Launch HN: Scribe 2.0 (YC W17) – Configurable, Actionable Alerts on Slack
We’re Sachin and Rutika, founders of Scribe (https://www.tryscribe.com). Scribe 1.0 provided sales call scheduling service managing client’s sales inboxes, scheduling sales calls and updating their CRM based on email and calendar events. We did this through a human in the loop (software+service) approach. In the process of managing external conversations we built an internal SAAS product which helped us stay on top of all the email and CRM updates. We are opening it up today for others to use as a standalone product calling it Scribe 2.0
It’s an extensively customizable workflow builder which allows you to receive events from your email, calendar, salesforce and Stripe accounts either as Slack DMs or notifications in slack channels of your choice. You can configure any number of API actions on top of these events and based on the event contents decide what actions to take with couple of clicks right from slack. We also have a HTTP/webhook option to support custom events or events from other integrations as we explore expanding the workflow builder for more usecases.
Some of the sample usecases we have been used for include
- Share selective emails in slack and based on the email information, you can reply, send a calendar invite and update CRM with single click buttons without opening any other website.
- You can setup custom reply templates for different email categories, and have them personalized based on the incoming email information
- Create support tickets, add assignees and deadlines, from email in slack
- Trigger ML jobs with updated parameters based on previous job’s success/failure and performance accuracy.
- Trigger code deployments and task pipelines from Slack
In effect, users can configure workflows to send data from any of their SAAS apps to Slack, update it in real time, and send it back to anywhere else. And all this can be done collaboratively allowing for broad visibility and accountability across teams. We also have a cool gif feature that allows one to attach changing gifs based on incoming event data allowing for some nice surprises
Some of the interesting feedback we have received from our customers are
- They go without logging into gmail and salesforce for days
- We are like a mother who nudges them to do the right thing at the right time
Technically, we have built a unified layer for authentication, resource and crud schema inference. We can therefore integrate with any software that is openApi compliant in a matter of few days. Pubsub management however has been quite nasty given the scale, lack of api standardization and the asynchronous nature of the platform. We also have selectively exposed our email AI from the original Scribe 1.0 product, that categorizes sales email into more than 22 different categories allowing users to setup personalized templates and actions based on the intent of the email.
We are looking to HN to get feedback on the product as well as explore new usecases on how we can extend the service to cover more integrations and usecases. Given our history, we have mostly built with sales usecase in mind, but we do believe that now, this can be extended perhaps more effectively to other markets and would love to get HN’s thoughts. Apart from more integrations, we can also provide option to schedule time based notifications as well as ability to define slack commands to pull data/trigger workflows if there is a usecase/market need.