During the peak of this pandemic, I've been actively testing different ideas to make remote work feel less lonely. One of the things that came out of it was Snack – virtual coffee, water-cooler, (call it what you want) chats for teams.
I've seen a several similar-type of Slack bots appear during these weeks, but Snack is the most complete and the most polished out of them all. It facilitates intricate user matching logic (that matches people when they are available and does not bother people when they are busy), it facilitates the call, has built-in ice-breakers, and it collects feedback (, which it then uses to prioritise future matches). Though, I think that what attracts users the playful branding, Easter eggs, and other surprises that make the chats a fun experience.
It was intended to be (and it will remain) a side-project for me; I've moved on to other (even more exciting) things. However, it is hard to ignore the pace at which it has been growing. Less than 4 weeks after the first public launch, 250+ Slack teams have installed Snack, totalling 120k+ Slack users.
I wish I could say I've devised some clever growth strategy, but it has been growing mostly through word or mouth. However, it definitely helps that:
• It has been (and continuous to be) featured by Slack for over a week now.
• It was one of the most upvoted and commented projects in the Global COVID-19 hackathon (out of 18,000 participants).
• It is being used by amazing (and huge) Slack groups like Globant (30k+ Slack users), University of California, Monstar Lab, Giphy, Pioneer, On Deck, and others.
• It got 480 when I launched it on Product Hunt.
• There seems to be an element of general-awareness vitality that drives the traffic.
Because I am committed to another venture, I would like to find Snack a new home. Someone who could grow it to its true potential. At the current pace and acceleration, that could be 50,000+ Slack teams before the end of 2020. Therefore, if you are indie hacker and if it sounds like something that you'd be wanting to work on, then you should definitely email me.
I know your pain. We've also seen a huge uptick in workspaces using our app, which has been hugely successful. It's an async collaboration integration with slack and other team messaging tools. While it's 400+ teams using our app with many key customers invested in our premium version. We aren't sure what we want to do with Standup & Prosper.
We had used our technology supporting our other products to make this at a fraction of the maintenance cost usually associated with starting up new services. So while it pretty much sits there and generates users and revenue, we do want to shift our attention to and focusi on application security by building Authress.
Congrats nonetheless! What inspired you to build it over using existing tools such as https://geekbot.com/?
The base features that we needed justified the functionality to be free, but nothing was offering that. So we created a community edition of the app to be free (which is most of the features of geekbot or standuply or any of the other apps) and only charge for more premium features.
Collaboration for team members should be free especially at the paltry features that most teams need, I don't know why they would charge for that. Geekbot is ~$3/month, why?!
This comment was deleted 5 years ago.
Hi Gajus! A great example of success and how a simple app can become popular when it appears at the right time in the right place.
Gajus, I wrote you an email, but most likely it fell into spam. I represent the Standuply.com team. We are Slack partner and ranked among the top apps in our category. We also have a huge list of friendly Slack communities where we can promote your product. I propose to think together how we can make our both products integrated, or just helpful for each other. Please drop me some lines to dima@standuply.com!
Hey, don't think I got that email...
I tried emailing you, but got:
Just email me at gajus@gajus.com
This comment was deleted 2 years ago.
Dope! gajus@gaus.com Email me and let's setup a call.