HN Explorer

Launch HN: Dots (YC S21) – Bot Builder for Discord

112 points by sanketc ↗ HN
Hi HN! We’re Sanket and Pranav, co-founders of Dots (https://dots.community). We help people manage large communities on Discord by automating common tasks like onboarding new members and providing insights on your most valuable members.

Companies are increasingly interacting with their customers through communities on Slack and Discord. This trend will continue, because building a strong community around your product is a moat, leading to better retention and revenue. However, while Slack and Discord are great communication tools, they aren’t designed for community teams to engage with thousands of members at a personal level. Moreover, community leaders don't have a good idea of who their members are. We solve these problems by letting them automate common tasks and by giving them visibility into what’s going on in their communities.

There’s a ton of repetitive manual work required to build a great community. Often, community leads spend hours kicking bots/toxic members or answering FAQs, ending in burnout. Specifically on Discord, mods of busy servers are patching together 10 bots or building custom bots to improve the UX of their server. This is confusing for community members too.

Dots is a no-code automation builder that helps mods build great experiences in their Discord servers. Specifically, the product consists of:

- a no-code bot builder: You can pick a trigger (e.g when a user joins a community, or when they click a button), and define various actions to fire off after (e.g. send a message, send a survey) You can think about it like Typeform for Discord on steroids;

- member analytics: Tag members into segments directly from Discord and identify key community members (or members about to churn)

Discord allows community leaders to build complex rules and member hierarchies. However, most mods lack the ability to code their own bots. A niche market of consultants and developers has cropped up to help customize communities, but our product lets the admins build what they need for themselves.

Here’s a quick 3 min demo on creating an automation flow: https://www.loom.com/share/67334ccee36f417da62caa2ad8fdcbd8

Communities like Chainlink, Splice, and the NBA use Dots to onboard and engage thousands of members in their servers. Here are some automation examples of what they use us for:

- Welcome flows: custom onboarding flows to ask questions to new members and show them around the community, as well as verify they’re not bots

- Surveys: send surveys to specific members within your Discord server

- Support flow: community-specific support chat bot directly in Discord which integrates with their existing support tooling

If you run a Discord, we would love love love your feedback! You can sign up at https://app.dots.community/signup with no credit card required. Invite code is LAUNCHHN. We have a free tier and our paid pricing starts at $29 / month and up for more advanced features and very large communities.

Join our Discord to see a flow in action (or just hang out with other Discord mods): https://discord.gg/WJFTPtvGGw.

Thanks so much HN—we look forward to your comments and questions and any of your thoughts on software support for communities!

36 comments

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dvykhopen
looking for this for a while bc i always have to ask my eng team to help build discord bots and that's not a good spend of resources -- have actively tried to build on my own but honestly just gave up and our community suffered bc of it.

product seems super intuitive. will try it with a subset of our community later today!

sanketc
Looking forward to your feedback. If are open to sharing what sort of bots have you thought about building for your community, I can see if we can support those specific use cases.
e63f67dd-065b
As a bot dev, this looks very interesting but quite underpowered. Maybe I just hang around in gaming communities where custom bots are common for non-trivial tasks like querying game APIs, organising parties for different activities, etc where I don't really see this being useful.

The cases that it does support, however, are quite helpful, and is currently only done by cobbling together a bunch of bots, as you said. Good job on launching :)

sanketc
Appreciate the candid feedback! We started with use cases that are relevant for most communities, and plan to build out the functionality to make it more comprehensive. We recently added ability to query external APIs, and triggers through webhooks (you can check out NBA's discord which has live game threads powered by our bot builder). But agreed with you that there is more work for us to do here.

What sort of organizational things have you built bots for? Curious to hear about, so we can build towards that :)

e63f67dd-065b
There’s quite a few things I’ve built or been involved in building (I just do this on the side, but I’ve had a few commissions and it’s all primarily gaming-based):

- Discord as a notifications service: perhaps the most common thing I’ve built, but it’s very common for there to be a lot of things that people want to be notified about (an activity that starts every x hours, <thing> just spawned, price of x just hit y, shop that has different stock every day has x today, etc) a variety of things. How it’s usually done is that a bot posts notifications to a central #notifications/#announcements channels in a guild and people sign up for roles so that they get pinged for notifications that they want. I’m not sure if you already support this, but it shouldn’t be that much work

This was before the whole follow channel feature, but that’s very limited and I would imagine this is very common even outside video games, as you said live game threads, pings for when a streamer/game starts, etc

- Ad-hoc wiki: a lot of guilds have what’s basically a few (or many) wiki channels, and I’ve been involved in turning that into a bot-controlled channel that also syncs to a website so non-discord people can access it and you can index, search, etc (see `pvme.github.io` for example; I wasn’t involved in building it but it’s very similar to stuff I’ve built)

I’ve wanted to build what’s basically a wiki that’s discord bot controlled (to bring the interface to where the editors are), but also a has a nice web interface, access control, etc. but never found the time or the motivation

- Database frontend - various different forms of “write these things into a DB, and then spit it back out in a nicer format”

- Crappy REST client - sometimes games have stuff that’s only hidden behind obscure APIs, so you just write a bot that forwards /commands to the correct endpoint and spits it back out

- Informal market - some features around aggregating price/demand/supply information for informal trading of game stuff, for lack of a better term

Edit: I completely forgot, but communities around streamers/YouTubers are probably a huge market. I haven’t been involved in that area, but I know friends that funded a nice vacation from building bots for these people. Stuff like patreon management, perks, moderation, engagement, etc that I see your service as a perfect fit

sanketc
Wow, thanks for the detailed use cases here!

- Discord as a notifications service - we do support aspect of it where folks can click a button to get a specific role (e.g. I want notification for xyz). We have a recurring trigger that can check an endpoint, and post an update from that endpoint. We don't yet support conditions on that (e.g. only notify if price hits x)

- Wiki - pvme.github.io looks pretty cool. I have seen couple other products that help convert community content into indexable pages. I like the idea of like a web interface where folks can edit, but the content also some how gets updated in discord (e.g. forums in discord could be a good use case for this?)

- Intra guild look tracking - this is definitely a little bit more complex than what we plan to support given it involves storing specific data for access at a later date. Is this pretty common for a lot of gaming communities?

- Crappy rest client - yes we can support this! Definitely get in touch if you find yourself wanting to do something like this in the future.

danr4
Are you looking for work? :)
BoorishBears
That'd be a terrible place for them to try and build a business.

There's a limited number of games that have the audience to justify them going out and enabling that level of tight integration, and that audience tends to be too disjointed to make good customers.

Their current product targets the kind of audiences Discord seems to be angling for these days: niche groups outside of gaming looking for a digital meetup spot

e63f67dd-065b
Yeah I’m definitely not saying that it’s a good business to be supporting boutique bots for small communities, but there’s a very long tail of communities with a few thousand people that have some custom needs. Supporting them almost definitely does not scale at all.

But that’s the problem though - everybody uses a slightly different set of features, so the more you add the more people you get.

sanketc
Absolutely! It’s helpful for us to keep the long tail of usecases in mind tho as we prioritize, so we can capture aspects of those. We’ll ofcourse never be able to replace a full custom bot. However, bots coded for specific uses come with its own set of challenges (eg. managing a backend server, logging, relying on someone else to update basic things etc.) which we hope to mitigate.
annnoo
It really looks pretty interesting and helpful for me and a lot of persons out there! :)

But one thing: If you record demos please try to setup your mic correctly. In the demo you've shared the audio is pretty often clipping (which does not really sound great/ sounds unprofessional)

Otherwise: Good luck on your journey!

sanketc
Ahh agreed, need to set up the mic correctly! Appreciate the feedback.

What usecases resonated with you the most?

tasn
I've had the pleasure of interacting with the Dots team, and they were great. Congrats on the launch!
swyx
Congrats on the launch—definitely a need for this kind of solution. I’ve used Common Room (https://www.commonroom.io/), which has similar automation features as well as broader functionality for community management and insights. Worth checking out too.
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discobelloy
Congrats on the launch. I'll share with some of my Web3 friends to get their thoughts.

Product looks clean and better than a lot of the solutions out there!

tchock23
I don't understand why companies are building customer communities on Slack or Discord.

I kind of get it for consumer brands where there is a natural passion around the topic/product, but the last thing I want to be invited to as a B2B customer is a Slack or Discord group.

Who has the time to figure out the channel structure and community rules/conventions, get even more notifications, scroll through endless chat threads, etc. just to stay up to date or share feedback about a B2B product?

Am I just an oddball and don't get it? HN please help me figure out what I'm missing because I keep getting invited to Discord customer communities for B2B SaaS products and I just have zero desire to join, ever...

shaburn
It's the worst. They are blackholes for information and search is funcitonally non-existent.
porphyra
Discord search is actually great but you are right that the information is invisible to Google search and other external search engines. Likewise, at my company, a huge amount of knowhow is stored in internal chat logs. This sort of knowledge is the true "deep web" --- unindexable and unsearchable.
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Firmwarrior
Yeah, man, it's going to be tragic when discord shuts down at some point and all that knowledge just disappears forever
ls15
The information is also often locked behind login walls. That accounts can be created for free (for most people) does not mean that the information is freely accessible.
pranavbadami
Hey, great question! I think a chunk of people like the immediacy of getting help over chat and find it easier to talk naturally with other members. In turn, we’ve seen people grow closer to the community and spend time hanging out there. However, I agree that it isn’t for everyone, especially if you’re mostly looking for support.

UX in terms of navigation, search, and configuration can definitely be improved, 100%, which is a huge reason why servers use us currently.

kirso
Continuous discovery? Your customer is partially your roadmap, some are helping you distribute the product. Its a super smart way how to get real world information, then shuffle and decide what to do.
tchock23
I fully understand the benefit to the company.

What I don’t understand is the benefit to me as a customer.

sanketc
Some customers prefer asking in a community because that can lead to responses from other customers (at times it can even be faster response than a company rep getting to respond). A good example is dev infra related companies, where a customer can get a lot of value by hearing from how other customers think about a specific problem. You don't get that through a typical customer support software which is one to one.

It comes down to preference. The trend is that companies have to meet where customers are already hanging. Some customers will prefer only email (and for them you still need a ticketing software), some will prefer social (depending on industry), and some will prefer chat/forum communities. If you want to stand out as a company (esp when you are starting out), you have to serve them where ever they prefer. Sure, if you have an amazing product with a strong moat, you have more leverage on how you want customers to interact with you. But that comes much later in a company lifecycle.

tchock23
I get what you’re saying and agree, but the synchronous nature of Discord and Slack aren’t the best interaction model for what you’re describing. Async forums (which have existed since the beginning of the web) are much better suited for that…
kirso
I am not affiliated with the folks here, but I think this is a matter of opinion and where it diverges.

I am part of several channels that like to have a native feature request / bug reporting in Discord => once the thread is created it sends the ticket to JIRA / Linear

The issue is that the alternative with communities is people sending you DMs with requests so its hard to keep track.

As a community user, I can just /command create_request, fill in my description + screenshot and send over to their team to process

TheLML
You can even do tickets on Discord. I've been on a server where users were able to create a ticket and then a new channel with the ticket number was created. The channel is private and only the ticket opener and users with the support role(s) can see the channel and communicate in it.
tomatohs
Few annoying things:

  - I really want Zapier integration but I don't want to ask you for it
  - Needing to join discord to get an invite code
  - I need to auth and give your bot all my permissions before I know what it can do
pranavbadami
Hey, thanks for the feedback!

Re: the invite code, we actually put it in the post text above, it’s LAUNCHHN but I totally see how it wasn’t clear.

And re: the permissions, great point. We should add a bit more context on the bot to explain it’s functionality in the onboarding process. Here’s more context on how the bot creates automated flows in Discord: https://www.loom.com/share/67334ccee36f417da62caa2ad8fdcbd8

baristaGeek
Congrats on the launch! It's really cool to see you here after seeing your progress through these months.

I just completed my onboarding flow your Discord server and it was pretty neat. Quick question about that: Do you ask for the region of the community member with the purpose of understanding where your users are located, or do you use that as a parameter for some configuration of how the Discord server works for that user specifically?

sanketc
It's to understand more about your members. You can use that to drive what sort of events you want to run, and what times, as an example.