Slack Bot Business Tutorial: From zero to $25k per month

During an interview I had at Discord recently the lead engineer mentioned they had exceeded 130 million users. Though, there was also a recent bump by almost 70 million people that left Skype and joined Discord in the news recently as well. He told me that Skype is the 800 pound gorilla to beat and that they have around 300 million users or something. They're definitely gunning for them, and Microsoft has changed Skype so much that they've alienated much of their user base in addition to having lots of security flaws. Discord touts their security, two factor auth, IP address hiding, plus having all the features of Skype in addition to the concept of slack-like chat rooms. More than just gamers are starting to use it.

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.

I use Discord daily as the main communication tool for a remote dev team. We have a voice and text channel for each project and works great.

I've used Discord since sept 2015. It's been an interesting journey (my friend develops a bot and has reached 26,000 servers and 3 million users.) It's quite good, but still does not support stereo audio input inside of the client. Canary build has a new experimental audio subsystem so it may be now, haven't tested yet.

I think it depends on what you consider a worthy market -- My daughter, 16, doesn't know a single friend who doesn't have a Discord account. Moreover, the 'group chat' in subreddits is, more often than not, powered by Discord.

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.

You always depend on something: traffic acquisition channels, competition, market size, etc.

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).

They are from Siberia "You know, it takes a lot to travel from Siberia"

Sorry, I mean how did you convince those guys to use your beta.

I don't particularly enjoy these articles, but they're hardly unethical. Saying you make X/month is very similar to splashing company logos on your homepage. Service companies typically want to try to demonstrate that they're successful to attract more clients.

With startups/apps it's now popular to brag about your revenue. Keep in mind, this isn't profit, so I find the articles pretty useless. I could start a million dollar revenue company by losing money on each unit sold, but what's the point in that? (unless I'm VC-backed and have a long-term strategy for growth)

When someone writes an article about how much profit they've made per month, then I'll take notice.

If this is true, why is it so easy to name genuinely good products that failed because of lack of visibility? How do you differentiate your product from that of competitors? How do you get seen in the first place unless you own a very good domain/have a massive sales force?

>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.

My takeaway is that it helps people find the "magical thing" in the first place, especially the people who didn't know they were looking for the magical thing.

Of course someone with an existing problem is most likely seeking a solution, but not everyone realizes there is a problem (especially if the existing solution works) until a better solution is shown to them.

How about how we conduct business: Face to face meetings -> phone/mail -> email -> online meetings, for instance. I'm sure people thought during their time periods that there could be better ways to do this, but they need to see the solution before they jump on board.

Thanks for saying that. It makes sense for us to be aware of such scenarios.

I'm sure they have core features to work on compared to a narrow bot use-case.

Moreover, they will have to invest heavily in a bot that serves only a part of Slack's user base.

It's not a logical move from a product standpoint.

I don't see any chance of that happening unless it would be on Hooli platform under Gavin's control =)

It is truly hard to comprehend that one of the most common things successful startup founders recommend is that your startup should have a blog and talk about the company and the product and the engineering, but when that gets shared suddenly it's spam and everyone is crying for blood.

Remember when this used to be a friendly startup forum full of people who liked hearing about interesting technology and how it was made?

Thanks for letting me know. We'll fix that.

You will find screenshots in the article which it seems you haven't read.

Or "Only $32,000/mo in ads!"