Show HN: Tellspin – Round robin rotation for at-mentions in Slack

by amozoss • 5 years ago

10 3 5 years ago

amozoss2• 5 years ago

Creator here. I made Tellspin to solve a problem I've had at my past two jobs. Our support teams had the habit of using at-channel. I found the more they used at-channel, the less people would respond. It seemed our developers got used to feeling like someone else would handle it.

Back then I made a simple slack bot to show who would be responsible to respond to #support. It worked well, but we soon found it'd be nice to have a schedule and a way to override each other's shifts.

Tellspin has been nice because it's a thin layer between pager duty and at-channel. Most support issues don't feel like they should be paging my phone and calling me, but a direct ping from Slack feels more appropriate.

Let me know what you think.

michaelmcdonald• 5 years ago

Looks interesting, but for a company the size I work at it’s a non-starter. $1 / user / month means we’re paying hundreds of dollars a month for what amounts to a slight automation perk. We already have bots that respond to keywords by pinging users in a channel for the respective channel / department they represent. We have a check-in / check-out function built into the bot. It would be trivial to have to ping users on a rotations / scheduled basis (@channel fatigue is t a huge problem since most of the employees are good about managing workload).

Drop the price and you might pick up a larger company that may not have the talent to program some Python bit for Slack.

Good luck though! It definitely looks polished and well thought out.

amozoss2• 5 years ago

Thanks for you thoughts. The price is based on participants in a Tellspin rotation, so it's easier to adopt on a team by team basis. So for example, if your company had 1,000 users in your Slack workspace, but you only had 10 people using Tellspin, you'd only pay for those 10 people.

Nonetheless, I agree $1/user/month is a bit steep. I've lowered the price by 5x to be $5 per 25 users / month.

Show HN: Tellspin – Round robin rotation for at-mentions in Slack

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