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I'm seeing a trend of apps that help to (micro)manage distributed / remote workforces. Virtually keeps track of who is late and no-show to Zoom events, Dailybot

I'm seeing a trend of apps that help to (micro)manage distributed / remote workforces. Virtually keeps track of who is late and no-show to Zoom events, Dailybot has automated standups that basically keeps tabs on employee work and productivity. I'm curious to hear from the founders as to what motivated the creation of the apps and whether WFH plays a significant part in the value proposition. Would you need either app in a traditional work-from-office environment?

maomorales 5y ago
DailyBot was born out of our own need - we’ve been WFH for many years and needed to stay in-sync with each other. There was a behavior we were not happy about: managers or people coming to others asking about what they’re working on or requesting status updates, often. We wanted to change that behavior with our product, if you get some written updates on a periodic basis, the team will get more aligned, managers won’t need to bother (that frequent), and likely you’ll reduce the amount of unnecessary meetings. Then we started extending the product around async work practices. Traditional work-from-office environments can indeed benefit from improving collaboration practices, getting more work done inside the chat, and (of course) decreasing the pointless meetings for things that could be written updates. It could happen that teams use DailyBot improperly for micro-management purposes - that’s why we’re also creating a catalog of best practices and proper question templates; asking the right questions is key. We'll go further by adding more features to DailyBot so it becomes a highly useful personal assistant at work.
- ciguy 5y ago
  How is this different than established players in the space like GeekBot?
  - maomorales 5y ago
    We're building a whole ecosystem of tools and add-ons for async work. Bots like geekbot are focused on stand-ups, and this is only a piece of what we're doing now - our goal is to replace several bots/apps with our toolkit, and implement security standards that are not followed by current bots; we're also available in more chat apps, not only in Slack. DailyBot lets you give kudos to teammates, have a watercooler in a chat channel, random 1:1 coffees, run a virtual commute that reminds you to disconnect from work each day, run countdowns, pomodoros, and more. You can even build public web forms that are connected to your chat channels through the bot. In the end, we want to make the chat 10x better and at the same time provide only one dashboard that connects all that data. Our product is extendable: you can connect your check-in responses to over thousands of apps through Zapier, and build your own chat commands without technical knowledge. For example: you can create a command that responds with your predefined text, like to access information quickly inside the chat, or to trigger a form, or get data from your back office tools, kind of useful for chat-ops. We created a 2min video that shows a bit of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHZnGl4c-9g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHZnGl4c-9g
asdff 5y ago
>Virtually keeps track of who is late and no-show to Zoom events Wow, back to high school. They don't track attendance in undergrad even. Why do companies need this sort of information? If the person is important to the meeting, them being a no show will be pretty evident. If they are so irrelevant to the meeting that they could just dip out and no one would be the wiser, why are they even wasting their time in the zoom meeting to begin with? Just email whatever information you need to get out if the zoom meeting is going to just be an announcement or one sided lecture. It also wouldn't be hard to write a little script that automatically connects you to zoom meetings that are coming up. You probably only need a few lines of bash to write your own if you have a tool like icalbuddy where you can grep for upcoming zoom meetings in your calendar.
- ishbaid 5y ago
  We're really building for bootcamps and online schools who need attendance data to know who's on track to finishing the program and who's at risk for falling. it's also useful to communities who want to learn how to better engage members and which types of zoom events drive the most engagement
  - asdff 5y ago
    I don't understand why anything needs to be built here. Zoom already lets you export this data per meeting. https://www.eduhk.hk/ocio/content/faq-how-retrieve-attendance-list-zoom-meeting https://www.eduhk.hk/ocio/content/faq-how-retrieve-attendanc...
- midev 5y ago
  > If the person is important to the meeting, them being a no show will be pretty evident. If they are so irrelevant to the meeting that they could just dip out and no one would be the wiser, why are they even wasting their time in the zoom meeting to begin with? Nothing you said precludes tracking the information. Yeah, I've missed meetings and it's been evident. But it's ok, because we have flexibility and the company knows it's rare. If I miss every meeting, that's a concern. > It also wouldn't be hard to write a little script that automatically connects you to zoom meetings that are coming up You'd be the employee we're trying to get rid of. If you're lying about participation in things, saying you attended meetings when you didn't, I'd fire you. You are literally proving why such a need exists.

maomorales 5y ago

DailyBot was born out of our own need - we’ve been WFH for many years and needed to stay in-sync with each other. There was a behavior we were not happy about: managers or people coming to others asking about what they’re working on or requesting status updates, often. We wanted to change that behavior with our product, if you get some written updates on a periodic basis, the team will get more aligned, managers won’t need to bother (that frequent), and likely you’ll reduce the amount of unnecessary meetings. Then we started extending the product around async work practices. Traditional work-from-office environments can indeed benefit from improving collaboration practices, getting more work done inside the chat, and (of course) decreasing the pointless meetings for things that could be written updates. It could happen that teams use DailyBot improperly for micro-management purposes - that’s why we’re also creating a catalog of best practices and proper question templates; asking the right questions is key. We'll go further by adding more features to DailyBot so it becomes a highly useful personal assistant at work.

ciguy 5y ago
How is this different than established players in the space like GeekBot?
- maomorales 5y ago
  We're building a whole ecosystem of tools and add-ons for async work. Bots like geekbot are focused on stand-ups, and this is only a piece of what we're doing now - our goal is to replace several bots/apps with our toolkit, and implement security standards that are not followed by current bots; we're also available in more chat apps, not only in Slack. DailyBot lets you give kudos to teammates, have a watercooler in a chat channel, random 1:1 coffees, run a virtual commute that reminds you to disconnect from work each day, run countdowns, pomodoros, and more. You can even build public web forms that are connected to your chat channels through the bot. In the end, we want to make the chat 10x better and at the same time provide only one dashboard that connects all that data. Our product is extendable: you can connect your check-in responses to over thousands of apps through Zapier, and build your own chat commands without technical knowledge. For example: you can create a command that responds with your predefined text, like to access information quickly inside the chat, or to trigger a form, or get data from your back office tools, kind of useful for chat-ops. We created a 2min video that shows a bit of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHZnGl4c-9g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHZnGl4c-9g

asdff 5y ago

>Virtually keeps track of who is late and no-show to Zoom events Wow, back to high school. They don't track attendance in undergrad even. Why do companies need this sort of information? If the person is important to the meeting, them being a no show will be pretty evident. If they are so irrelevant to the meeting that they could just dip out and no one would be the wiser, why are they even wasting their time in the zoom meeting to begin with? Just email whatever information you need to get out if the zoom meeting is going to just be an announcement or one sided lecture. It also wouldn't be hard to write a little script that automatically connects you to zoom meetings that are coming up. You probably only need a few lines of bash to write your own if you have a tool like icalbuddy where you can grep for upcoming zoom meetings in your calendar.

ishbaid 5y ago
We're really building for bootcamps and online schools who need attendance data to know who's on track to finishing the program and who's at risk for falling. it's also useful to communities who want to learn how to better engage members and which types of zoom events drive the most engagement
- asdff 5y ago
  I don't understand why anything needs to be built here. Zoom already lets you export this data per meeting. https://www.eduhk.hk/ocio/content/faq-how-retrieve-attendance-list-zoom-meeting https://www.eduhk.hk/ocio/content/faq-how-retrieve-attendanc...
midev 5y ago
> If the person is important to the meeting, them being a no show will be pretty evident. If they are so irrelevant to the meeting that they could just dip out and no one would be the wiser, why are they even wasting their time in the zoom meeting to begin with? Nothing you said precludes tracking the information. Yeah, I've missed meetings and it's been evident. But it's ok, because we have flexibility and the company knows it's rare. If I miss every meeting, that's a concern. > It also wouldn't be hard to write a little script that automatically connects you to zoom meetings that are coming up You'd be the employee we're trying to get rid of. If you're lying about participation in things, saying you attended meetings when you didn't, I'd fire you. You are literally proving why such a need exists.