[HN Gopher] Launch HN: Dots (YC S21) - Bot Builder for Discord
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Launch HN: Dots (YC S21) - Bot Builder for Discord
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!
Author : sanketc
Score : 67 points
Date : 2022-11-17 16:49 UTC (6 hours ago)
| e63f67dd-065b wrote:
| 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 :)
| danr4 wrote:
| Are you looking for work? :)
| sanketc wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| BoorishBears wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| dvykhopen wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| annnoo wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Ahh agreed, need to set up the mic correctly! Appreciate the
| feedback.
|
| What usecases resonated with you the most?
| tchock23 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| It's the worst. They are blackholes for information and search
| is funcitonally non-existent.
| [deleted]
| discobelloy wrote:
| 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!
| swyx wrote:
| 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.
| tasn wrote:
| I've had the pleasure of interacting with the Dots team, and they
| were great. Congrats on the launch!
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