FWIW, I'm not sure I'd recommend that. For things outside your control, you've got to deal with the world as it is, not how you would like it to be. Slack own the game for chat bots right now - I think the advice you got from Des Traynor to double down on it is spot on.

That is so true. We were building for Telegram before Slack and was very disappointed business-wise about it.

Now we're fully focused on Slack and it helps us in building a great product for the narrow use-case.

However, of course, we're looking for ways to expand our market.

I'm not sure about Discord (how many of you guys are using it?), but MS Teams, Google Chat, and Stride are the other players that in my opinion will be able to compare with Slack in terms of features and market size.

During an interview I had at Discord recently the lead engineer mentioned they had exceeded 130 million users. Though, there was also a recent bump by almost 70 million people that left Skype and joined Discord in the news recently as well. He told me that Skype is the 800 pound gorilla to beat and that they have around 300 million users or something. They're definitely gunning for them, and Microsoft has changed Skype so much that they've alienated much of their user base in addition to having lots of security flaws. Discord touts their security, two factor auth, IP address hiding, plus having all the features of Skype in addition to the concept of slack-like chat rooms. More than just gamers are starting to use it.

https://variety.com/2018/gaming/news/discord-turns-three-120...

At the moment, Discord is ad-free and other than Nitro subscriptions which let you have animated profile images and use emoticons in any server, which he admitted was an almost unnoticeable revenue stream at the moment, they don't really have a way to monetize the platform. When I asked how they were planning to generate revenue and whether my job would be secure he said they haven't settled on any ideas yet but have a few bouncing around that he wouldn't tell me.

He mentioned that once they reach 600 million users they consider that the break-even point where they've succeeded as a platform and can start considering putting possible plans into action. My guess is that advertising will play a big part, and possibly various other techniques like microtransactions, platform integrations, affiliates, partnership deals, content distribution (movies, music, games), etc. It is probably the break point at which you can afford to anger a percentage of your users in exchange for enough revenue to establish themselves as a self-sufficient organization.

It's sad what Microsoft has done to Skype. I wish they'd stop screwing it up and fix the gaping security and performance issues that were just not there before they bought it and screwed with it's design (probably to merge it into their legacy corporate chat system). Thankfully they made Teams which I think is fine.

>He told me that Skype is the 800 pound gorilla to beat and that they have around 300 million users or something.

>He mentioned that once they reach 600 million users they consider that the break-even point where they've succeeded as a platform and can start considering putting possible plans into action.

He needs to become a 1600 pound gorilla just to hit break-even?

Thanks, that's insightful. I wonder how can they get as many users. There are not enough gamers in the world to hit that number.

You are clearly underestimating the number of gamers in this world!

Yep, maybe. What a huge market!

I use Discord daily as the main communication tool for a remote dev team. We have a voice and text channel for each project and works great.

I've used Discord since sept 2015. It's been an interesting journey (my friend develops a bot and has reached 26,000 servers and 3 million users.) It's quite good, but still does not support stereo audio input inside of the client. Canary build has a new experimental audio subsystem so it may be now, haven't tested yet.

Could you tell us about monetization of that bot? Does it make any money? It would be interesting to see whether Discord is already a platform to build a business on.

He doesn't make any money at all as far as I am aware. I think he may have 1-5 patrons on patreon, otherwise it's only ads on his control panel from a small ad company.

Do enough companies use Discord to make it worthwhile? I thought that for any sort of semi-corporate use, it was either Slack, Hipchat or Teams.

I think it depends on what you consider a worthy market -- My daughter, 16, doesn't know a single friend who doesn't have a Discord account. Moreover, the 'group chat' in subreddits is, more often than not, powered by Discord.

Of course, those users are probably using it for its free service, and aren't a terribly attractive market on their own, but if they're at all representative, there are a lot of people using Discord, so maybe a low-effort MVP to prove out the market might be worthwhile.

I think the problem (or should I say "the difference") with Discord is that they don't position it for business communications. However, the product is fully capable of doing that.

So there are some teams using Discord for business communications, but it's not the default use-case. You can prove that by looking at Discord bots on the market and feature requests at https://feedback.discordapp.com

They would have privacy concerns if they did. We’d never use facebook for business for instance, the same is true for Discord.

Maybe it’s different for American companies but in they EU you’d be hard pressed to sell something that monetizes privacy data.

Agreed.

>We've seen plenty of people going all in building their business on a platform they don't control, then getting mad when the platform they depend on changes how things work.

I've always wondered about this. When you depend on another, already-monetized platform to build on, your livelihood depends on a variety of factors not in your control.

What if they decide to make your functionality part of their core product? Charge for API access? Limit/remove API access?

You always depend on something: traffic acquisition channels, competition, market size, etc.

Choosing Slack doesn't mean it's the only platform you're developing for. You can expand the same value proposition to other platforms with the same business users (I can't say the same regarding other b2c chatbots/platforms, though).