Prototyping with Discord and Slack
We work with startups, both as designers and as mentors. Our most important work involves helping teams to speed up their learning process. We help them create simple experiments or prototypes that they can use to quickly start interacting with potential users.
Often, the fastest way to get started is not to build much at all. In fact, many startups can launch their first experiments with existing products that already solve some parts of the problem that their planned, future product will address. The features that these existing products lack today can often be solved with some manual work from the founders. The most efficient startups we’ve seen typically develop products along the lines of this pattern:
- Do a lot of work manually, supported by existing products
- Add simple automation or bots to existing products
- Build and release your own product, a few features at a time
A manual approach to design only works while a startup has very few users. By doing things that don’t scale, a team will get to know a handful potential customers really well. Later, invaluable insights gained from these early user interactions will help the team design a useful and desirable product. When a team knows what their users need, product development is faster and involves much less waste.
Here are two examples where startups have used Slack and Discord for efficient prototyping.
1. All manual
We met Martin, the founder of FollowApp, through E.ON’s accelerator. He was developing a communication platform to improve collaboration between homeowners and builders. He already knew a few carpenters, so he quickly got started by setting up Slack channels for some of their renovation projects.
This simple Slack prototype helped Martin learn a lot about what homeowners as well as craftspeople cared about. Since the prototype lacked many features, Martin had to be involved as the person in the middle for the experiments to work. He manually initiated, supported and monitored all communication in Slack about a few renovation projects for a several months. By interviewing his early users, he discovered what features they valued the most and even were willing to pay for. This saved him a lot of guesswork when working on his own solution.
2. Bring out the bots
Over the last year, we’ve worked with a team creating a digital collectible called Marble.Cards. It’s a website where people create and buy digital cards that later can be used in different types of games. Since there are many different types of card games that players might like, it’s tricky to know which ones to start building. So the Marble team uses Discord to figure out what games the community enjoy the most.
Like Slack, Discord is a group communication platform, focused on games rather than work. The Marble community already uses Discord to discuss new card releases and to show off and trade cards. At first, the Marble team tried to manually host different “card battle” games in Discord. They soon found that checking card stats and calculating scores introduced annoying delays in the gameplay. Also, players live in different time zones and don’t want to wait for the team to be available to host games. So the Marble team decided to create some simple bots in Discord to speed up card battles. With these bots in place, games became much faster and could be arranged any time of day or night.
3. Roll your own
After studying how users interact with manual or bot-enabled prototypes, it’s time to start building your own product.
The Marble team is currently expanding their web page with a card-vs-card Battle Arena. The gameplay is inspired by the games that users are engaging with on Discord. When released, it will be a major feature that brings real game elements to the Marble.Cards web page.
To sum up, real product development is costly. You don’t want to use it as your main tool for iteration. There are often easier and cheaper ways to figure out what to build next. Always look for shortcuts to get to know a handful of potential users before you invest in expensive development. If your own product idea involves a lot of communication, Slack or Discord might be handy prototyping tools. In some cases, you might even get quite far with well designed emails or even purely manual work. Whatever product you envision, try to deliver its main user experience manually before you invest in building anything.
