Hi HN - we built this simple tool as an experiment in a hackathon here at DailyBot. It is a tool to help you plan the agenda for a meeting, it can also calculate the potential cost of the meeting and tell you if perhaps that meeting is not necessary.
Do you think this can be useful in any way? Does it make sense to develop it further? any ideas to integrate?
I imagine how tough this decision has been - thanks for making Friday and for delighting many users with your product these years. We started building DailyBot (https://www.dailybot.com) some time ago, and here we always loved the Friday approach and the UX of your tool.
With good will, we are here to help you or support your users community in the time to come.
This got me thinking on how to train such models. At first, it could be that DailyBot allows any recipient to flag a message they have received, then they provide feedback whether it was aggressive, etc... DailyBot can use that to train the model, and also to provide some neutral feedback to the sender.
The good thing about flagging is that DailyBot won't need to process all the messages, only the ones that a person wants to flag.
I thought it'd make sense to share how we're internally using DailyBot, to build DailyBot. This will give you a better picture.
1. We run daily stand-ups
2. Every Friday, there is a 3 questions retrospective, really good to reflect about work and priorities
3. On Monday, we run an icebreaker, the team tells stories about how the weekend went, it helps us stay connected at a human level
4. Every 2 weeks, we get a #watercooler prompt with very random questions that create discussions among the team
5. Whenever we're launching a release, we trigger the command "Coderelease" that shows a native form that the technical leads fill out. The data is posted in a #releases channel, then everyone sees what new things are being launched, we use that data as change control, and PMs use the notes to prepare product updates for users, etc.
6. When we get any idea/feedback, we register that through a form that we can trigger in chat "@dailybot customer feedback"
7. Every week, the team is paired randomly to have virtual coffees (those are optional to opt in, but nice to keep our team connected)
8. We run polls/surveys from time to time with DailyBot
9. I have built a few commands to query internal data, like product top KPIs
Thanks. We're working in something related to faqs and team knowledge bases (already have an initial version of this). The onboarding checklists sound useful as well, noted!
About detecting the online style and messages - the point here is that we don't want DailyBot to be able to read all the messages that a person is sending through the chat, we believe it's important to respect the privacy and avoid processing all that content. Currently, DailyBot can only process direct messages between user and chatbot, or in channels when @DailyBot is mentioned.
Thanks for this feedback! we'll improve the timing and I will prioritize creating the walkthrough video - in the meantime, feel free to reach out if you want to see a full demo: mauricioatdailybotdotcom
We have not looked at these integrations with video conferencing apps closely but having tools for better video meetings does sound useful - we’ll take a look.
In general automation: a feature that is coming next year is Integromat support, also, we recently launched a feature that allows you to turn any DailyBot Form in an online data table: you can store and query data from it using the chat assistant. Teams are using this to have time-off tracking, inventories, track their code releases, etc. These Forms support integrations with WebHooks.
And there is more to come next year around Chat-Ops, we’ll be sharing these updates with our users. Thanks!
Our aim is to provide an all-in-one solution so companies don't need to get a bunch of different feature-bot software subscriptions to manage what they can achieve with DailyBot.
Our product is user-friendly and highly customizable - which is a great advantage, you can adapt it to be your team's chat assistant. You may want to run 1-1 chats (we call it virtual coffee) like Donut, set up in-chat watercooler & icebreaker prompts every week, but also get reminders of your team's birthdays or use DailyBot for stand-ups and/or as a shared knowledge base for the team.
Users that have moved to DailyBot see a lot of value in our all-in-one approach as they are reducing tooling fatigue, have more compelling analytics/reports, and for some companies it is better in terms of risk assessments: if you have to comply with strong security, it's better to audit one vendor rather than 6+ bots, plus DailyBot is reliable with SOC2-Type2 coming soon.
We might target similar customers for some use cases, but different ones in other cases like workflows, in-chat automation, etc.
The wide range of use cases covered by DailyBot is exciting for us, we're working to create templates and content that can inspire and speed up the setup of every type of customer.
Indeed, good asynchronous practices are a key multiplier, and I believe remote teams should invest on establishing these early on. In our case, moving our standups to async was a game changer.
DailyBot manages this smoothly, it takes in account each person's timezone, it sends reminders and posts reports automatically in chat channels. And the best part is the web dashboard, you can see organized reports, see analytics like who's the person that is most blocked this week (so the team can help out), see the trend of engagement, and additional info like team morale.
With DailyBot, you can download that data in XLS,CSV,PDF, and you can search across reports very easily, on the web, or using the bot. This is is just one of the use cases that users are achieving with our product :)
Interesting thoughts - our users are seeing it as a tool to improve their workflows and interactions. Some employees may feel overwhelmed when a manager is reaching every often to ask for a written update, etc - but when it’s an automated assistant it feels more like a process and flow. It’s also more predictable.
For example:
Many teams use DailyBot for agile/scrum ceremonies, like automating a daily stand-up, a development sprint health check at the middle of the cycle to make sure everything is going well, and perhaps some retrospective meetings every 2 weeks.
They don’t stop meeting face-2-face. DailyBot helps gather all that information, it provides analytics and you have an organized record. Then the teams meet to discuss, but everyone will be well prepared and there are notes already to navigate — it makes the interactions more efficient.
We’re not yet another chatbot. DailyBot is an automation platform that delivers a chat assistant that you can use for many purposes.
The main difference: privacy and security. Many feature-bots out there do not follow strong security and privacy measures. This is our top priority and we’re working on SOC2-Type2 compliance which will be ready in 2022.
DailyBot is an all-in-one solution, it replaces many other chatbots you might be using today and a) unifies data through a simple web dashboard, b) you pay for only one tool at a great price, c) it’s adaptable & extendable.
We see seat-based pricing convenient for customers that want to control and adapt the product to their team size and budget. Per-seat pricing is simple to structure and easy to understand by customers as it's a standard in SaaS nowadays.
We do offer flat fee options for bigger teams and companies that are adopting DailyBot as an organization-wide solution, it's not currently automated and we do it case by case.
It's a great question, pricing is something we continue learning about and improving over time.
Thanks! Feedback is always welcomed and we're excited to have you onboard. Feel free to contact me directly if you need anything or have comments: mauricioatdailybotdotcom
Oh, thanks! I shared this comment with my team - they're the ones behind what we're building. I'm glad to see you're finding value in what we're doing. Stay tuned for what's coming next! And feel free to send me any ideas or feedback directly, my email: mauricioatdailybotdotcom
We landed at this pricing: $3/mo per user (in a basic plan) and $5/mo per user in a standard plan that includes more security features, anonymous check-ins, culture/team values for kudos, API/webhooks, and some other details.
The reasoning behind hiding pricing: we've been running a/b tests for different pricing setups inside our web app. We had to hide it from the public page because of a technical limitation in our a/b implementation. Public site and web app are completely separated and we didn't want to spend time integrating more things to track users/sync info between both apps - it soon will be over.
We're building a whole ecosystem of tools and add-ons for async work. Bots like geekbot are focused on stand-ups, and this is only a piece of what we're doing now - our goal is to replace several bots/apps with our toolkit, and implement security standards that are not followed by current bots; we're also available in more chat apps, not only in Slack.
DailyBot lets you give kudos to teammates, have a watercooler in a chat channel, random 1:1 coffees, run a virtual commute that reminds you to disconnect from work each day, run countdowns, pomodoros, and more. You can even build public web forms that are connected to your chat channels through the bot. In the end, we want to make the chat 10x better and at the same time provide only one dashboard that connects all that data.
Our product is extendable: you can connect your check-in responses to over thousands of apps through Zapier, and build your own chat commands without technical knowledge. For example: you can create a command that responds with your predefined text, like to access information quickly inside the chat, or to trigger a form, or get data from your back office tools, kind of useful for chat-ops.
DailyBot was born out of our own need - we’ve been WFH for many years and needed to stay in-sync with each other. There was a behavior we were not happy about: managers or people coming to others asking about what they’re working on or requesting status updates, often. We wanted to change that behavior with our product, if you get some written updates on a periodic basis, the team will get more aligned, managers won’t need to bother (that frequent), and likely you’ll reduce the amount of unnecessary meetings.
Then we started extending the product around async work practices. Traditional work-from-office environments can indeed benefit from improving collaboration practices, getting more work done inside the chat, and (of course) decreasing the pointless meetings for things that could be written updates.
It could happen that teams use DailyBot improperly for micro-management purposes - that’s why we’re also creating a catalog of best practices and proper question templates; asking the right questions is key. We'll go further by adding more features to DailyBot so it becomes a highly useful personal assistant at work.
Hi HN — we’re Mauricio and Sergio from DailyBot (https://www.dailybot.com). We provide tools for async work and team collaboration. It's currently a chatbot with support for Slack, MS Teams, G Chat, and Discord and others coming soon. Here's a 2-minute video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHZnGl4c-9g
We've been working in distributed teams for over 6 years and even for us, async work was still challenging. We faced pains like having too many meetings. overusing calls, and processes that could and should be chat-driven, automated, or optimized. We wanted some sort of chat assistant that we could adapt to our daily workflows. We found a few bots with partial solutions but they didn't care much about privacy and security, and we didn't want to cobble a bunch of different apps together. So we started building a tool for teams like us!
DailyBot adds features that don’t exist in Slack - our goal is to replace many apps/bots you use, all integrated in one and with a web dashboard that combines insights from these add-ons in a simple way. You can use @DailyBot to automate daily stand-ups, periodic team check-ins, give kudos to your teammates, track team morale, and even run a virtual watercooler or random 1:1 coffees across the company. All inside your chat. We also made it customizable so teams can build their own chat commands that respond with predefined texts or with data from their APIs.
We’re building it with security and privacy in mind: we don’t read messages from Slack channels, nor private conversations, except when you tag @dailybot. We use granular scopes and get only the necessary API permissions, we encrypt data in transit and at rest and implement different roles/permissions at the web dashboard. DailyBot is being used mainly by product and engineering teams, to run stand-ups, agile routines and build their own chat commands. We offer a free trial, and seat-based pricing starting at $3/mo/user.
We’d love to hear any ideas on how you would like to see chat assistants evolving, for example: a) a command to send anonymous feedback to a person; or b) a better reminder feature, etc. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts and feedback!
Do you think this can be useful in any way? Does it make sense to develop it further? any ideas to integrate?