Make Slack Even More Useful With Bots!

I love Slack and all its fun/useful/ridiculous bots. Here are a couple to highlight, written by the Product Hunt team. Enjoy. :)

If you are one of the million-plus people who uses Slack on a daily basis, you probably live and breathe on the platform. With all of its use cases—from day-to-day colleague communication to remote team collaboration to network groups—it’s easy to see why Slack won a Crunchie for Fastest Rising Startup earlier this week at TechCrunch’s 9th annual awards show. And if you use it as frequently as we do at Product Hunt, you’re probably down to make it even more useful for you (and your team).

Here are five of the Product Hunt community’s favorite integrations and slackbots, designed to optimize your use of the platform—and make you feel like a Slack productivity wizard. [Insert hilariously ironic /giphy here] :-)

1. Notify

Get notified in Slack when your startup is mentioned online

Wish you could keep better track of when your startup is mentioned online? The Notify integration will do that for you—and the setup takes less than a minute. All you have to do is create what you want to track (e.g. startup name, topics, events, and competitors); select the sources you want to track them on (e.g. Reddit, Medium, Facebook, Twitter, Product Hunt, Blogs); and choose how often and where you want to receive notifications.

Using this tool will help you get more customers, find press coverage, stay ahead of competitors, and learn more about your areas of interest.

2. Statsbot

Google Analytics bot for Slack

Statsbot is such a cool Slack integration. You can layer this tool on top of others you currently use, like New Relic and Mixpanel. Then you can pull all sorts of fancy metrics and reports with nothing more than a Slack message. Ask for things like: total sessions, total users, new users, conversion rate, and bounce rate. This tool is definitely worth checking out if you are frequently asked for—or just feel like nerding out about—performance metrics.

3. Meekan

Your team’s scheduling robot assistant

Well, this works like a little piece of magic on earth. Meekan will match everyone’s calendars on your team and quickly find common free times for everyone to meet. All you have to do is add the “robot” to any of your Slack channels and it will find times that work for everyone you’re looking to get into a room. Rescheduling? No problem. Conflicts? Those can be sorted out in seconds.

In addition to finding the times when everyone on your team is available, Meekan will also help you do things like: book a flight, schedule a service, or reserve your hotel. This is a must-use integration, especially if you really want to save time on meeting coordination and booking-driven tasks (aka. all of us).

4. Birdly for Slack

A Slack bot that does your expense reports

Let’s be honest: completing your expense report is a sucky task. You dread doing it until it’s finally the eleventh hour and you have to scramble to do a month’s (or more) worth of bill tracking. Basically, the old way of doing expense reports is procrastination-inducing. Birdly for Slack is going to save you a lot of unnecessary headache. This bot does not require a tool or app download, but it will enable you the upload a photo of a current receipt in real time, as well as send you intelligent reminders to avoid last-minute expenses. We don’t know about you, but we’ll take it!

5. Smooch

Speak to your app’s users entirely within Slack

If you want to get back to your customers faster than you already do, giveSmooch a try. When one of your customers sends you a message, you’ll get a Slack notification about it and can answer directly from the tool. This serves to help you tackle support questions quickly and more seamlessly, as well as consolidate how many different tabs you have to have open at any given point throughout the day. We love the ease and convenience of Smooch, along with its Slack integration. Besides…how do you not love a product with a name like “smooch”? ;-)

Want more? You can find the full collection of Slack integrations and slackbots here on Product Hunt: