Get Together - Slack Hack 2.0

Home Tab Heaven!
Just tell @GetTogether what to schedule and let the AI take it from there!

Inspiration

Our team uses Slack every day to move our business forward in real time. That’s because everything we do starts with a message - whether it's an idea, a project timeline, a quick decision or a meeting request. Unfortunately, while everything starts with a message, not everything can be easily achieved with one… 🤔

Time-after-time our team agreed to meet over Slack, but whether it was due to different calendars, different time zones, different organizations, or different preferences, we found ourselves sending endless back-and-forth messages or setting up numerous polls simply trying to schedule time. 😩

And when we asked around, we found out that we weren’t the only ones…everyone was having to go in-and-out of Slack to try and coordinate because, despite the many apps available, there wasn’t a single, message-first, automated AI scheduling app…until now! 🎉

What it does

Get Together is the fastest, easiest way to schedule via Slack. 🏎 💨

Simply add @GetTogether to a group DM or channel, tell it what you want to schedule with a bot mention, and our patent pending scheduling algorithm will immediately triangulate message context, calendar availability, and individual user scheduling preferences in order to find the best overall time for the group! 💥

Get Together will even place the event on each individual’s calendar, so no one has to leave the Slack conversation to send an invite! 📅

How we built it

Get Together's Slack App is built on top of our patent-pending scheduling algorithm that leverages a proprietary natural language processing model to enable instant, broad-based, in-message scheduling. 🤓

During the Slackathon, we connected the “scheduling brain” of the Get Together API directly to the Slack interface in order to create a seamless user experience. 🧠

We used the block kit builder extensively to model our desired UI within Slack and the App Manifest to ensure that we had all the necessary scopes, permissions, and event hooks for our app to function in any workspace. 💃 🕺🏽

Challenges we ran into

Our first challenge was on the technical side. Learning the nuances of Slack app interactivity was a natural challenge, particularly when it came to things like dealing with the “3-second response requirement.” Fortunately, the Slack API documentation is AMAZING and we were able to learn everything we needed by just reading through the docs…and maybe checking in on an occasional Stack Overflow forum. 😆

Our second challenge was on the consumer side ensuring that new users could easily onboard and get started using the app right away. To this end, we spent a tremendous amount of time on our app’s home tab, tailoring the messages displayed to each part of the user’s journey with the app! 🙌

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our product now schedules our team’s meetings in seconds, and we use it internally on a daily basis! 🤗

Other companies have shown interest as well! In fact, we already had another company try out scheduling with Get Together in their own Slack workspace and the response was clear that this is, “THE FUTURE!” 🔮

What we learned

Slack provides an incredibly rich set of backend APIs and frontend UX components that makes it a natural fit for Get Together! Leaning in during the Slackathon taught us that we have a huge opportunity to help more companies and teams schedule seamlessly in Slack. 💪

What's next for Get Together - Slack Hack 2.0

Coming out of the Slackathon, we are going to make Get Together in Slack the dominant focus for our startup! There are still a number of features that we want to add to make the experience even better (including leveraging the new Beta API features) and we already have organizations willing to run partner pilots with us! 🔥