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Slack Bot Business Tutorial: From zero to $25k per month

standuply.com

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Re: Slack Bot Business Tutorial: From zero to $25k per month

#61
post #3

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.

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?

>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.

I've always wondered about this. When you depend on another, already-monetized platform to build on, your livelihood depends on a variety of factors not in your control.

What if they decide to make your functionality part of their core product? Charge for API access? Limit/remove API access?

Re: Slack Bot Business Tutorial: From zero to $25k per month

#62

Sometimes I wonder how much of these "we started making $X/mo and heres how" are true and how much are really just more content marketing spam?

Highly unlikely to be content marketing spam. The audience for this kind of post is completely different from the audience for the product itself.

True. I have no idea what their product does nor why would I need it.

Re: Slack Bot Business Tutorial: From zero to $25k per month

#63
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

During an interview I had at Discord recently the lead engineer mentioned they had exceeded 130 million users. Though, there was also a recent bump by almost 70 million people that left Skype and joined Discord in the news recently as well. He told me that Skype is the 800 pound gorilla to beat and that they have around 300 million users or something. They're definitely gunning for them, and Microsoft has changed Skype so much that they've alienated much of their user base in addition to having lots of security flaws. Discord touts their security, two factor auth, IP address hiding, plus having all the features of Skype in addition to the concept of slack-like chat rooms. More than just gamers are starting to use it.

https://variety.com/2018/gaming/news/discord-turns-three-120...

At the moment, Discord is ad-free and other than Nitro subscriptions which let you have animated profile images and use emoticons in any server, which he admitted was an almost unnoticeable revenue stream at the moment, they don't really have a way to monetize the platform. When I asked how they were planning to generate revenue and whether my job would be secure he said they haven't settled on any ideas yet but have a few bouncing around that he wouldn't tell me.

He mentioned that once they reach 600 million users they consider that the break-even point where they've succeeded as a platform and can start considering putting possible plans into action. My guess is that advertising will play a big part, and possibly various other techniques like microtransactions, platform integrations, affiliates, partnership deals, content distribution (movies, music, games), etc. It is probably the break point at which you can afford to anger a percentage of your users in exchange for enough revenue to establish themselves as a self-sufficient organization.

Re: Slack Bot Business Tutorial: From zero to $25k per month

#64

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'm curious if you could talk about your unit economics: 14,000 teams are using your bot (including some big brand tech companies), but its translating to what feels small, 25k/mo for a 7 person operation.

Re: Slack Bot Business Tutorial: From zero to $25k per month

#65
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 use Discord daily as the main communication tool for a remote dev team. We have a voice and text channel for each project and works great.

Re: Slack Bot Business Tutorial: From zero to $25k per month

#66

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.

Re: "we grow our Slack bot from zero to $25,000/mo."

"Or your mattress is freeee"

Re: Slack Bot Business Tutorial: From zero to $25k per month

#67

Sometimes I wonder how much of these "we started making $X/mo and heres how" are true and how much are really just more content marketing spam?

Want me to do a screen sharing of our Baremetrics dashboard? Reach out to me at alex at standuply.com to book a call.

I'm amazed at the hostility here these days :( It's very accommodating of you to offer to share additional metrics.

To be honest, my interest isn't intense enough to warrant my time for a screen share, much less yours. I will keep an eye on your blog, though.

ETA: I can't seem to find an RSS feed for your blog :(

ETA2: It's at https://standuply.com/blog/feed/, but don't see a link to it anywhere.

Re: Slack Bot Business Tutorial: From zero to $25k per month

#68

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'm curious if you could talk about your unit economics: 14,000 teams are using your bot (including some big brand tech companies), but its translating to what feels small, 25k/mo for a 7 person operation.

They're 12000 km away from Silicon Valley - seeing the names, most likely in Russia. $25k/mo feels enough for a 7 person operation.

Re: Slack Bot Business Tutorial: From zero to $25k per month

#69
post #28

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.

Google should have a better spam filter. Basically all "content marketing" should be classified by Google as spam and get trashed on search results.

After that, perhaps people would learn to search for stuff they need, and find what you built.

--

OR: We could have trusted people who analyze tools that exist and recommend those, not based on who paid more to them or their personal preference, but based on its suitability for such and such tasks.

Re: Slack Bot Business Tutorial: From zero to $25k per month

#70

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.

My company has a Slack bot product and we've found that we are able to drive lots of clicks the "Add to Slack" button but a very low percentage complete the installation.

Our assumption is that this is because most users that get to the "Add to Slack" button are not administrators and most users won't go through the (frankly poorly designed) "find an administrator" flow... but of course we have no visibility into what happens after the user clicks "Add to Slack" as they leave our control at that point.

Did you have a similar experience and/or do you any advice?

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