Launch HN: DailyBot (YC S21) – in-chat automation for work

Hi HN — we're Mauricio and Sergio from DailyBot (https://www.dailybot.com). We're building an automation platform and chat assistant for modern work that integrates with Slack, Discord, MS Teams and Google Chat, with others coming soon. Here's a 2-minute video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHZnGl4c-9g

Even after six years of managing distributed teams, async work remained a challenge for us. We faced pains like having too many meetings, overusing calls instead of having asynchronous check-ins, and having processes that could and should be chat-driven, automated, or optimized, like managing our releases’ change control, getting reminders on a teammate’s birthday, or running a quick poll. We wanted some sort of chat assistant that we could adapt to our daily workflows. We found a few slack bots with partial solutions, but they lacked privacy and security, and we didn't want to cobble a bunch of different apps together. So we started building a tool for teams like us!

Using DailyBot, you have access to features that aren’t available on Slack - our aim is to replace many apps/bots you use, all integrated in one, with a web dashboard that summarizes insights from these add-ons. It’s a world of possibilities: @DailyBot automates daily stand-ups, regular team meetings, surveys, employee recognition and team morale, random 1:1 coffees, watercooler convos, and even knowledge bases across the company – all inside your chat. We made it customizable, so teams can build their own chat commands that respond with predefined messages or with data from their APIs.

We’re building it with security and privacy in mind: we’ll be SOC2 compliant in 2022, plus we don’t read messages from your chat channels, nor private conversations, except when you tag @DailyBot. We use granular scopes and get only the necessary API permissions, also we encrypt data in transit and at rest and include roles/permissions management. DailyBot is being used mainly by product and engineering teams to run stand-ups, agile routines and build chat-ops. We offer a free plan, and seat-based pricing starting at $3/mo/user.

We’d love to hear any ideas on what repetitive processes you have to deal with that you’d like help automating, for example: a) scheduling a meeting with a chat command; or b) getting feedback on a task by sending automated reminders to the other person until it’s done, etc. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts and feedback!

I can't help but think this is the perfect way for an out of touch manager to justify staying out of touch. Maybe I'm not thinking of the right use case but personal interactions are something that are sorely missed in this day and age. Still a cool product!

We see seat-based pricing convenient for customers that want to control and adapt the product to their team size and budget. Per-seat pricing is simple to structure and easy to understand by customers as it's a standard in SaaS nowadays.

We do offer flat fee options for bigger teams and companies that are adopting DailyBot as an organization-wide solution, it's not currently automated and we do it case by case.

It's a great question, pricing is something we continue learning about and improving over time.

Interesting thoughts - our users are seeing it as a tool to improve their workflows and interactions. Some employees may feel overwhelmed when a manager is reaching every often to ask for a written update, etc - but when it’s an automated assistant it feels more like a process and flow. It’s also more predictable.

For example: Many teams use DailyBot for agile/scrum ceremonies, like automating a daily stand-up, a development sprint health check at the middle of the cycle to make sure everything is going well, and perhaps some retrospective meetings every 2 weeks.

They don’t stop meeting face-2-face. DailyBot helps gather all that information, it provides analytics and you have an organized record. Then the teams meet to discuss, but everyone will be well prepared and there are notes already to navigate — it makes the interactions more efficient.

I agree. The ideal situation is when they are on the same page and reach with thoughtful feedback or willing to help.