Three months ago I built and launched a Slackbot and promptly forgot about it. Last week I found out people are actually using it and loving it. Whoops.

Whoops.

How the hell did this happen?

In November 2016 my co-conspirator PJ Murray and I did a hack weekend in an effort to see if we could still build and launch something from scratch.

Over 48 hours we built a Slack bot that would help people take more time out of the office by handling out of office notifications. It’s called brb.life.

It’s not like we didn’t try to make it successful. We wrote it up on Medium, built a very small mailing list and emailed it to friends who we thought would use it.

And then we hit a roadblock.

The friends we sent it to couldn’t even bring themselves to install our product.

The permissions were too onerous: we needed to be able to read and write their direct messages in order to setup an autoresponder if someone DM’d you on Slack while you were out.

The worst part? These people were not only good friends of ours (who might cut us a break) but they were also the founders of their companies (who could override any organizational resistance).

It was a brutal realization and we couldn’t find an easy way around it. So after much back and forth we decided to stop working on the project and find something else to do.

We gave up. We stopped all marketing activities and feature development in its tracks.

Funnily enough one of our friends took a more cavalier approach to us potentially reading his DM’s, installing the product and sharing it with his team immediately. And then, much to his surprise, the team actually used it.

Brb.life has now become the default way the Vero team stay in touch on who is in and out, and where people are working from.

Sample of activity from the Vero team on an average weekday.

You would think we would be stoked? But I’m kind of embarrassed to say we had no idea. The app was such an MVP we didn’t have any alerts for usage or signups and we didn’t keep track of the logs since we assumed it was gathering dust on a Heroku server somewhere.

The only reason we found out that he was actually using the product was that he had some feature requests and a bug submission he wanted us to take a look at.