alexxtomsk

Hi, HN folks! The idea of Remote Friday came to me when I was thinking about the ultimate list of tools for remote work.

Then I thought, what if we can make not only a list of tools but partner with some of them to get discounts. Black Friday was approaching, making it a perfect occasion.

Overall, it took me a couple of months and hundreds of back and forth emails. As a result, we have over 50 amazing tools on the list. I'm excited to share it with you, and I hope you'll greatly benefit from it ;)

thanks, already did that ;)

Hi folks, we spent hours of our time to come up with that guide. I hope it will be useful here. See a funny infographic inside the post.

Thanks, Charlie.

Well, it's a broad topic. However, it comes back to several main things:

1. Select a target keyword. You select some and only keyword you'd like to rank a post for.

2. Mind the competition Check on the competition for that keyword. Don't chase for the ones where you can't outrank competitors. I.e. we can't outrank Atlassian for agile project management, but we can go for less competitive keywords.

3. Compose a great piece of content about that keyword. Then you write a great piece of content about it (See 10x content by Rand Fishkin). Put it in the title, URL and within the content.

I made a similar open startup list with stories, links and other insights a while ago. I think you will find more startups to pick from that post: https://standuply.com/blog/saas-startups-reveal-their-journe...

We spent 500 hours to make a fantastic and super useful Slack Guide. Hopefully, this is the only guide on how to use Slack and FAQ you will need to supercharge your work.

How do you make your standup meetings great? Here's an Excel template to coordinate all the work your Scrum team needs to do.

Agreed.

Yep, maybe. What a huge market!

You will find screenshots in the article which it seems you haven't read.

Here's a quick update on the most popular questions.

1. Are those numbers real or fake in favor of content marketing?

Numbers are real. Anyone from this forum can book a call with me, and I will do a screen sharing of our Stripe/Baremetrics panel. My email is alex at standuply.com.

2. It's not a trend, but a peak number in revenue.

Our revenue breakdown: Feb: $7k Mar: $9k Apr: $19,5k May: $25k June: $13k (as of 20th June). So we'll get a bit less in June. You decide whether it was a peak or it's a trend.

3. It only cost us $23,000/month in advertising

In 18 months we spent less than $2k on paid ads and didn't waste any dollar in 2018.

Standuply focuses on Slack where it brings all the data and questions. There is no need for you/your team to remember using one more external tool.

Here's our revenue trend: Feb: $7k Mar: $9k Apr: $19,5k May: $25k June: $13k (as of 20th June)

Spent on advertising: $0.

Thanks for letting me know. We'll fix that.

Yeah, but let's just listen to those positive commenters and disregard haters. I think if you talk about your story educating others, it brings value to the ecosystem.

I respect companies like GrooveHQ that share their experience and don't conder it as a marketing or spam.

Thanks for saying that. It makes sense for us to be aware of such scenarios.

Hi Igas. There could be several reasons in my opinion:

1. You ask for too many permissions. It makes a lot of sense to ask for less because people don't like to share their sensitive information with the product they don't know/trust yet.

2. It may depend on your target audience, but our users in most cases are able to install the bot on their own. So it doesn't hurt our (not yet perfect) onboarding flow.

What's small and what's large? We've just started and the business grows. I'm sure we'll hit much larger numbers in revenue.

So I'm more concerned about our growth rate rather than revenue numbers.

As for unit economics, we're very lean burning less than $20k. So we're able to survive and grow Standuply further.

You always depend on something: traffic acquisition channels, competition, market size, etc.

Choosing Slack doesn't mean it's the only platform you're developing for. You can expand the same value proposition to other platforms with the same business users (I can't say the same regarding other b2c chatbots/platforms, though).

Thanks, that's insightful. I wonder how can they get as many users. There are not enough gamers in the world to hit that number.

Could you tell us about monetization of that bot? Does it make any money? It would be interesting to see whether Discord is already a platform to build a business on.

Want me to do a screen sharing of our Baremetrics dashboard? Reach out to me at alex at standuply.com to book a call.

thanks for your warm feedback :)

I'm sure they have core features to work on compared to a narrow bot use-case.

Moreover, they will have to invest heavily in a bot that serves only a part of Slack's user base.

It's not a logical move from a product standpoint.

I don't see any chance of that happening unless it would be on Hooli platform under Gavin's control =)

We didn't. It was the pain point that drove users to our beta.

Actually, a standup bot is one of the most popular bots if its kind on Slack App Directory.

Why would a company that relies heavily on bots shut us (or another valuable) bot off?

Thanks. I wrote a dedicated post on that: https://standuply.com/blog/saas-mvp/

It took us a bit less than a year to build the MVP and experiment with the concept.

These marketing channels worked the best: Content Marketing, Product Hunt, Social Networks.

We went out of beta offering paid plans. This way sales started to show up.