We Built our First SaaS - Asante Bot

Dusan Milovanovic — Fri, 28 Jun 2024 17:00:22 +0000

The project is called Asante Bot. I wanted to create a Slack bot that helps teams build a culture of recognition, rewards and celebrations. I focused on making it super easy to use and integrate with Slack.

Motivation

I've always been passionate about building tools that help teams work better, so my co-founder and I started working on this SaaS in mid-November. So, this cute logo was born.

With my experience building products with large teams, I noticed that many teams struggle to show appreciation and celebrate each other's achievements. We wanted to create a simple and fun way for teams to do this.

Short intro

Asante Bot allows team members to give each other recognition Emoji as a gesture of gratitude and appreciation. Each day, team members have a certain number of Emojis to give. The limit can be customized anytime so teams can change the daily Recognitions limit with our Flexible System.

The Appreciation is represented by emojis, which become the currency of fun, team spirit and appreciation. Teams can use the bot to recognize achievements, celebrate milestones, and have fun together.

Why Slack?

Slack was the perfect choice for this application for several reasons:

Slack is where teams already communicate and collaborate, so integrating Asante Bot into their workflow is seamless.
Slack has a great bot platform and SDK, making building and deploying bots easy.
Slack has a large and growing user base, so Asante Bot has a big potential market.

How Did It Go?

Building Asante Bot was a challenging but rewarding process. The biggest challenge was ensuring the bot was easy to use and integrate with Slack.

Since we have full-time jobs, we worked on weekends in rented co-working spaces and worked remotely via Trello and Slack.

We also spent a lot of time testing and iterating on the user experience to ensure it was intuitive and delightful, and we are constantly improving it.

Another challenge was ensuring the bot was secure and compliant with Slack's privacy requirements and GDPR. We followed Slack's documentation closely to ensure Asante Bot met all their standards.

Extra features

We have implemented some extra features for our users, like:

Birthday Bot for Slack - we wanted to integrate Birthday celebrations with Recognitions ability so users can receive Recognition on their birthdays
Work anniversary bot - Same as birthday bot, just for work anniversaries :)
Rewards in Slack - users can redeem rewards created by team members - each reward can cost a certain amount of Recognitions

Try It Out

Asante Bot is available now for a free 30-day trial, with no credit card required.

*And yup - it is free for up to 10 users. *

Our Next Steps

After the initial launch, we plan to continue improving and expanding Asante Bot based on user feedback.

Some of the key priorities are:

Adding more customization options for teams to personalize the bot to their needs
Integrating with Microsoft Teams
Developing more advanced analytics and reporting to help teams measure the impact of their recognition efforts

Conclusion

Asante Bot is designed to help teams build a culture of recognition, rewards and celebrations. We hope it will make it easy and fun to show appreciation.

Free trial

I'd love to hear your feedback and ideas for improving the bot.

DEV Community: Dusan Milovanovic