4 Slackbots to Supercharge Your Startup’s Productivity

If you’re involved at a tech startup or iPhone app development company, chances are you’re at least passingly familiar with Slack, the email-replacing communication and productivity suite for team projects. It’s the backbone of our daily communication here at Dogtown Media.

What makes Slack special for app developers is the company’s approach to the tool as an OS of its own, integrating with other tools as well as facilitating custom apps and “bots” within accounts. Since they started pouring investment money into slackbot development last fall (to the tune of $60 million), hundreds of tools and dozens of startups have cropped up to help you get the most out of Slack.

Here are a few of our favorite Slackbots for boosting productivity and saving time:

1. Geekbot

In-person standup meetings may be preferable for NYC and San Francisco iPhone app developers, but when you have a distributed team syncing time zones and coordinating video chats quickly becomes a headache.

The app developers at Geekbot created a useful bot to solve this problem by facilitating the meeting directly in Slack, interviewing individual team members and drafting a public report from the results.

2. Howdy

Trainable assistant bots are one of the biggest promises of the Slack platform. Howdy is a Slackbot that can be trained to perform simple tasks, as well as perform helpful tasks for iPhone app developers around the office like organizing and ordering lunch.

3. /done

/done is as much about motivation as it is about productivity. The core function is collecting updates from team members as they accomplish small “to-dos” throughout the day. The accomplishments are uploaded to a dedicated channel, creating a real-time snapshot of how everyone’s contributions are pushing the long-term project to completion.

4. Workato

Studies show that task-switching is a productivity killer for iPhone app development companies. With that in mind, Workato is a serious time-saver: controlling and syncing hundreds of apps from within Slack!

Slack apps are bold new territory

Developing on a small, private platform has its risks. Slack is still young, making the future growth of the platform hard to predict for Slack app developers.

That said, iPhone app developers interested in building custom Slack apps are offered some of the benefits of the early days of the Apple App Store: low barrier to entry, low competition, and hundreds of niches to fill.

If you find yourself enjoying any of these Slack apps, it’s well worth taking a peek at the APIs and tinkering with your own.