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Launch HN: Dots (YC S21) – Bot Builder for Discord

112 points by sanketc 4y ago

Hi HN! We’re Sanket and Pranav, co-founders of Dots (https://dots.community https://dots.community). We help people manage large communities on Discord by automating common tasks like onboarding new members and providing insights on your most valuable members. Companies are increasingly interacting with their customers through communities on Slack and Discord. This trend will continue, because building a strong community around your product is a moat, leading to better retention and revenue. However, while Slack and Discord are great communication tools, they aren’t designed for community teams to engage with thousands of members at a personal level. Moreover, community leaders don't have a good idea of who their members are. We solve these problems by letting them automate common tasks and by giving them visibility into what’s going on in their communities. There’s a ton of repetitive manual work required to build a great community. Often, community leads spend hours kicking bots/toxic members or answering FAQs, ending in burnout. Specifically on Discord, mods of busy servers are patching together 10 bots or building custom bots to improve the UX of their server. This is confusing for community members too. Dots is a no-code automation builder that helps mods build great experiences in their Discord servers. Specifically, the product consists of: - a no-code bot builder: You can pick a trigger (e.g when a user joins a community, or when they click a button), and define various actions to fire off after (e.g. send a message, send a survey) You can think about it like Typeform for Discord on steroids; - member analytics: Tag members into segments directly from Discord and identify key community members (or members about to churn) Discord allows community leaders to build complex rules and member hierarchies. However, most mods lack the ability to code their own bots. A niche market of consultants and developers has cropped up to help customize communities, but our product lets the admins build what they need for themselves. Here’s a quick 3 min demo on creating an automation flow: https://www.loom.com/share/67334ccee36f417da62caa2ad8fdcbd8 https://www.loom.com/share/67334ccee36f417da62caa2ad8fdcbd8 Communities like Chainlink, Splice, and the NBA use Dots to onboard and engage thousands of members in their servers. Here are some automation examples of what they use us for: - Welcome flows: custom onboarding flows to ask questions to new members and show them around the community, as well as verify they’re not bots - Surveys: send surveys to specific members within your Discord server - Support flow: community-specific support chat bot directly in Discord which integrates with their existing support tooling If you run a Discord, we would love love love your feedback! You can sign up at https://app.dots.community/signup https://app.dots.community/signup with no credit card required. Invite code is LAUNCHHN. We have a free tier and our paid pricing starts at $29 / month and up for more advanced features and very large communities. Join our Discord to see a flow in action (or just hang out with other Discord mods): https://discord.gg/WJFTPtvGGw https://discord.gg/WJFTPtvGGw. Thanks so much HN—we look forward to your comments and questions and any of your thoughts on software support for communities!

dvykhopen 4y ago
looking for this for a while bc i always have to ask my eng team to help build discord bots and that's not a good spend of resources -- have actively tried to build on my own but honestly just gave up and our community suffered bc of it. product seems super intuitive. will try it with a subset of our community later today!
- sanketc 4y ago
  Looking forward to your feedback. If are open to sharing what sort of bots have you thought about building for your community, I can see if we can support those specific use cases.
e63f67dd-065b 4y ago
As a bot dev, this looks very interesting but quite underpowered. Maybe I just hang around in gaming communities where custom bots are common for non-trivial tasks like querying game APIs, organising parties for different activities, etc where I don't really see this being useful. The cases that it does support, however, are quite helpful, and is currently only done by cobbling together a bunch of bots, as you said. Good job on launching :)
- sanketc 4y ago
  Appreciate the candid feedback! We started with use cases that are relevant for most communities, and plan to build out the functionality to make it more comprehensive. We recently added ability to query external APIs, and triggers through webhooks (you can check out NBA's discord which has live game threads powered by our bot builder). But agreed with you that there is more work for us to do here. What sort of organizational things have you built bots for? Curious to hear about, so we can build towards that :)
  - e63f67dd-065b 4y ago
    There’s quite a few things I’ve built or been involved in building (I just do this on the side, but I’ve had a few commissions and it’s all primarily gaming-based): - Discord as a notifications service: perhaps the most common thing I’ve built, but it’s very common for there to be a lot of things that people want to be notified about (an activity that starts every x hours, <thing> just spawned, price of x just hit y, shop that has different stock every day has x today, etc) a variety of things. How it’s usually done is that a bot posts notifications to a central #notifications/#announcements channels in a guild and people sign up for roles so that they get pinged for notifications that they want. I’m not sure if you already support this, but it shouldn’t be that much work This was before the whole follow channel feature, but that’s very limited and I would imagine this is very common even outside video games, as you said live game threads, pings for when a streamer/game starts, etc - Ad-hoc wiki: a lot of guilds have what’s basically a few (or many) wiki channels, and I’ve been involved in turning that into a bot-controlled channel that also syncs to a website so non-discord people can access it and you can index, search, etc (see `pvme.github.io` for example; I wasn’t involved in building it but it’s very similar to stuff I’ve built) I’ve wanted to build what’s basically a wiki that’s discord bot controlled (to bring the interface to where the editors are), but also a has a nice web interface, access control, etc. but never found the time or the motivation - Database frontend - various different forms of “write these things into a DB, and then spit it back out in a nicer format” - Crappy REST client - sometimes games have stuff that’s only hidden behind obscure APIs, so you just write a bot that forwards /commands to the correct endpoint and spits it back out - Informal market - some features around aggregating price/demand/supply information for informal trading of game stuff, for lack of a better term Edit: I completely forgot, but communities around streamers/YouTubers are probably a huge market. I haven’t been involved in that area, but I know friends that funded a nice vacation from building bots for these people. Stuff like patreon management, perks, moderation, engagement, etc that I see your service as a perfect fit

112 points by sanketc 4y ago

dvykhopen 4y ago

looking for this for a while bc i always have to ask my eng team to help build discord bots and that's not a good spend of resources -- have actively tried to build on my own but honestly just gave up and our community suffered bc of it. product seems super intuitive. will try it with a subset of our community later today!

sanketc 4y ago
Looking forward to your feedback. If are open to sharing what sort of bots have you thought about building for your community, I can see if we can support those specific use cases.

e63f67dd-065b 4y ago

As a bot dev, this looks very interesting but quite underpowered. Maybe I just hang around in gaming communities where custom bots are common for non-trivial tasks like querying game APIs, organising parties for different activities, etc where I don't really see this being useful. The cases that it does support, however, are quite helpful, and is currently only done by cobbling together a bunch of bots, as you said. Good job on launching :)

sanketc 4y ago
Appreciate the candid feedback! We started with use cases that are relevant for most communities, and plan to build out the functionality to make it more comprehensive. We recently added ability to query external APIs, and triggers through webhooks (you can check out NBA's discord which has live game threads powered by our bot builder). But agreed with you that there is more work for us to do here. What sort of organizational things have you built bots for? Curious to hear about, so we can build towards that :)
- e63f67dd-065b 4y ago
  There’s quite a few things I’ve built or been involved in building (I just do this on the side, but I’ve had a few commissions and it’s all primarily gaming-based): - Discord as a notifications service: perhaps the most common thing I’ve built, but it’s very common for there to be a lot of things that people want to be notified about (an activity that starts every x hours, <thing> just spawned, price of x just hit y, shop that has different stock every day has x today, etc) a variety of things. How it’s usually done is that a bot posts notifications to a central #notifications/#announcements channels in a guild and people sign up for roles so that they get pinged for notifications that they want. I’m not sure if you already support this, but it shouldn’t be that much work This was before the whole follow channel feature, but that’s very limited and I would imagine this is very common even outside video games, as you said live game threads, pings for when a streamer/game starts, etc - Ad-hoc wiki: a lot of guilds have what’s basically a few (or many) wiki channels, and I’ve been involved in turning that into a bot-controlled channel that also syncs to a website so non-discord people can access it and you can index, search, etc (see `pvme.github.io` for example; I wasn’t involved in building it but it’s very similar to stuff I’ve built) I’ve wanted to build what’s basically a wiki that’s discord bot controlled (to bring the interface to where the editors are), but also a has a nice web interface, access control, etc. but never found the time or the motivation - Database frontend - various different forms of “write these things into a DB, and then spit it back out in a nicer format” - Crappy REST client - sometimes games have stuff that’s only hidden behind obscure APIs, so you just write a bot that forwards /commands to the correct endpoint and spits it back out - Informal market - some features around aggregating price/demand/supply information for informal trading of game stuff, for lack of a better term Edit: I completely forgot, but communities around streamers/YouTubers are probably a huge market. I haven’t been involved in that area, but I know friends that funded a nice vacation from building bots for these people. Stuff like patreon management, perks, moderation, engagement, etc that I see your service as a perfect fit