Launch HN: Dots (YC S21) – Bot Builder for Discord

[sanketc]

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!

[tchock23]

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]

It's the worst. They are blackholes for information and search is funcitonally non-existent.

[pranavbadami]

Hey, great question! I think a chunk of people like the immediacy of getting help over chat and find it easier to talk naturally with other members. In turn, we’ve seen people grow closer to the community and spend time hanging out there. However, I agree that it isn’t for everyone, especially if you’re mostly looking for support.

UX in terms of navigation, search, and configuration can definitely be improved, 100%, which is a huge reason why servers use us currently.

[kirso]

Continuous discovery? Your customer is partially your roadmap, some are helping you distribute the product. Its a super smart way how to get real world information, then shuffle and decide what to do.

[e63f67dd-065b]

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 :)

[BoorishBears]

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

[sanketc]

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 :)

[danr4]

Are you looking for work? :)

[annnoo]

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]

Ahh agreed, need to set up the mic correctly! Appreciate the feedback.

What usecases resonated with you the most?

[baristaGeek]

Congrats on the launch! It's really cool to see you here after seeing your progress through these months.

I just completed my onboarding flow your Discord server and it was pretty neat. Quick question about that: Do you ask for the region of the community member with the purpose of understanding where your users are located, or do you use that as a parameter for some configuration of how the Discord server works for that user specifically?

[sanketc]

It's to understand more about your members. You can use that to drive what sort of events you want to run, and what times, as an example.

[tomatohs]

Few annoying things:

  - I really want Zapier integration but I don't want to ask you for it
  - Needing to join discord to get an invite code
  - I need to auth and give your bot all my permissions before I know what it can do

[pranavbadami]

Hey, thanks for the feedback!

Re: the invite code, we actually put it in the post text above, it’s LAUNCHHN but I totally see how it wasn’t clear.

And re: the permissions, great point. We should add a bit more context on the bot to explain it’s functionality in the onboarding process. Here’s more context on how the bot creates automated flows in Discord: https://www.loom.com/share/67334ccee36f417da62caa2ad8fdcbd8

[dvykhopen]

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]

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.

[swyx]

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.

[discobelloy]

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!

[thenightcrawler]

This is great!

[Sk012]

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[tasn]

I've had the pleasure of interacting with the Dots team, and they were great. Congrats on the launch!