Launch HN: Dots (YC S21) – Bot Builder for Discord
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
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 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.
Thanks so much HN—we look forward to your comments and questions and any of your thoughts on software support for communities!