[HN Gopher] Launch HN: DailyBot (YC S21) - in-chat automation fo...
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Launch HN: DailyBot (YC S21) - in-chat automation for work
Hi HN -- we're Mauricio and Sergio from DailyBot
(https://www.dailybot.com). We're building an automation platform
and chat assistant for modern work that integrates with Slack,
Discord, MS Teams and Google Chat, with others coming soon. Here's
a 2-minute video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHZnGl4c-9g 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!
Author : maomorales
Score : 34 points
Date : 2021-11-30 14:20 UTC (8 hours ago)
| kjz12 wrote:
| Congrats on your launch!
|
| How are you planning to compete with specialized tools like Donut
| or CoffeePals that do one thing (1-1 chats) very well, with lots
| of user-friendly configuration?
|
| Why would somebody choose DailyBot over Donut/CoffeePals or vice
| versa?
|
| Are you targeting different kinds of customers than those
| specialized tools?
| maomorales wrote:
| Thanks! love these questions.
|
| Our aim is to provide an all-in-one solution so companies don't
| need to get a bunch of different feature-bot software
| subscriptions to manage what they can achieve with DailyBot.
|
| Our product is user-friendly and highly customizable - which is
| a great advantage, you can adapt it to be your team's chat
| assistant. You may want to run 1-1 chats (we call it virtual
| coffee) like Donut, set up in-chat watercooler & icebreaker
| prompts every week, but also get reminders of your team's
| birthdays or use DailyBot for stand-ups and/or as a shared
| knowledge base for the team.
|
| Users that have moved to DailyBot see a lot of value in our
| all-in-one approach as they are reducing tooling fatigue, have
| more compelling analytics/reports, and for some companies it is
| better in terms of risk assessments: if you have to comply with
| strong security, it's better to audit one vendor rather than 6+
| bots, plus DailyBot is reliable with SOC2-Type2 coming soon.
|
| We might target similar customers for some use cases, but
| different ones in other cases like workflows, in-chat
| automation, etc.
|
| The wide range of use cases covered by DailyBot is exciting for
| us, we're working to create templates and content that can
| inspire and speed up the setup of every type of customer.
| rsweeney21 wrote:
| Some feedback on the demo video from a potential customer: It
| moves way too fast. It's a chat based product, but things were
| moving around so much and so quickly, I couldn't read anything. A
| minute in, I had no idea what that product does. You have to give
| the audience enough time to read what's on the screen.
|
| I had to slow the video all the way down to .25 speed to read
| that the bot asked the person to fill out their daily standup
| report.
|
| A simple demo by one of the founders walking through how the
| product works would have been much better IMO.
|
| Hope that helps!
| maomorales wrote:
| Thanks for this feedback! we'll improve the timing and I will
| prioritize creating the walkthrough video - in the meantime,
| feel free to reach out if you want to see a full demo:
| mauricioatdailybotdotcom
| ushakov wrote:
| why seat-based pricing?
| maomorales wrote:
| We see seat-based pricing convenient for customers that want to
| control and adapt the product to their team size and budget.
| Per-seat pricing is simple to structure and easy to understand
| by customers as it's a standard in SaaS nowadays.
|
| We do offer flat fee options for bigger teams and companies
| that are adopting DailyBot as an organization-wide solution,
| it's not currently automated and we do it case by case.
|
| It's a great question, pricing is something we continue
| learning about and improving over time.
| tmnstr85 wrote:
| I can't help but think this is the perfect way for an out of
| touch manager to justify staying out of touch. Maybe I'm not
| thinking of the right use case but personal interactions are
| something that are sorely missed in this day and age. Still a
| cool product!
| maomorales wrote:
| Interesting thoughts - our users are seeing it as a tool to
| improve their workflows and interactions. Some employees may
| feel overwhelmed when a manager is reaching every often to ask
| for a written update, etc - but when it's an automated
| assistant it feels more like a process and flow. It's also more
| predictable.
|
| For example: Many teams use DailyBot for agile/scrum
| ceremonies, like automating a daily stand-up, a development
| sprint health check at the middle of the cycle to make sure
| everything is going well, and perhaps some retrospective
| meetings every 2 weeks.
|
| They don't stop meeting face-2-face. DailyBot helps gather all
| that information, it provides analytics and you have an
| organized record. Then the teams meet to discuss, but everyone
| will be well prepared and there are notes already to navigate
| -- it makes the interactions more efficient.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Nothing is more terrifying than an out of touch manager who
| decides they want to be more in touch, and reaches for meeting
| or calls as a vehicle to do so.
|
| "Explain everything about everything, daily."
| maomorales wrote:
| I agree. The ideal situation is when they are on the same
| page and reach with thoughtful feedback or willing to help.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| There have been several great pieces (on HN and elsewhere)
| about the key multiplier to doing remote work effectively
| has been moving from synchronous communication / processes
| to asynchronous ones.
|
| And it's pretty simple. Why have a fixed time standup when
| people are all over time zones and work hours? But! All the
| info from a standup still needs to be regularly captured
| and disseminated. It just needs to be done async instead of
| sync.
| maomorales wrote:
| Indeed, good asynchronous practices are a key multiplier,
| and I believe remote teams should invest on establishing
| these early on. In our case, moving our standups to async
| was a game changer.
|
| DailyBot manages this smoothly, it takes in account each
| person's timezone, it sends reminders and posts reports
| automatically in chat channels. And the best part is the
| web dashboard, you can see organized reports, see
| analytics like who's the person that is most blocked this
| week (so the team can help out), see the trend of
| engagement, and additional info like team morale.
|
| With DailyBot, you can download that data in XLS,CSV,PDF,
| and you can search across reports very easily, on the
| web, or using the bot. This is is just one of the use
| cases that users are achieving with our product :)
| youce wrote:
| What sets DailyBot apart from all its competition? There are lots
| and lots of chatbots out there doing these things.
| maomorales wrote:
| We're not yet another chatbot. DailyBot is an automation
| platform that delivers a chat assistant that you can use for
| many purposes.
|
| The main difference: privacy and security. Many feature-bots
| out there do not follow strong security and privacy measures.
| This is our top priority and we're working on SOC2-Type2
| compliance which will be ready in 2022.
|
| DailyBot is an all-in-one solution, it replaces many other
| chatbots you might be using today and a) unifies data through a
| simple web dashboard, b) you pay for only one tool at a great
| price, c) it's adaptable & extendable.
| youce wrote:
| Interesting balance between convenience and security, best of
| luck!
| eferro wrote:
| Here is a happy user. We use daily bot daily in all
| Product+Engineering teams and it helps us a lot to get organized
| and build small automations.
|
| Considering that it includes a few small utilities, can you think
| of a way to integrate it with external video conferencing
| systems? I'm thinking about having utilities (pomodoro,
| stopwatch, meeting cost counter) during the meeting...
|
| I'm also interested to see what moves forward as a general
| automation tool... any interesting related functionality in the
| roadmap?
| maomorales wrote:
| I'm glad you're using DailyBot :)
|
| We have not looked at these integrations with video
| conferencing apps closely but having tools for better video
| meetings does sound useful - we'll take a look.
|
| In general automation: a feature that is coming next year is
| Integromat support, also, we recently launched a feature that
| allows you to turn any DailyBot Form in an online data table:
| you can store and query data from it using the chat assistant.
| Teams are using this to have time-off tracking, inventories,
| track their code releases, etc. These Forms support
| integrations with WebHooks.
|
| And there is more to come next year around Chat-Ops, we'll be
| sharing these updates with our users. Thanks!
| eferro wrote:
| great to hear about the integration with integromat. I
| already knew there was integration with Zapier, but in our
| case we use integromat more, so now a new world of
| possibilities opens up.
|
| I am going to explore the functionality of capturing
| information with forms to make a couple of MVPs.
|
| Thank you!
| maomorales wrote:
| I thought it'd make sense to share how we're internally using
| DailyBot, to build DailyBot. This will give you a better picture.
|
| 1. We run daily stand-ups
|
| 2. Every Friday, there is a 3 questions retrospective, really
| good to reflect about work and priorities
|
| 3. On Monday, we run an icebreaker, the team tells stories about
| how the weekend went, it helps us stay connected at a human level
|
| 4. Every 2 weeks, we get a #watercooler prompt with very random
| questions that create discussions among the team
|
| 5. Whenever we're launching a release, we trigger the command
| "Coderelease" that shows a native form that the technical leads
| fill out. The data is posted in a #releases channel, then
| everyone sees what new things are being launched, we use that
| data as change control, and PMs use the notes to prepare product
| updates for users, etc.
|
| 6. When we get any idea/feedback, we register that through a form
| that we can trigger in chat "@dailybot customer feedback"
|
| 7. Every week, the team is paired randomly to have virtual
| coffees (those are optional to opt in, but nice to keep our team
| connected)
|
| 8. We run polls/surveys from time to time with DailyBot
|
| 9. I have built a few commands to query internal data, like
| product top KPIs
|
| This is how adaptable DailyBot can be.
| simon_000666 wrote:
| Hey, I've got another feature request for you - detect when your
| messages sound passive aggressive, angry or sarcastic. I've
| noticed many people who switch to remote work who were fine to
| work with in person have terrible online style and put people's
| backs up - a way to tell those people automatically would be
| great. Also onboarding checklists & guides and faq abilities
| would be cool.
| nmstoker wrote:
| Or better yet, detect the behaviour that's triggering the
| passive aggressive response and handle that better before it
| causes frustration.
|
| A lot of it comes about because people are lazy: - unwilling to
| try something obvious/easily discovered - unwilling to think
| about who might actually be a sensible person to contact -
| unwilling to spend even a tiny effort to describe their problem
| clearly with basic useful details
|
| These would be at the harder end of NLP but they are common and
| I suspect there are signs that could give away this sort of
| thing.
| maomorales wrote:
| This got me thinking on how to train such models. At first,
| it could be that DailyBot allows any recipient to flag a
| message they have received, then they provide feedback
| whether it was aggressive, etc... DailyBot can use that to
| train the model, and also to provide some neutral feedback to
| the sender.
|
| The good thing about flagging is that DailyBot won't need to
| process all the messages, only the ones that a person wants
| to flag.
| maomorales wrote:
| Thanks. We're working in something related to faqs and team
| knowledge bases (already have an initial version of this). The
| onboarding checklists sound useful as well, noted!
|
| About detecting the online style and messages - the point here
| is that we don't want DailyBot to be able to read all the
| messages that a person is sending through the chat, we believe
| it's important to respect the privacy and avoid processing all
| that content. Currently, DailyBot can only process direct
| messages between user and chatbot, or in channels when
| @DailyBot is mentioned.
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(page generated 2021-11-30 23:02 UTC)