The Knowledge Base Slackbot

For over 4 to 6 months, I've been working on AudioBrother.com - a peer to peer marketplace for audio equipment rentals.

The idea sounds great on paper, but after conducting research on consumer demand and need, the idea just doesn't work. I decided to just completely stop this project, before I go even deeper and spend money on something that's destined to fail.

I needed to come up with an idea that meets these criteria:

1. It's micro - I need something that's just one product, and does one thing really well. I'm envious of those that run startups / products that sell this one thing, and it does this one thing really well.
2. It's completely online - Nothing physical. It must be completely software based, and consumers interact with the product 100% online.
3. Has a subscription model - Self explanatory. Needs to have a pricing model that works based on a simple tier structure, paying monthly.

I work as a DevOps engineer, and today I had an issue with a custom built API. The documentation we had on it was on Confluence, and if anyone has used confluence before, you know how extremely annoying it is to deal with. I still haven't figured out how to access my liked articles.

I was reading through this one article we have on this API, and struggling to find what I was looking for. It's a bit annoying, because there's no layout or syntax enforcement.

The quality of the article is entirely dependent upon the time and effort of its author.

We also use Slack almost exclusively. All deployments are done via Slackbots. All communication, aside from meeting invitations, are done via Slack. We rely so much on it.

So for my next product, I found something that meets all of my criteria listed above, and have successfully "niched" it down.

I present Botkno (the name sucks, it's' a placeholder) - the knowledge base slackbot.

Botkno allows you to access relevant articles within your knowledge base, all through slack. Not only can you search, but you can also create knowledge base articles that enforce a distinct layout / syntax, depending on what type of article you're creating.

Articles are also tagged by their type, such as [Ansible], [API], [Playbook], [Knowledge], and have "Verified" tags that signify that the article contains accurate information. This solves the problem of dealing with rusty five year old MySQL articles, written by that one guy who left the company after finding out his supervisor's been sleeping with his wife.

No more digging around confluence or other inefficient knowledge base platforms.

You work remote, and you're on a 24/hr on call rotation. Who are you going to call at 2 AM for help? Easy. Just look up what articles are in the knowledge base using keywords that describe your problem, and voila, Botkno has you covered.

What do you guys think?