Are you thinking about what platform would be the right one for your bot? If you are making something work related, we recommend to start with Slack. Below you will find some advice that helped us make Statsbot–one of the most popular b2b bots with >5000 installs in 2 months.

Statsbot was officially launched on January 26th, 2016, and >5000 teams have installed it since.

Everyone heard about Slack

But what makes Slack such an amazing product? Among other things, it’s bots and integrations. Slack builds a communication hub for the companies, and Slack App Directory is its integral part. Slack was not the first one to create Messenger App Store, but here you can really feel the quality of the platform and applications.

Few words about Statsbot

Do you use analytics tools at work? Wouldn’t it be great if you could easily share your data with your team instead of making all these spreadsheets for your co-workers?

I love @statsbotco. For 99% of updates I don’t even need to use Google Analytics in browser anymore.

Statsbot is an analytical companion for your Slack team. You can add Statsbot to query data from Google Analytics or Mixpanel right into your Slack and automate the process of sharing these data sets and graphs with your team.

Validating your bot value is a must

This is the tip #0. Before entering any app store, decide if your product has a value. People don’t need one more app that would waste their time, even if it’ll work inside a messenger. Run a beta-test. Before Statsbot’s big launch, we tried our hypothesis on the first 100 teams, worked out analytics for our bot, and made sure that the teams were really using it and that we were solving their problems rather than creating new ones.

Learn how to onboard and retain users before scaling. The launch will give you a spike in new users, but the rest depends on the quality of your product.

Follow the the best practices

There are a lot of articles about the technical side of the issue. We’ve learned a lot from Kifi, Meekan, and Kip.

I would also like to emphasize the importance of onboarding and Add to Slack Button.

There is a great article about onboarding by Ross Simmonds— follow the best practices. Your goal is to lead the user from your page at Slack Store to the first message to your bot — this will be your activational funnel.

At first, our registration started with connecting to Google Analytics, and then the team authorized the bot for Slack. We took the advice of one of the Slack’s managers and moved Add To Slack Button to the landing page. And though it cost us some technical efforts, it brought us growth in conversion to nearly 10%. Don’t miss any tips from Slack Platform’s managers.

Traffic from Slack App Directory for Statsbot.co in March.

Slack Platform as a team and community

Any cool product starts with a team. And I have to say that Slack Platform has a very strong one.

After you submit your application for review on Slack Dir, you are assigned to a personal manager. In our case, it was Amy. She helped us solve many problems and even gave us tips on UX.

We had an issue with multi-account support: our users wanted to connect several analytical accounts in one Slack. To discuss the implementation, we got in contact with Product Managers from Slack — Jassim Latif and Buster Benson.

We also have been featured in Slack API blog.

Most of this communication would not be possible without Slack Developers Hangout, kudos to Ben Brown for his great work on building the community.

To sum up

Three months ago, Slack launched the Slack App Directory. Currently, it is the fastest-growing platform for b2b bots. Most importantly, Slack has very high quality user base and adoption rate for new integrations. We see a lot of new releases every week that make people’s lives easier and more productive.

We strongly recommend that you start the development of your bot for Slack, where you can get a lot of traction and validate your idea.

Get started today