on changes how things work. With that said, are you guys also targeting other platforms than Slack? I'm sure MS Teams, Discord, etc provide the same foundations for an even larger reach?
That is so true. We were building for Telegram before Slack and was very disappointed business-wise about it. Now we're fully focused on Slack and it helps us in building a great product for the narrow use-case. However, of course, we're looking for ways to expand our market. I'm not sure about Discord (how many of you guys are using it?), but MS Teams, Google Chat, and Stride are the other players that in my opinion…
I've used Discord since sept 2015. It's been an interesting journey (my friend develops a bot and has reached 26,000 servers and 3 million users.) It's quite good, but still does not support stereo audio input inside of the client. Canary build has a new experimental audio subsystem so it may be now, haven't tested yet.