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!
23 comments
[ 38.1 ms ] story [ 718 ms ] threadWe 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.
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.
"Explain everything about everything, daily."
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.
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 :)
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.
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?
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.
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?
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!
I am going to explore the functionality of capturing information with forms to make a couple of MVPs.
Thank you!
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.