I built a Slack app & I liked it

And the potential for Slack as an LMS

I closed my last post with:

I guess this means I’ll be launching WeeklyArticle.Club soon.

Well, this past week, I went heads down on building an MVP and it’s now ready for early access!

Quick recap: In my last post, I put together a landing page in Notion for WeeklyArticleClub with the aim of practicing visualizing ideas quickly. This idea solves a problem that I had faced at previous companies; it’s time-consuming to manage a quality L&D initiative.

Inspired by Jason Fried’s call-to-action to “build the thing, put it out there and see what happens”, I decided that I wanted to get to the point of launching an MVP of WeeklyArticleClub. I also thought that it would be easy to build a truly minimal version. This is me in the last post:

I could execute an MVP of it without any code and just with some no-code tools like Typeform, Google Sheets, and Zapier! 

🤦🏽‍♂️ Classic under-estimation. Ultimately, it took about 500 lines of javascript and about two 12-hour days of coding.

Still, I wasn’t bummed about that. I had been itching to get back into code and see if I could remember how to ride that bicycle. It took a couple of hours to remember, but I got the hang of it again. Turns out that NodeJS still displays unhelpful error messages and console.log continues to be a developer’s best friend. I learned how to use Slack and Airtable’s JS library, which will prove useful for future prototypes. And I learned that clear documentation and a helpful community are key components when building a product for developers, as Slack’s app platform team and Airtable have demonstrated.

Here’s a demo of the experience so far:

Anyone can simply invite @ArticleClub to a channel, pick a playlist, and go!

The potential for Slack as an enterprise LMS

Reflecting back on what I built, I realize that it could apply to a broader use case than running an article club. As it is today, it is simply an application that stores curriculum and delivers it through Slack on a set schedule. So, the code could be repurposed to deliver “courses” through Slack.

The application can be extended to provide a UI to add or edit the curriculum. It can also be enhanced to provide more ways for learners to engage with content or fellow students through discussion questions, polls, and emoji-reactions.

Why Slack? The main benefit for employees already using Slack is that it saves time because they don’t have to manage a new user account and they don’t have to change their workflow. As an employee at a company that used Slack, I was spending a LOT of time on it.

This was an average working day for me. Also, this was a “No Meeting Wed” 🙃

Making time is one of the biggest challenges with learning at work. Products and services that make it more convenient to engage in workplace learning have a competitive advantage.

But, as a learner, convenience without quality is not valuable. Quality is table-stakes. This means that, with Weekly Article Club, the quality of the content playlists will be key. And a more generalized platform for “courses in Slack” is only as good as the courses it offers. So, I need to make it easier for creators to create playlists or courses and then find the creators.

There’s something interesting here as a solution. But, let’s not get ahead of ourselves and fall into the trap of having a solution in search of a problem.

I’ve had more conversations this past week with hiring managers. Two problem areas that stood out were interviewing and L&D. More to come on this as I reflect on my conversations and continue prototyping solutions.

If you (or someone you know would) want to talk about hiring or L&D, please hit reply and let me know.

Thanks for reading! Also, thank you to those who recommended prototyping apps after last week’s post. I appreciate the responses! The main new ones I heard about were Bubble.io and Whimsical.