A simple Slack bot that notifies when users join a channel
Thanks for the story, but I’m just here for the bot…
Hey, no problem, here you go. I hope you find it useful. Please don’t hesitate to reach out and let me know what think.
The story so far…
Recently I’ve been transitioning roles at work. I’m moving away from product development into business, marketing, and sales strategies. It’s foreign territory but I’m really enjoying it.
A few weeks ago we started a beta and I was tasked to come up with our onboarding strategy. I’ll try and write more about my research and results another time. I want this article to focus on one important piece of the strategy.
“Welcome Aboard!”
The first step of the onboarding process is to invite all new users to join our Slack team and then personally welcome them when they joined the #general channel. Something fairly small and simple, but I felt it would be critical to helping our users achieve an initial success.
It took a few iterations of the process to get it just right, but once it was refined it worked really well. Our users were having a very positive experience, along with our onboarders. However, almost immediately I noticed a problem…
“Sorry I missed you :(”
I found that unless someone was literally sitting and watching the #general channel, we never actually knew when someone joined. Far too often I was off in another conversation and a new user would join with no one to welcome them (sometimes for hours). This meant we were failing at what we felt was the most critical step of the onboarding process.
I searched around the Slack dashboard hoping to find a setting that would notify me when a new user joined, but only found a few dead ends. So I finally decided I’ll just do what I’ve been doing for the past decade and build my own solution.
See a need, fill a need
As I searched the internet for what I was looking for, I found plenty of examples of Slack bots, but I didn’t find a single example of a simple Slack bot that notifies you when a user joins a channel… I was stunned. I thought for sure this was something someone else would have already needed and created.
Also, most of what I found was way more than what I actually needed. I did, however, finally stumble on this guide which promised a super-simple slack bot, and delivered on that promise!
After digging around for a bit through the slack api guides (which weren’t quite as helpful as I would have hoped) I ended up with exactly what I needed, a simple Slack bot (which I ended up calling Baymax) that would notify me when someone joined our #general channel.
“Hello, I am Baymax…”
Since I used Nanobox to develop the bot locally it was extremely easy to launch it live. In a matter of minutes I was getting a PM in Slack from Baymax telling me that a new user had joined #general. Perfect!
