A migration story with Max Pete: Slack to Discord

Migrations frequently fall on a Community Operation person’s plate, as the person who is responsible for the community’s tech stack and is often responsible for the data integrity and data management for the community. Since my nine-ish official months at Talkbase, I’ve already done four migrations for the company, and during my time at Salesforce, my largest migration had to be sunsetting Eventbrite, Meetup, and Splash and moving all our user groups across different segments to Bevy.

Recently, Max Pete did a migration of the SuperHi community from Slack to Discord, and I thought it would be awesome to interview him to find out more about his migration story, because who doesn’t love a good migration?

Tiff: What was the impetus or primary reason for the migration of the SuperHi community from Slack to Discord?

Max: The main reason was that Slack was too costly. I believe SuperHi was paying upwards of $50k+ a year to host the community there and it was just getting to be even more expensive as we scaled. With Discord, the platform is pretty much free, minus a few costs for server boosts but the savings alone were massive.

Also, Slack has made it known time and time again that they’re not focusing their platform on communities, and we kept running into issues around moderation, search functionality, and content overload.

Beyond that, SuperHi was working with external creators to launch new content and courses, and there also wasn’t a great way to give creators certain access and control over Slack for the various channels that they would help co-run.

Tiff: How much time did you have to plan the migration end-to-end? How much pre-planning was there, and then how long did the migration itself take?

Max: 90 days from start to finish which honestly wasn’t an ideal situation. But we had some tight deadlines to hit, so we hit the ground running.

We spent about 60–70 days on the planning and actual build of the new Discord server. Luckily we had a good mold for our community architecture that already existed on Slack so instead of starting from scratch we had this foundation to build off of.

The last 30ish days to launch were spent testing out the new platform before opening it wide to the community. In a perfect scenario, we would have invited certain members to onboard to our Discord server to get feedback and suggestions, but we didn’t have time to do this. So our Community team took it upon ourselves to continuously test the sign-up flow from the perspective of a new user.

Tiff: What kind of cross-functional alignment, preparation, comms, meetings, etc. did you have while planning for the migration?

Max: I would say that this was mostly a Community/CS project that we owned entirely, but we did work alongside strategy and content when it was getting closer to the launch date. There were a few different projects happening in the background simultaneously and in order to meet deadlines, we kept meetings to a minimum while working with other departments. However, the Community/CS team met on a weekly basis (sometimes twice per week) to connect on progress updates, roadblocks, etc.

When we worked with content and strategy, we did a lot of async work via Slack communication and utilizing Linear and Notion for project management.

Tiff: How did your project plan look like? What was in it? Do you mind sharing a screenshot of it, if you have it?

Max: I, unfortunately, don’t have access to the roadmap for this, but this was all planned in our Notion database with key dates and milestones to hit. The nice thing about this being built in our Notion was that it was accessible for all of our team to see current updates, status, and any documentation that we created alongside this.

A few milestones that we had in our project plan included:

• Set up the Discord server
• Build out channel structure
• Create the welcome Screen and onboarding flow
• Create a survey to send to the SuperHi community members pre-launch
• Record walk-through videos

I can’t take credit for setting up this Notion database up, all of the kudos and praise go to the Product Manager, Kali.

Tiff: Did you pre-seed Discord, or fill it with any legacy information from Slack? Or was it a completely clean slate?

Max: It was a completely blank slate! We did fill in some channels such as (#start-here) to showcase information for onboarding. We also made sure to fill out all of the channel descriptions, etc. so that members could have a point of reference of what each channel is (if it was different than what we had in Slack)

Tiff: In terms of member communications, how did you let your members know that you were changing platforms? How did they take it?

Max: We first wanted to get a pulse of our community members to see if they would even be up for a platform change and if so, what their current needs/wants are. Our team worked on a short survey and sent it to our members about a month before the launch.

Surprisingly, the community members who filled out the survey noted that they would be very interested in the Discord migration. Overall, 70–80% were marked excited and we had roughly 20–30% who marked hesitant or not willing to migrate.

We also asked our members on this survey to list out what they would need to feel comfortable transitioning to Discord and the majority of responses listed something along the lines of making the onboarding process smooth by including documentation, how-to videos, etc. The data that we collected in this survey was super to discover because we used it to build out our onboarding videos and messaging sequence.

We also used this data from the survey to reaffirm that this migration is the right call to make because based on the results of the survey, the majority of our members would migrate to our new Discord server.

Tiff: Walk me through migration day.

Max: LIGHTS. CAMERA. ACTION * Cues confetti drop *

Haha jk jk.

If I am being honest, I didn’t sleep well the night before just due to me being worried if the migration launch was going to work or not. We had good faith that the majority of members would be up for this change, but you never know until you launch.

But on launch day itself, it went pretty smoothly. We did a big initial post in the Slack community letting our members know about this switch and we also sent out other correspondents via newsletter and social.

We got a lot of good initial feedback that our onboarding video and sequence was helpful and by the end of the day, we saw 250 members migrate in the first 24 hours. For context, our Slack had 15,000 members in total (most were inactive through the years) and around on average 700–800 monthly active users. So while it wasn’t the biggest splash in terms of record numbers, we were happy with the initial results.

Tiff: Did you turn off Slack on migration day? Or did you leave it for an amount of time afterwards for members to get whatever they needed and take their time migrating over to Discord?

Max: We didn’t turn off Slack. The plan was to keep it up until we were able to download the full Slack archive and host that archive on a separate site for members to access. However, we didn’t see that through with the layoff, so I am not sure what the status is there. In terms of moderation, the community team went through all of the new posts that were made after the Discord launch and redirected members to post the question in Discord with an invite link. It was pretty tedious but we made it work.

Tiff: Were there any members who were really unhappy with changing platforms? How did you handle working with them?

Max: Fortunately, we didn’t have any members express extreme displeasure with this transition. There were a few members who did express that they were hesitant of course, but no one who was super unhappy.

For the people who did express their hesitancy, what we did was reach out to them 1:1 to connect more on their concerns, and what we can do to best alleviate the blockers from them transitioning to Discord. In these messages, the members were happy that we took an extra step to address their concerns and also gave us more additional context and insight that we used to adjust our onboarding process.

Tiff: Did you have any goals or success metrics that were determined for the migration? How did it do?

Max: So I know this isn’t the most kosher answer, especially with having to tie ROI and data back into everything, but we didn’t have must-have success metrics that we needed to hit. The more important goal was to make this migration happen in the first place as this was where the new direction of the SuperHi community was heading.

Having said that the community team put together a few metrics that we had in mind for hitting after 30 days of launch:

• 1,000 community members
• 10% engagement rate (on Slack ours hovered around 5%)
• 90% of new community posts would be made in Discord (we still had Slack open, and our goal was for members to not post there anymore and fully transition to Discord)

To the goals above, this is what we hit:

• 830 community members in 30 days (but on target to hit 1,000 in 45 days)
• 29% engagement rate in month one (almost 2 times our original goal)
• We hovered around 80–85% percent for new member posts in Discord, but still a great range to be in during the first month.

Tiff: What are some key takeaways or lessons learned from this migration experience?

Max: Oh, I have a few, this could be its own article haha, but for the sake of time:

1. Take your time with a migration if you can: I know we get all sorts of deadlines, etc. but if you have the power to push back and give yourself some breathing room for a migration, please do so.
2. Be okay with being in the unknown: I really didn’t know a whole lot about Discord before this migration and while that was intimidating, I didn’t let that stop me from exploring. There are going to be times when you are put in the unknown and that isn’t always a bad thing.
3. Document everything: Because Discord was such a new platform for myself and the community team to get used to, I knew it was going to take our wider team time to adjust as well. Creating documentation on how to access channels, onboard, etc. is going to be super beneficial not just for your community but also for team members as well.
4. Things aren’t going to be perfect: No matter what community platform you’re on, you are going to run into roadblocks and nothing is going to 100% check all of the boxes. This is why it is good to create more buffer time in a community migration so that when you do run into roadblocks, you’ll have some time for workarounds.
5. Celebrate the work that you and your team have done: Community migrations are a lot of work and you should be celebrating you and your team’s efforts because y’all deserve it!

Let’s chat

Are you working on a platform migration? Or perhaps assessing if a migration is a good option for your community? Then I’d highly recommend reaching out to Max — he is currently open to consulting or full-time opportunities. You can learn more about Max and find out how to reach him by visiting his portfolio or reaching out to him on LinkedIn.

And lastly, in true CommOps Gal tradition, here is the blog-ender doggie photo, this time of Scotch & Hoagie, Max’s fur babies.

Scotch (left) and Hoagie (right)