Why Our Startup Runs on Discord and the Channels That Make It Work

Communication tools can make or break a startup, especially one like ours where the team are fully remote spread across Europe. With team members juggling multiple tasks and responsibilities, clear communication becomes the key to operating at our best.

For our startup Overmind, we chose Discord as our primary platform for communication, collaboration, and workflow management. In this blog, we’ll discuss why Discord became our go-to tool, the specific channels we use, and how they benefit our team.

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Why Discord?

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Ease of Use and Integrations

One of the main reasons we chose Discord is its user-friendly interface. From day one, our team found it easy to use, with many of them familiar with it from personal use, such as gaming. It just made sense to use this for our startup.

More importantly, Discord’s integration with other tools and systems we use is a game-changer. From sharing documents directly from Google Drive to integrating with custom bots and RSS feeds, Discord keeps our team informed and up-to-date without any hiccups or headaches.

Cost

Startups often operate on tight budgets, and Discord offers a financially viable solution compared to traditional enterprise communication tools. With free features and affordable premium options, Discord provides value without breaking the bank. Features like unlimited message history and extensive customisation options make it easier for us to run efficient operations at minimal cost.

Our core channels

When we set out we tried to limit ourselves to a maximum 5 channels, and then allow additional channels to be organically requested. This is so you can decrease the space in which conversations can happen, meaning it’s easier for all members to stay up-to-date in the fast paced environment. This allows for more people to stumble upon the conversations of others & different thoughts & opinions from what they’re looking for.

#general

Purpose: Company-wide announcements and general discussions.

Benefits: The #general channel serves as our central team hub. Here, we share important announcements, updates, and general discussions, fostering an inclusive and transparent environment for all team members. This is also where you will find any food or dog pictures.

#design

Purpose: Discussions related to design projects, including feedback and revisions. This is also shared with our external design agency as the place to communicate with them.

Benefits: By using the #design channel, we streamline the design process and enable easy collaboration among our design team, ensuring everyone is on the same page.

#sign-ups

Purpose: Tracking new user sign-ups and subscriptions.

Benefits: We use Zapier to automate the posting and filtering of messages in the #sign-ups channel, showing only external sign-ups. This process ensures that the team stays updated on growth metrics and allows for quick action on successful onboarding. The messages contain crucial information like email, company, and a HubSpot lead link. In the future, we plan to use OpenAI to summarise the user's journey to signup, providing deeper insights into customer acquisition and onboarding.

#go-to-market

Purpose: Strategy discussions for product launches, marketing campaigns, and sales strategies.

Benefits: The #go-to-market channel facilitates collaboration between our marketing and sales teams, ensuring coordinated efforts and cohesive strategies. Again this is in a separate channel so its easier to stay on topic and search and history

#engineering-bots

Purpose: Centralised notifications for code updates, alerts, and package updates.

Benefits: The #engineering-bots channel is the dedicated home for all automated notifications that keep our developers informed. Bots integrated into this channel help manage and track various aspects of our code and infrastructure. Some examples are:

1. GitHub: Notifies our developers of new pull requests, commits, and merge statuses, ensuring everyone stays on top of code changes.
2. Sentry: Alerts us to errors and performance issues in our applications, allowing rapid response to production problems.
3. Renovate: Alerts about new versions of packages that need updating, helping us maintain up-to-date dependencies.

#user-actions

Purpose: Conversation around user activities, feedback, and interactions.

Benefits: The #user-actions channel provides insights into user behaviour, helping us continuously improve the user experience based on real-time feedback. We also have a Overmind Bot that posts our own risks made on our terraform-example demo repo. This is useful for discussing these risks as we continue to fine tune our model.

#outage-alerts

Purpose: Tracking and discussing global outages from various companies.

Benefits: This channel keeps our finger on the pulse of industry issues. We subscribe to a few hundred different organisations status page RSS feeds and use Inoreader to collate these updates, filtering them through ChatGPT for relevance and importance before generating summaries. This real-time awareness provides a broader understanding of IT ecosystem stability.

#reddit-alerts

Purpose: Monitoring mentions and relevant conversations on Reddit using specific keywords.

Benefits: By tracking keywords such as 'overmind' and 'blast radius' on popular subreddits like r/terraform and r/devops, the #reddit-alerts channel helps us stay up-to-date with market trends and public sentiment, aiding in market research. Again this is made possible through Inoreader and the Zapier and Discord native integration.

Misc Channels

#music

Purpose: Sharing and discussing music, creating playlists, and organising virtual jam sessions.

Benefits: Music has a unique way of bringing people together. The #music channel is focused on boosting team bonding and creativity. After all, who doesn’t love music?

Automation and Bots

We’ve integrated various bots and automated services into our Discord to streamline processes and boost productivity. From CRM announcements from Hubspot to automated signup postings and tracking user actions, these tools keep our team informed and efficient.

We typically start this by seeing if there is already a native Discord integration, which most of the time there is. If not we use a tool like Zapier to automate the various steps. Below is an example of the zap that powers the Outage bot in our #outage-alerts channel.

If you’re considering a communication platform for your startup, we highly recommend giving Discord a try. Share your experiences or recommendations in our community Discord channel —we’d love to hear how other startups leverage Discord.