Launch HN: DailyBot (YC S21) – in-chat automation for work
Even after six years of managing distributed teams, async work remained a challenge for us. We faced pains like having too many meetings, overusing calls instead of having asynchronous check-ins, and having processes that could and should be chat-driven, automated, or optimized, like managing our releases’ change control, getting reminders on a teammate’s birthday, or running a quick poll. We wanted some sort of chat assistant that we could adapt to our daily workflows. We found a few slack bots with partial solutions, but they lacked privacy and security, and we didn't want to cobble a bunch of different apps together. So we started building a tool for teams like us!
Using DailyBot, you have access to features that aren’t available on Slack - our aim is to replace many apps/bots you use, all integrated in one, with a web dashboard that summarizes insights from these add-ons. It’s a world of possibilities: @DailyBot automates daily stand-ups, regular team meetings, surveys, employee recognition and team morale, random 1:1 coffees, watercooler convos, and even knowledge bases across the company – all inside your chat. We made it customizable, so teams can build their own chat commands that respond with predefined messages or with data from their APIs.
We’re building it with security and privacy in mind: we’ll be SOC2 compliant in 2022, plus we don’t read messages from your chat channels, nor private conversations, except when you tag @DailyBot. We use granular scopes and get only the necessary API permissions, also we encrypt data in transit and at rest and include roles/permissions management. DailyBot is being used mainly by product and engineering teams to run stand-ups, agile routines and build chat-ops. We offer a free plan, and seat-based pricing starting at $3/mo/user.
We’d love to hear any ideas on what repetitive processes you have to deal with that you’d like help automating, for example: a) scheduling a meeting with a chat command; or b) getting feedback on a task by sending automated reminders to the other person until it’s done, etc. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts and feedback!