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

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

#91

Post by eksemplar »

alexxtomsk wrote: post #15
bmelton wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it depends on what you consider a worthy market -- My daughter, 16, doesn't know a single friend who doesn't have a Discord account. Moreover, the 'group chat' in subreddits is, more often than not, powered by Discord. Of course, those users are probably using it for its free service, and aren't a terribly attractive market on their own, but if they're at all representative, there are a lot of people using Di…

I think the problem (or should I say "the difference") with Discord is that they don't position it for business communications. However, the product is fully capable of doing that. So there are some teams using Discord for business communications, but it's not the default use-case. You can prove that by looking at Discord bots on the market and feature requests at https://feedback.discordapp.com

They would have privacy concerns if they did. We’d never use facebook for business for instance, the same is true for Discord.

Maybe it’s different for American companies but in they EU you’d be hard pressed to sell something that monetizes privacy data.

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

#92

Post by alexxtomsk »

eksemplar wrote: post #91
alexxtomsk wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the problem (or should I say "the difference") with Discord is that they don't position it for business communications. However, the product is fully capable of doing that. So there are some teams using Discord for business communications, but it's not the default use-case. You can prove that by looking at Discord bots on the market and feature requests at https://feedback.discordapp.com

They would have privacy concerns if they did. We’d never use facebook for business for instance, the same is true for Discord. Maybe it’s different for American companies but in they EU you’d be hard pressed to sell something that monetizes privacy data.

Agreed.

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

#93

Post by ggg9990 »

alexxtomsk wrote: post #2

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.

Here’s an opinion: it was not very wise to disclose how successful of a concept this has been. It would have been better to cash in under the radar than invite low-end competition from solo developers.

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

#94

Post by enra »

boon wrote: 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.

Write meaningful / in depth content that is valuable to someone? It worked for Joel on software and 37signals.

It's hard and can be a larger investment, but seems that writing spam content and then spending day/days on optimize ways to spam it through different channels is not that great way to spend your time.

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

#96

Post by hangtwenty »

alexxtomsk wrote: post #86
alexxtomsk wrote: post #2

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.

Here's a quick update on the most popular questions. 1. Are those numbers real or fake in favor of content marketing? Numbers are real. Anyone from this forum can book a call with me, and I will do a screen sharing of our Stripe/Baremetrics panel. My email is alex at standuply.com. 2. It's not a trend, but a peak number in revenue. Our revenue breakdown: Feb: $7k Mar: $9k Apr: $19,5k May: $25k June: $13k (as of 20th…

Typo in point number 3 there? Confused

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

#97

Post by setr »

palisade wrote: post #63
alexxtomsk wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Sky…

>He told me that Skype is the 800 pound gorilla to beat and that they have around 300 million users or something.

>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.

He needs to become a 1600 pound gorilla just to hit break-even?

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

#98

Post by VectorLock »

alexxtomsk wrote: post #87
VectorLock wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go ahead post a screenshot. And no I would never book a call with you.

You will find screenshots in the article which it seems you haven't read.

No when I got the whiff of blatant advertising, I stopped.

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

#99

Post by hhh »

alexxtomsk wrote: post #75
hhh wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Could you tell us about monetization of that bot? Does it make any money? It would be interesting to see whether Discord is already a platform to build a business on.

He doesn't make any money at all as far as I am aware. I think he may have 1-5 patrons on patreon, otherwise it's only ads on his control panel from a small ad company.

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

#100

Post by blihp »

alexxtomsk wrote: post #80
blihp wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They decide they want to provide the features you provide directly? See Twitter, Google, Apple, Microsoft etc. It's a very old game at this point and you really should be aware of your risk in being so dependent on what is effectively a closed platform. (i.e. an API does not make a closed platform open) They're providing APIs right now to help fuel their own growth but once that growth levels off, or worse reverses,…

Thanks for saying that. It makes sense for us to be aware of such scenarios.

No problem. BTW, I didn't want to discourage you: it's great that you've got a successful service and it's often a smart move to start on a well known platform. (many of today's successful companies started that way... see Microsoft and IBM ;-) Just be sure to diversify away from the platform lock-in ASAP (i.e. build a bot business rather than a Slack-bot business) so when/if the rules change you're not doing a followup post titled 'Slack destroyed our bot business' down the road.
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