Show HN: I self learned to code and built a Slack app for team feedback - Kaapi

Show HN: I self learned to code and built a Slack app for team feedback - Kaapi(kaapi.team)

29 points by adityarao310 5 years ago | 17 comments

scoutt 5 years ago |

My mood would definitely drop if I have to answer questions about my mood while I am coding. I see this tool as more corporate-jerkery oriented instead of helping to be more productive. And I can't stop thinking this HN entry was kind of forged since the 3 out of 5 cheerful comments here were done by green created-1-hour ago users. But of course, I can be wrong.

yboris 5 years ago | |

Great catch on the 3 comments from users created 1 hour ago.

Seems suspicious.

adityarao310 5 years ago | |

Fair point on the distraction bit, and I hate it too! Kaapi sends two notifications a week and if your Slack notifications are off, you wont get any notification from app too :) Maybe we have some improvement areas on this topic. Will think about it more!

I do disagree on the corporate-jerkery bit. 100% of current users (454 active this week) work in tech startups. Most managers use us to get agenda points for their upcoming 1-on-1s..

On the last bit --> Yup, I sent my weekly newsletter a few minutes ago and did tell users to give us HN feedback on how we can do better! :)

scoutt 5 years ago | | |

I think that to succeed in your business you should poll on management, because I think every developer on earth would roll eyes (and probably hate you) when proposed insistently* into participating on giving such feedback by some wanky manager.

*should read: "participate or it will impact negatively in your performance review".

> did tell users to give us HN feedback

I am not an admin or police of this place, but be careful because it might be against the guidelines[0].

>> Can I ask people to upvote my submission? >> No...

>> Can I ask people to comment on my submission? >> No....

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

elviz 5 years ago |

Hey, I produced a detailed feedback for your website (incl. video and breakdown). You can see it here:

https://firstimpressions.link/result/kaapi-team

I hope this helps.

adityarao310 5 years ago | |

Dang this is nice Elviz!

adityarao310 5 years ago |

Creator here. I have spent a decade in startups now. Almost always, the best teams had fantastic feedback culture & systems.

So when I learned to code last year, I really wanted to build an app for this :) The Slack app checkins with your team once a week, and collects the answers for you in a simple format. You can even run daily standups! All within Slack.

Had to do some interesting hacks to make a Slack UI - it even has a bar graph using Slack formatting tips :) We have a serverless stack (AWS Lambda) and Python on backend, and Aurora database with a Psql engine for autoscaling.

I really believe that the answer to a good remote culture is surprisingly simple - listen to your people, and take action on the feedback. Trivia nights and Zoom parties come later.

[1] [Our story of bootstrapping Kaap to $1000 MRR](https://www.kaapi.team/blog/hardcore-year-learning-to-code-b...)

[2] [Why we went serverless from the beginning](https://www.kaapi.team/blog/this-is-why-we-went-server-less-...)

[3] [Goal setting in remote teams](https://www.kaapi.team/blog/a-simple-idiot-proof-guide-to-go...)

[4] Why everyone should code(https://www.kaapi.team/blog/everyone-should-learn-code)

puranjay 5 years ago | |

Congrats on the launch! Curious about your coding journey. You mentioned that it took you 1.5 years of coding on weekends, but would you also share the courses/tools/communities you used?

veermanhas 5 years ago |

Hey Aditya, Congratulations for the launch. Glad to see you here. Been using Kaapi for a two weeks and have already filled the feedback loop I wasn't able to do for some time. Dead simple to use and works better than calls.

Would love to add custom questions as well.

adityarao310 5 years ago | |

nice! Yeah we are going to add that ability soon hopefully

travelco 5 years ago |

I see that you only have a Slack app - I am curious why did you start with that platform first?

adityarao310 5 years ago | |

It was a good MVP to begin with. Slack abstracts away a lot of other head ache for us e.g. we dont have any frontend UI - we just give formatted JSON outputs to Slack API and they parse it for us!

prakharam 5 years ago |

Been using Kaapi for my team for the past few weeks. Great results so far! Highly recommended.

Saajjain 5 years ago |

Great stuff! Signed up for my team.

gehani 5 years ago |

This is an incredible achievement. Been using for a few weeks, and it doesn't feel like the work of a newly minted developer. More power to you!