Growing a Slack Bot to $25k per month
How we built a Slack bot and made it #1 in its niche
In this post, you’ll find how we built a profitable Slack bot Standuply (a bot that runs asynchronous standup meetings via text, voice/video and tracks team performance).
Two years ago Artem and I took our savings and went all in to create a bot on Slack: Standuply — Digital Scrum Master in Slack. We blindly believed we could make it.
After two years of hard work, stress, and fear, we made our first step towards success.
In May 2018, Standuply reached $25,000 in revenues meaning we’re now profitable!
Reaching profitability was damn hard. But now we have time and learnings to come up with this post full of insights.
And, it’s just a beginning. We’re adding $3–4k in MRR each month looking to hit $100k in 2019. It all proves that $1M business can be built entirely on top of Slack.
Check out Standuply — it improves communications in both Fortune 500 companies and tiny startups 🚀
How we got our early adopters
After publishing an upcoming page (see below) on Betalist.com, 300 people subscribed to our waiting list. Not bad.
We planned to ship within a week but eventually shipped Sprinterbot in 4 weeks. It often happens this way, right?
Invitation emails were sent, and we’ve been waiting for our first users. But, we got fewer signups than expected. Not good.
Most of the subscribers left interest due to silence from our side. Still, 50 teams signed up. Half of them tested the bot, and a dozen of teams started using it.
Lesson learned: keep in regular touch with your subscribers before delivering the beta. Warm up their interest.
Then we decided to look for new users and feedback on Slack communities. We had over 150 talks< in two months. But it didn’t help ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
We defined criteria of a person from our target audience: IT manager of a software development team on Slack. Then Artem and I approached those people via DM with a short and personal message like “Hey Jane, could you do me a favor?”
1/3 would talk to us, and those talks may have lasted up to 30 minutes. People are open and helpful if you ask gently. Here’s a useful article about networking on Slack communities.
Most people were skeptic about our concept and our bot, but we did get few signups and some pieces of advice.
Moreover, we found that both our unknown bot and other popular Slack bots got the same reaction — skepticism, and disapproval.
It turns out we were talking to people who were slightly different from our real target audience.
Later we found users and then customers who had no skepticism, but a strong need for our product. They were IT managers from remote software development teams and were using Slack bots.
A slight difference made a huge change. Incredible!
Building a product— our challenges
At first we had a beta that was serving a couple of hundred teams. However, it was far from being perfect in regards to features and stability.
Suddenly our Slack bot went down several times within two weeks. It was so very embarrassing, but that wasn’t the only problem.
Back in the days our website didn’t work properly in Safari, and Standuply lacked a few features our users were constantly asking for. Some teams were leaving due to that.
It was painful, but we couldn’t do much with two developers on the team. It’s the price you pay when bootstrapping.
After all, it took us the whole 2017 year to go from unstable Slack bot with a crappy web interface to a working product with a nice web app.
Everything takes time, especially in SaaS. We learned valuable lessons along the way. I go deeper into details in a dedicated blog post. Read it here.
How we got 15,000 teams
Here are the major ones that drove us traffic and leads.
Slack App Directory
Someone at Slack decided that our Slackbot is worthy and Standuply had been featured on the main page of Slack Bot Directory in March 2017.
In two weeks we got 750 new signups and reached a milestone of 1000 teams.
Even after featuring was over we’re still getting a steady stream of new users from Slack. Being in Slack Bot Directory is the #1 driving factor for an early stage Slack bot.
Content Marketing
In addition to Slack Bot Directory, we leveraged other channels to attract more teams.
I put out several long reads. It helped us to improve our SEO and led decent traffic to our blog on Medium. Overall, my posts received 150k views in 2017.
Product Hunt
We shipped (using Product Hunt Ship) Standuply and related Slack bot products 8 times in the latest 18 months. We love Product Hunt and what about you?
The first it was our initial launch that brought in our very first users. It wasn’t that successful as we ended up on 7th place. However, it brought us ~150 teams.
The second time it was a web-page of our popular blog post with 1000 Slack groups. It became the 2nd product of the day, brought us ~5k visits, and … a couple of new sign-ups.
The next time we shipped Standuply 2.0 when the product matured enough. We got some traction — 6th place of the day, mention in Product Hunt’s email list, and about 100 new teams.
In the meantime we shipped our major features with various results: Top Daily Hunts in Slack (#5 product of the day), Slack Video Messaging (#2 product of the day), Slack Voice Messaging (#3 product of the day).
However, those launches didn’t bring in many teams. It was more like a PR.
Our best launch was the latest one — Standuply 3.0. It became #1 product of the day and #4 product of the week. So we made it to both Product Hunt email lists, daily and weekly.
See how it affected on our registrations.
Social networks
We spread the news about Standuply, Slack bots and our blog posts on Facebook, Twitter, Hacker News, Reddit and on smaller sites.
In all, it brought us ~20k visits in the last 18 months.
Tech Conferences
We had booths at three conferences in 2017 — ChatBot Summit in Berlin, Slush in Helsinki and TechCrunch Disrupt in Berlin.
Chatbot Summit was a total failure — very few potential users and worthless talks how chatbots will rule the world (I admit — most of them won’t).
Slush — was a great event, more like a party. We enjoyed it a lot. Also, Slush provides an ability to book coach sessions with speakers.
We talked to Des Traynor from Intercom (which we’re using daily for customer support). His strategic advice to us was to stick with Slack and do some tactical moves.
Also, we talked to Robin Wauters from Tech.eu. He advised us how to pitch press (something we haven’t approached yet):
- where your product is the best?
- name your important customers, who is using your product and why?
- learn how to tell your story: why are you doing that, mention facts, choose an appealing angle;
- build lasting relationships, keep the pitch informative enough, but not long;
TechCrunch Disrupt in Berlin can’t compare to the same event in SF. It was also a failure. Few relevant talks and people; startup alley wasn’t worth its price.
As a result, we had at maximum the same amount of signups from the three conferences as on a regular day with zero marketing budget. Not good.
All of the activities above generated some buzz, and so we ended up with 15,000 teams signed up by June 2018. Not bad :)
Charging our users
Some people advocate starting charging from day one. We didn’t follow that practice — during beta our product was free to use.
This way we attracted more signups, but we also had users that weren’t ready to pay at all. Sometimes their feedback was distracting and demotivating.
We rolled out the pricing very smoothly. At first, we put a notice about the trial that is going to be over with a link to pay. Sales started to come.
Later we implemented advanced notifications within Slack bot and in the web app. It resulted in more sales.
No teams still weren’t switched off or limited in any way. This way, in six months we went from few hundred to $6k in MRR.
Later we rolled out two additional pricing plans with more features. Some of them were delivered after we presented plans. Those features were marked “soon” so that customers kept informed.
It worked really well. We started seeing purchases of new plans, thus increasing our average check.
The next step was the most significant in terms of revenue growth. We deployed a system that was limiting our customers to what they purchased.
Once we rolled out the system, our sales and expansions skyrocketed. We were a bit worried how customers would treat it. But it went smoothly.
Compare our MRR before and after. The system became fully operational in April.
This way we learned that there is no need to be afraid to play by the rules with your customers. Sometimes being too nice can hurt your business.
Our future plans
Being profitable feels amazing. It means you will survive, while other 90% of startups around may not.
That’s why I’m advocating reaching profitability as soon as possible to set the ground for your company (read — business). Unless you’re B2C, though.
We set a short-term goal to reach $100k MRR which is a turning point for a SaaS that proves a real business potential.
But, looking long term, I wonder whether a Slack bot is capable of getting to $1M MRR. Want to see how we’re getting there? Subscribe to our newsletter and follow our story.
Key takeaways
- Slack Bot Directory is an amazing source of new leads;
- Slack users are willing to try new bots and pay for solutions that solve their pains;
- Slack Bot Ecosystem grows at a rapid pace providing business opportunities for niche products;
But, competition is getting stronger. Standuply has 20+ direct competitors on Slack. So if you’re considering building a Slack bot, don’t wait too long.
Check out my previous stories:
Choosing a Casper Wallet — The Best Ways to Store Your CSPR
Where to Buy Casper (CSPR) Coin — The Best Exchanges as of 2022
How to Stake Casper Coins (CSPR) in 2022 and Calculate Your Rewards
Image credit: Slack.com.
