I can’t believe it’s been two months (three including breaks) of writing! One of the cool things about writing here is that I go back to what I wrote, to check what I was thinking last week. When a lot of my output is “thinking”, that helps me build on top of what I previously thought.

In today’s post:

  • 💡Ideas: Last week’s top ideas
  • 🗿Status: How’s it going, Stefan
  • ➡️Next steps: Step nexts

💡Last week’s top ideas

In previous posts I shared ideas as a brain dump. However, now that I’m focusing on Slack apps, I thought it could be interesting to give more details about my thinking.

There are four areas where my attention keeps drifting and where my inspiration keeps giving: (©️ 😂) Artificial Intelligence, Productivity and Integrations.

Artificial Intelligence

If you are on Twitter or Linkedin, your eyes are probably bleeding from all the talk about (Chat-)GPT. If not, quick intro:

  • GPT-3 is an artificial intelligence language model
  • Chat GPT is a chat bot built on top of GPT-3
  • Chat GPT has been blowing people’s minds what the things that it can do, including answer questions (well enough pass an MBA exam), write code/poetry/anything(?) and summarize information
  • Dozens of companies are jumping on the hype and building things using the GPT models (anyone can use the paid API)

Applied to the context of Slack, there are 4 main problems that AI could probably solve well:

  • Unblock people from starting/replying to conversations. It could help you rewrite a message to sound more polite or add clarifying details. If you let the AI learn from your previous chats, it could reply the way you would usually respond.
  • Help you not miss important information from different channels, while not having to read every single message. It can also guess the general emotions (if e.g. people are unhappy) in a discussion.
  • Write code in your place. GPT can start from a simple prompt (e.g. write a script to scrape the reddit), translate programming languages and even find + fix bugs
  • Answer general/specific knowledge questions. GPT knows about most of the information that was on the internet in 2021. But you can also train it with more information. Make it read a specific book and it will be able to answer questions from it. Make it read messages from your colleague Karen, and it will be able to answer from her voice.

Productivity

The market for productivity apps has been overcrowded for years. But there always seems to be room for one more app. Below are three problems that I personally would like solved as a corporate Slack user:

  • Remind you of messages that you’ve read but haven’t responded to, or of your messages that no one has responded to yet. This has been a personal problem of mine. Would definitely make my life less stressful
  • Wrap collaborative bots: On a daily basis, I’d get notifications about comments in Google Docs, Sheets, Loom, Figma, Jira, etc, eating up my focus. Would be cool to have one place for all content discussions, that’s not a new place (e.g. Slack, not an extra app)
  • Auto-reply with my Gmail/Outlook out-of-office message, when I go on holiday. Current apps just notify the person that you’re out-of-office. Slack also has a Status that you can update manually (many people forget though).

Integrations

Most people that use Slack also use all kinds of other apps. Those apps generate data and notifications. However, context switching is hard - going from app to app makes you lose focus. Slack is often an app people already spend a large chunk of their time.

Below are some integrations that:

  • Are not on Slack yet but are getting some search traffic:
    • Surveymonkey - no integration, 50 searches/month
    • Linkedin - weak integration, 120 searches/month
  • Are already on Slack but there’s so much search traffic that there could be place for one more app: Jira
  • Can help motivate sales teams by bringing stats and producing leaderboards from data in fast-growing CRMs (e.g.: arena/salescompete for Pipedrive)
  • Same idea but for customer support (e.g. Supportman for zendesk/gorgias/qualified/crisp/hubspot livechat/support)

The logic behind the last two points is that these are centered around Sales and Support tools. That means they are used to get or retain customers. So customers are more willing to spend money on them.

🗿How’s it going, Stefan?

Thanks for asking! I’ve got another cold (3rd one this winter). Kind of depressed that I’m getting sick so often lately and worried that my training for the Paris semi-marathon on March 5th will suffer. But also, maybe I should dress better when running 15k at -2 🤷‍♂️.

Quite happy with my progress in the past few weeks. From the list above, there are a few things that I can get excited about building.

Thoughts going through my mind:

  • Is it worth riding a trend like GPT3?
  • Who would pay for yet another small improvement in productivity?

➡️Next steps

  • Make a shortlist from the ideas I shared above, and run them through my checklist + write up more about the actual problems to be solve
  • Write about how I scraped the Slack app marketplace with the help of ChatGPT. It’s very frustrating that there are no stats about apps on the Slack app Marketplace. So I decided to get some data myself.