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One of the best points the author hits on is the benefit of platforms for MicroSaaS companies. Having a reliable source of highly qualified prospects makes it m

One of the best points the author hits on is the benefit of platforms for MicroSaaS companies. Having a reliable source of highly qualified prospects makes it much easier to build out a profitable SaaS business because you can spend most of your time building while still closing customers. The tough thing about this is that the ease of building into the platform also attracts a lot of competition (which the author mentions in the post too). Getting in on a fast growing platform early is really beneficial because you can arbitrage the opportunity before others get into the platform. My startup was probably one of the first 50 apps in the Slack app store when it launched in December 2015. Since then, there's been about 5 dozen startups who are in the space now, but that early Slack platform momentum gave us enough of a lead to build a real business closing in on $1M ARR with 5 people.

dakna 6y ago
> Getting in on a fast growing platform early This depends on good timing. As a small team or single developer you don't want to invest months into building a plugin or service for a platform that won't take off. And at the time the platform has great traction, chances are that someone already took the higher risk and implemented something close to your idea. I would be interested in knowing more about the decision process that made you confident enough in 2015 to pour resources into a Slack plugin, if you would like to share that.
- andygcook 6y ago
  Agreed and happy to share because you asked. At the time, the "company" was just my co-founder and me. We were essentially going to fail/give up by taking on consulting work. The decision to integrate with Slack was a bit of a bet-the-company move. We were building an internal wiki to compete with Confluence. Our early beta users told us they'd use our MVP, and when we gave it to them, no one actually did. When we asked, they just said, "We just keep forgetting. Still interested." We then asked about hooking up our wiki to Slack so you could search from Slack and get notifications for new content, and they wanted that desperately. Some teams even pre-paid us to build it for them. So we scrapped our whole MVP and three months of work, and rebuilt the entire product on top the Slack platform in two weeks over the holidays. When I say, "on top of Slack", I mean we literally used Slack's APIs as our backend and just rebuilt a "wiki" front end serving up Slack files from the APIs. We even deep linked to their Post as the editor in our wiki. The goal was to validate demand so we did it as leanly as possible. Once we launched, we got about 200 sign ups in 48 hours. From there, we built a real product, which is now tettra.com. I wrote an article about the pros and cons of building on another company's platform about a year after that which goes into more details if you're interested: https://thinkgrowth.org/building-on-slack-saved-our-startup-94953fdaf27a https://thinkgrowth.org/building-on-slack-saved-our-startup-...
  - dakna 6y ago
    Thanks, appreciated! > We were essentially going to fail/give up by taking on consulting work. The decision to integrate with Slack was a bit of a bet-the-company move > they wanted that desperately. Some teams even pre-paid us to build it for them Congrats to the successful pivot. At this point giving demand validation another try instead of shutting down makes a lot of sense, given you already invested heavily and had a list of potential users. Happy to hear it worked.
  - atarian 6y ago
    Were there any other wiki-like apps for Slack when you guys first launched? I know there are several now, but I'm curious what it was like in the beginning.
    - andygcook 6y ago
      The only other one at the time that also built a Slack integration was Guru. Confluence didn’t have a Slack integration and HipChat was still alive too, so our bet was that we could be the Confluence equivalent for the Slack/Github/Asana ecosystem. Things have wildly changed since then (e.g. Slack bought HipChat, dozens of new competitors, etc), but we’ve adapted.

dakna 6y ago

> Getting in on a fast growing platform early This depends on good timing. As a small team or single developer you don't want to invest months into building a plugin or service for a platform that won't take off. And at the time the platform has great traction, chances are that someone already took the higher risk and implemented something close to your idea. I would be interested in knowing more about the decision process that made you confident enough in 2015 to pour resources into a Slack plugin, if you would like to share that.

andygcook 6y ago
Agreed and happy to share because you asked. At the time, the "company" was just my co-founder and me. We were essentially going to fail/give up by taking on consulting work. The decision to integrate with Slack was a bit of a bet-the-company move. We were building an internal wiki to compete with Confluence. Our early beta users told us they'd use our MVP, and when we gave it to them, no one actually did. When we asked, they just said, "We just keep forgetting. Still interested." We then asked about hooking up our wiki to Slack so you could search from Slack and get notifications for new content, and they wanted that desperately. Some teams even pre-paid us to build it for them. So we scrapped our whole MVP and three months of work, and rebuilt the entire product on top the Slack platform in two weeks over the holidays. When I say, "on top of Slack", I mean we literally used Slack's APIs as our backend and just rebuilt a "wiki" front end serving up Slack files from the APIs. We even deep linked to their Post as the editor in our wiki. The goal was to validate demand so we did it as leanly as possible. Once we launched, we got about 200 sign ups in 48 hours. From there, we built a real product, which is now tettra.com. I wrote an article about the pros and cons of building on another company's platform about a year after that which goes into more details if you're interested: https://thinkgrowth.org/building-on-slack-saved-our-startup-94953fdaf27a https://thinkgrowth.org/building-on-slack-saved-our-startup-...
- dakna 6y ago
  Thanks, appreciated! > We were essentially going to fail/give up by taking on consulting work. The decision to integrate with Slack was a bit of a bet-the-company move > they wanted that desperately. Some teams even pre-paid us to build it for them Congrats to the successful pivot. At this point giving demand validation another try instead of shutting down makes a lot of sense, given you already invested heavily and had a list of potential users. Happy to hear it worked.
- atarian 6y ago
  Were there any other wiki-like apps for Slack when you guys first launched? I know there are several now, but I'm curious what it was like in the beginning.
  - andygcook 6y ago
    The only other one at the time that also built a Slack integration was Guru. Confluence didn’t have a Slack integration and HipChat was still alive too, so our bet was that we could be the Confluence equivalent for the Slack/Github/Asana ecosystem. Things have wildly changed since then (e.g. Slack bought HipChat, dozens of new competitors, etc), but we’ve adapted.