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.
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?
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.
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
Maybe it’s different for American companies but in they EU you’d be hard pressed to sell something that monetizes privacy data.
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.
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.
>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.
He needs to become a 1600 pound gorilla just to hit break-even?
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?
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).
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
Actually, a standup bot is one of the most popular bots if its kind on Slack App Directory.
"Or your mattress is freeee"