THE THING WE BUILT:

SurpriseBot

Slack team engagement channels – #pet-photos, #dad-jokes, #random – they start with enthusiasm and slowly fade into digital ghost towns. A few brave souls post occasionally, but the tumbleweed emoji would be more active than most of these well-intentioned spaces.

The problem isn’t the team. It’s asking people to adopt yet another habit in their already-packed day. Everyone wants engagement and 👍’s on their quippy Slack messages, but no one wants to build an entire product just to test if people will actually participate.

So we built a thing.

Meet SurpriseBot!

How it works:

• SurpriseBot drops into your existing Slack instance – no new apps outside of Slack, no new logins

• It randomly shares fun prompts during work hours

• Prompts are lightweight and engaging, like “Share your Spotify search history” or other conversation starters

• A simple API connects via webhook, triggered by a basic cron job on Vercel

• That’s it – no UI, no complex architecture, just enough code to make something feel alive

Lessons we applied in building this thing:

1. Build as little as possible to test an idea. The road to abandoned projects is paved with overbuilt MVPs. Slack’s built-in /remind feature can’t handle randomness (don’t worry, we tried). So we built a wildly simple setup: one API endpoint and one cron job. No database, no authentication system, no complex UI. Just enough to validate whether people engage before investing more time. Easy to add complexity later. Harder to keep things simple from the beginning.

2. Meet people where they already are. The biggest engagement killer is asking users to go somewhere new. Every additional app, login, or tab creates exponential drop-off. By integrating directly into existing workflows, we removed that friction entirely. People are already logged into Slack with notifications set up. The best new engagement tool is one that doesn’t feel like a new tool at all.

3. Randomness = delight. Every hour between 11am-4pm ET, there’s an 8% chance the bot will send a prompt. It might ask, “💬 What’s a quote you say all the time that nobody around you actually gets?” on Tuesday, and “🎥 Best cheesy moment in an action movie—GO” on Thursday. This unpredictability makes interactions feel spontaneous, rather than routine. Our work in with the Music League Community showed us that regularly scheduled prompts make sense for structured activities. But casual, impromptu interactions, unpredictability creates a fun sense of surprise and attention without folks feeling pestered.

4. Technical simplicity enables rapid experimentation. If folks ignore SurpriseBot, we’ve made minimal code investments. If people love it, we’ll add features based on real interactions. Simple architecture means we can adjust quickly: changing frequency, adding new prompt types, or curating different topics based on the community.

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