What kind of growth has been made in development startup that raises profit of more than 2.7 million yen a month?

by Steven Depolo

A business-oriented chat tool, Slack , it is possible to automatically perform various tasks by adding a program called Slackbot. Alex Kistenev , co-founder of Standuply, a startup that develops various Slackbots including Standuply , learns how to get $ 25,000 a month (about 2.8 million yen) from a state where neither right nor left is known I explained how I grew up to earn profits.

Slack Bot Business Tutorial: From Zero to $ 25,000 / mo - Standuply
https://standuply.com/blog/slack-bot-business-tutorial/

Mr. Alex Kistenew and Artem Borodin came up with an idea as to whether or not a chat bot can make a scrum master that supports agile development team study sessions and technical information exchanges possible, and then became the spotlight as a business chat tool at the time We focused on Slack.

However co-founder Mr. Kistenew and Mr. Borodin did not have programming techniques that could code Standbot then. Also, Standuply, who has an office in Siberia, Russia, is 12,000 kilometers away from Silicon Valley in California and southern San Francisco where many software companies gather, and there is no connection with Slack Technologies which is developing Slack It was a situation.

Despite this adversity, Mr. Kistenew and Mr. Borodin hired one engineer in 2016, and formed a team of Standuply by three people. In December the same year we founded Stackbot Development Startup "Standuply".

It took me several months to build the first MVP (Minimum Viable Product, the minimum practical use product), but as of the beginning of 2017, I got a beta version of Standuply free to about 200 teams . Standuply at the time was still incomplete in terms of function and service was sometimes dropped, but each time we sent a "horrible" photo to the user and worked on restoring the service. The following picture is the real thing, Mr. Kistenew at the far right. It seems that there was unexpected popularity from users from photo sending.

However, the development team did not have enough technology base to meet the demands of users. For example, it is said that there were many requests to add answers especially when the user could not confirm the report by the deadline, but since the code of Standuply was rewritten from 1, it was originally one and a half months It was said that the addition of functions planned for 4 months took. Mr. Kistenew said that there were users who had left away in the beta version because they could not respond quickly.

As a result, the development team spent the entire 2017 update on Standuply, but the feature added by hardships was not being used more than I thought. Mr. Kistenew says he learned that it is better to spend time on the core part of stability improvement and function integration rather than adding new features.

On the other hand, as I was updating it seemed that I was getting noticed little by little, in March 2017 it was posted on the main page of Slack App Directory . As a result, we got 750 users newly in 2 weeks and started using it with Slack of 1000 teams. The number of new user registrations has stabilized from here, and the operation of Standuply also got on track. Looking at the graph showing the fluctuation in number of bot registrations per team below, you can see that the number of teams registered on March 26, 2017 has increased sharply.

Standuply continued to update the version afterwards, and released various other Slackbots. By introducing Slackbot in blogs and news sites, the number of registered teams has increased steadily. When Standuply 3.0 was released in March, 2018, it made it to the top sales in one day and it was registered as a maximum of 85 teams in one day.

By aggressively delivering news about Standuply and other Slackbots on SNS such as Facebook · Twitter etc, the website seems to have 20,000 accesses in 18 months. In response to this, Mr. Kistenew says that he recognized the great effect social media has on business.

Also, it seems that it was a great harvest that we could interact with other development teams and business engineers by actively participating in summits and events talking about chat bots and exchange know-how on technical information and strategies .

Although the beta version of Standuply was distributed for free, it has said that it has adopted SaaS (Software as a Service) which can use the required function as a necessary service for the chargeable official version rate plan. Furthermore, when we informed the user of future development plans one by one, monthly revenue has risen to the right, and in February 2018 we surpassed 5,900 dollars (about 650,000 yen). Further review of the tariff plan and enhancement of the notification function by bot showed that monthly revenue exceeded 24,000 dollars (about 2.6 million yen) as of May 2018.

Mr. Kistenöff said that monthly earnings of 100,000 dollars (about 11 million yen) was set as a short-term target as a level that could prove that SaaS is a realistic business model. However, Mr. Kistenf comments that it may be difficult to seek a monthly profit of one million dollars (about 110 million yen) further beyond that in the long term.