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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-

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.

tabtab 8y ago
Re: "we grow our Slack bot from zero to $25,000/mo." "Or your mattress is freeee"
- dang 8y ago
  Please don't do this here.
TobbenTM 8y ago
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?
- pavel_lishin 8y ago
  Do enough companies use Discord to make it worthwhile? I thought that for any sort of semi-corporate use, it was either Slack, Hipchat or Teams.
  - bmelton 8y ago
    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 Discord, so maybe a low-effort MVP to prove out the market might be worthwhile.
    - alexxtomsk 8y ago
      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 https://feedback.discordapp.com
      - eksemplar 8y ago
        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.
        alexxtomsk 8y ago
        Agreed.
- greysteil 8y ago
  FWIW, I'm not sure I'd recommend that. For things outside your control, you've got to deal with the world as it is, not how you would like it to be. Slack own the game for chat bots right now - I think the advice you got from Des Traynor to double down on it is spot on.
- alexxtomsk 8y ago
  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 will be able to compare with Slack in terms of features and market size.
  - hhh 8y ago
    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.
    - alexxtomsk 8y ago
      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.
      - hhh 8y ago
        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.
  - palisade 8y ago
    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-1202810983/ 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.
- Tehchops 8y ago
  >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?
  - alexxtomsk 8y ago
    You always depend on something: traffic acquisition channels, competition, market size, etc. Choosing Slack doesn't mean it's the only platform you're developing for. You can expand the same value proposition to other platforms with the same business users (I can't say the same regarding other b2c chatbots/platforms, though).
balls187 8y ago
How many people on the team?
- alexxtomsk 8y ago
  There are 7 of us
ckastner 8y ago
Not a question, but some advice: you might want to add a sentence or two to that page describing what Standuply actually is or does.
- alexxtomsk 8y ago
  thanks, I didn't want to be too pushy =)
samfisher83 8y ago
How did you get the 1st,10th,20th,100th customer?
- alexxtomsk 8y ago
  We went out of beta offering paid plans. This way sales started to show up.
  - samfisher83 8y ago
    Sorry, I mean how did you convince those guys to use your beta.
    - alexxtomsk 8y ago
      We didn't. It was the pain point that drove users to our beta. Actually, a standup bot is one of the most popular bots if its kind on Slack App Directory.
geekjock 8y ago
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?
- alexxtomsk 8y ago
  These marketing channels worked the best: Content Marketing, Product Hunt, Social Networks.
not_a_moth 8y ago
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.
- tasuki 8y ago
  They're 12000 km away from Silicon Valley - seeing the names, most likely in Russia. $25k/mo feels enough for a 7 person operation.
  - confiscate 8y ago
    They are from Siberia "You know, it takes a lot to travel from Siberia"
- alexxtomsk 8y ago
  What's small and what's large? We've just started and the business grows. I'm sure we'll hit much larger numbers in revenue. So I'm more concerned about our growth rate rather than revenue numbers. As for unit economics, we're very lean burning less than $20k. So we're able to survive and grow Standuply further.
lgas 8y ago
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?
- alexxtomsk 8y ago
  Hi Igas. There could be several reasons in my opinion: 1. You ask for too many permissions. It makes a lot of sense to ask for less because people don't like to share their sensitive information with the product they don't know/trust yet. 2. It may depend on your target audience, but our users in most cases are able to install the bot on their own. So it doesn't hurt our (not yet perfect) onboarding flow.
alexxtomsk 8y ago
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 June). So we'll get a bit less in June. You decide whether it was a peak or it's a trend. 3. It only cost us $23,000/month in advertising In 18 months we spent less than $2k on paid ads and didn't waste any dollar in 2018.
- hangtwenty 8y ago
  Typo in point number 3 there? Confused
ggg9990 8y ago
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.

tabtab 8y ago

Re: "we grow our Slack bot from zero to $25,000/mo." "Or your mattress is freeee"

dang 8y ago
Please don't do this here.

TobbenTM 8y ago

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?

pavel_lishin 8y ago
Do enough companies use Discord to make it worthwhile? I thought that for any sort of semi-corporate use, it was either Slack, Hipchat or Teams.
- bmelton 8y ago
  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 Discord, so maybe a low-effort MVP to prove out the market might be worthwhile.
  - alexxtomsk 8y ago
    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 https://feedback.discordapp.com
    - eksemplar 8y ago
      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.
      - alexxtomsk 8y ago
        Agreed.
greysteil 8y ago
FWIW, I'm not sure I'd recommend that. For things outside your control, you've got to deal with the world as it is, not how you would like it to be. Slack own the game for chat bots right now - I think the advice you got from Des Traynor to double down on it is spot on.
alexxtomsk 8y ago
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 will be able to compare with Slack in terms of features and market size.
- hhh 8y ago
  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.
  - alexxtomsk 8y ago
    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.
    - hhh 8y ago
      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.
- palisade 8y ago
  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-1202810983/ 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.
Tehchops 8y ago
>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?
- alexxtomsk 8y ago
  You always depend on something: traffic acquisition channels, competition, market size, etc. Choosing Slack doesn't mean it's the only platform you're developing for. You can expand the same value proposition to other platforms with the same business users (I can't say the same regarding other b2c chatbots/platforms, though).

balls187 8y ago

How many people on the team?

alexxtomsk 8y ago
There are 7 of us

ckastner 8y ago

Not a question, but some advice: you might want to add a sentence or two to that page describing what Standuply actually is or does.

alexxtomsk 8y ago
thanks, I didn't want to be too pushy =)

samfisher83 8y ago

How did you get the 1st,10th,20th,100th customer?

alexxtomsk 8y ago
We went out of beta offering paid plans. This way sales started to show up.
- samfisher83 8y ago
  Sorry, I mean how did you convince those guys to use your beta.
  - alexxtomsk 8y ago
    We didn't. It was the pain point that drove users to our beta. Actually, a standup bot is one of the most popular bots if its kind on Slack App Directory.

geekjock 8y ago

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?

alexxtomsk 8y ago
These marketing channels worked the best: Content Marketing, Product Hunt, Social Networks.

not_a_moth 8y ago

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.

tasuki 8y ago
They're 12000 km away from Silicon Valley - seeing the names, most likely in Russia. $25k/mo feels enough for a 7 person operation.
- confiscate 8y ago
  They are from Siberia "You know, it takes a lot to travel from Siberia"
alexxtomsk 8y ago
What's small and what's large? We've just started and the business grows. I'm sure we'll hit much larger numbers in revenue. So I'm more concerned about our growth rate rather than revenue numbers. As for unit economics, we're very lean burning less than $20k. So we're able to survive and grow Standuply further.

lgas 8y ago

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?

alexxtomsk 8y ago
Hi Igas. There could be several reasons in my opinion: 1. You ask for too many permissions. It makes a lot of sense to ask for less because people don't like to share their sensitive information with the product they don't know/trust yet. 2. It may depend on your target audience, but our users in most cases are able to install the bot on their own. So it doesn't hurt our (not yet perfect) onboarding flow.

alexxtomsk 8y ago

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 June). So we'll get a bit less in June. You decide whether it was a peak or it's a trend. 3. It only cost us $23,000/month in advertising In 18 months we spent less than $2k on paid ads and didn't waste any dollar in 2018.

hangtwenty 8y ago
Typo in point number 3 there? Confused

ggg9990 8y ago

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.