Set and forget: the product we forgot about

Three months ago I built and launched a Slackbot and promptly forgot about it. Last week I found out people are actually using it and loving it. Whoops.

How the hell did this happen?

In November 2016 my co-conspirator PJ Murray and I did a hack weekend in an effort to see if we could still build and launch something from scratch.

Over 48 hours we built a Slack bot that would help people take more time out of the office by handling out of office notifications. It’s called brb.life.

It’s not like we didn’t try to make it successful. We wrote it up on Medium, built a very small mailing list and emailed it to friends who we thought would use it.

And then we hit a roadblock.

The friends we sent it to couldn’t even bring themselves to install our product.

The permissions were too onerous: we needed to be able to read and write their direct messages in order to setup an autoresponder if someone DM’d you on Slack while you were out.

The worst part? These people were not only good friends of ours (who might cut us a break) but they were also the founders of their companies (who could override any organizational resistance).

It was a brutal realization and we couldn’t find an easy way around it. So after much back and forth we decided to stop working on the project and find something else to do.

We gave up. We stopped all marketing activities and feature development in its tracks.

Funnily enough one of our friends took a more cavalier approach to us potentially reading his DM’s, installing the product and sharing it with his team immediately. And then, much to his surprise, the team actually used it.

Brb.life has now become the default way the Vero team stay in touch on who is in and out, and where people are working from.

Sample of activity from the Vero team on an average weekday.

You would think we would be stoked? But I’m kind of embarrassed to say we had no idea. The app was such an MVP we didn’t have any alerts for usage or signups and we didn’t keep track of the logs since we assumed it was gathering dust on a Heroku server somewhere.

The only reason we found out that he was actually using the product was that he had some feature requests and a bug submission he wanted us to take a look at.

Not all customers are created equal

Every customer is a unique snowflake: you need to find the snowflakes that fit your product at the stage it’s at today.

The first two people to tell us they couldn’t use the product because of security concerns were good friends of mine I’ve known for years. Both were the founders of their companies — one with 6 people at a seed-stage SAAS startup and one with 150 people at a series B-stage HR tech company. Both couldn’t get past the risks associated to giving any app access to their private direct messages for their teams no matter how well we knew each other.

Conversion rates matter

Most people won’t ‘get’ your product. The more people you show it to, the better your chances of finding the few who will.

Let’s say you show your product to 6 people like we did. You’re relying on a at minimum of 16% not only needing your product, but even understanding what it is and signing up. That’s an incredibly high bar.

Want to increase your chances of finding the right customers and converting them? Increase the number of people you’re marketing to.

Persistence is key

Finding the motivation to start something is hard but almost everyone has that in them. Persistence is the difference between starting and finishing.

We hit a roadblock which killed the direct message feature for the most part but we still had the ability to manage a teams out of office channel, the teams upcoming schedule and auto reply if an out of office user was away. We rationalized that direct messaging was the killer feature based on limited customer feedback, and didn’t try to test alternative assumptions.

At minimum we should have continued to roll out the product and try to get it into the hands of more users to find out:- what % of users would give us dm access- what % users would use the OOO feature- what additional functionality or integrations would make the product work

Winning is the ultimate motivator

While we’re both fairly busy with our day jobs and life outside of work it’s been incredibly motivating to know that people use our product and love it.

What now?

Given we’ve got some people actually using and loving the product we’ve decided to put some more time into it to take it to the next level. It’s not about to become a full-time gig but it’s becoming a great way for us to flex our muscles and build something we’re proud of. Who knows where it could go?

Ever built and launched a project only to forget about it almost immediately?

I’d love to hear about what it was and why you abandoned it.

And check out brb.life to manage your out of office messages for your Slack team!