The Final Chapter of Beep Boop
Ready the rockets, we have a new Mission
TL;DR Beep Boop will shut down on December 31st. To our customers, thank you. The dream lives on through Missions.
Two years ago this week, we started Beep Boop with a vision to make building, deploying, and discovering Slack bots simple. It was pre-Slack platform and chatbots were still pretty nascent. We believed that Slack and other messaging platforms would become an entirely new canvas for a new class of messaging based applications. And like mobile, we believed developers would be critical to crafting the best experiences.
When the Messenger bot platform launched, we released support for it the very next day. Momentum was building for bots, and it was an exciting time. However as the spring of 2016 became summer, our conviction for “bots” became clearer — we were unsure if the consumer demand would materialize for chatbots, but we were confident that messaging based apps would slowly revolutionize enterprise software as we knew it. So, we doubled down on Slack and continued to learn.
We were confident that messaging based apps would slowly revolutionize enterprise software as we knew it.
As platforms added more structured features like buttons and menus, chatbot experiences naturally became more app-like. In fact, I even started calling them appbots 😉. We experimented and learned a lot along the way, but one other point nagged at our souls.
A new Mission
Team messaging apps aren’t successful because of integrations, they are transformational because of the effect they have on transparency, culture, the ability to self organize, and the way they enable geographically dispersed teams to work together. Custom integrations are costly to build and maintain and require one of our most scarce resources: developers!
We decided that if we were really going to make a dent at empowering diverse teams to work together more effectively, we needed to expand beyond developers and create a platform anyone could use. We needed to focus on how people worked with each other, not how systems connect to systems. We needed to embrace that every company, team, workgroup, and relationship is unique. We needed to focus on workflows. At the end of 2016, we had a new vision and a new mission: Missions. Missions is a new workflow system for Slack that helps coordinate activities between people to get work done.
The sun sets on Beep Boop
Beep Boop will shutdown on December 31, 2017. You’ll need to move your projects to another hosting provider by the end of the year. Heroku, AWS Lambda, and Now are great options depending on your needs. You can use the Teams API to migrate your Slack OAuth tokens. Reach out for help if you need it!
Though we are saying goodbye to Beep Boop, Slapp will continue to be actively developed; it is a core component of Missions. We plan to publish some of the Slapp plugins we created when we recently migrated Missions from Beep Boop.
For our team, Beep Boop was a labor/labour of love (👋🇨🇦) . We did our best to put the best product forward we could and not take ourselves too seriously. One of my favorite moments was when we decided the “hamburger menu” would literally be a hamburger.
We named our pricing tiers after Starbucks drink sizes, but no one laughed. Lessons learned: don’t joke about peoples’ money ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
Maaike Lambalgen is the amazing artist who created the Beep Boop characters and the illustrations used throughout the product. When we launched Beep Boop on Product Hunt, Stephen M Levinson made our day:
We presented Maaike with the “Dope as F*ck” Award 🎉. Thanks for the suggestion Stephen!
Goodbyes are never easy, but it was a great journey and our team couldn’t be more excited about the path we are on with Missions. 🙏
Thank You
To all of our customers, we offer a humbled THANK YOU. Brad Harris, Ben Myers, Maaike Lambalgen, Chris Skudlarczyk and Michael J. Sikorsky THANK YOU. To the rest of the team at Robots & Pencils THANK YOU! To our friends from Slack Amir Shevat, Ceci Stallsmith, D.E. Goodman-Wilson, Buster Benson, John Agan, Sachin Ranchod THANK YOU!
