Why & How We Developed Tools for Slack to Better Facilitate How We Work

 

 

Fount was founded on democratic principles to ensure that every team member would have an equal voice in our company’s operations. We provide strategy, design, development, & growth services for startups & growth-stage companies. Often operating alongside our clients in small teams of full stack software engineers & designers, we soon found the need for internal tools to optimize our workflow and expedite decisions.

Democracy isn’t just a mission statement or buzzword that lives as text on a website, it’s how we work. We have democratized every part of the software design and development process. For example, each project that we undertake is voted on and all project leaders are elected by their teams. This type of working culture requires a high level of communication. Which is why…

We freaking love Slack.

Slack is used daily as our primary communication tool. After we fell in love with Slack, we joined the Slack Development Community to begin building and developing Slack apps to help facilitate how we work and communicate.

We are hackers & makers at heart and couldn’t wait to start developing tools on Slack.

Vote

A Slack App For Effortless & Anonymous Voting

We built Vote, a new Slack app that allows anyone to call for anonymous votes at any time and on any issue.

Keeping the creator of the poll/vote anonymous is very important to us to guarantee that the selections are not skewed based on whom posts the vote. For example, if a more senior team member creates a poll, people should not feel a tendency to vote a certain way just because of their seniority or some political alignment.

We use the Vote app for everything from making company policy decisions to deciding where our weekly happy hour spot will be. Check it out in action:

Want To Install Vote For Your Team? It’s Free. View our full blog post here. You can download and install Vote for Slack here.

Interested in learning the technical specs behind Vote? Read the full blog post here.

Spoiler

A Slack App to Prevent Spoilers

It only took a few spoilers shared within our team Slack channel to force the question: “How could we leverage a Slack bot to alert users that a Spoiler has been entered?”

Coincidentally, we were also looking for a good excuse to build a Slack bot without traditional server costs. We put our heads together to solve both of these problems and out came Spoiler: a free Slack add-in to warn your team of possible spoilers.

Check it out in action:

Export

A Slack App For Downloading Archives of all Your Slack Discussions

Each project that we undertake is voted on and all project leaders are elected by their teams. We then create a Slack channel for each project where we communicate as a crew. This worked perfectly until we had to archive each channel.

Thanks to a lack of tooling around exporting within Slack, we kept losing important/useful information from these channels. That is why we decided to build Export.

Export is an easy to use Slack add-in for allowing you to download archives of all your Slack discussions. You can export all types of Slack messages, including:

• Public group channels
• Private group channels
• Direct messages

Messages can be archived as either HTML, JSON, or plain-text for easy readability. Additionally, you can limit by date range too.

It’s free! You can download and install Export for Slack here.

About Fount:

Fount is a digital product design and development studio. We create beautiful, interactive experiences for our partners across many verticals, including consumer web and mobile products, enterprise services, and healthcare.