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Lowdown — Auto-generate newsletters from Slack community content
Lowdown unleashes the valuable content locked within Slack and delivers it to your members inboxes as a weekly email newsletter, guiding them back to engage.
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Tem Nugmanov
I just saw an example post for one of the communities I participate it and holy moly it's *awesome* ... love it! Any plans to support discord?
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@temirlan Hey Tim, sorry just saw this thank you! We're keeping an open mind to other platforms for future - but in the near term we're focused on Slack unfortunately.
👋 Hi Product Hunt!
Last year I started a Slack community which grew to over 800 members, but I noticed that many of the people who joined didn’t engage and eventually disappeared.
I desperately wanted a way to re-engage with these members so I could remind them of the valuable content my community offered. If I could do that they’d know what they missed and could return to get involved.
That’s when we had the idea to highlight the post's members engaged with the most in a weekly newsletter — and Lowdown was born!
Here’s how it works:
- Lowdown watches the Slack channels of your choice and automatically highlights the posts with the most replies and emoji reactions. You can also and post to your newsletter directly from Slack in two clicks.
- Easily get subscribers by either auto-subscribing your entire membership or asking for permission via a message sent to any channel/DM by our Slackbot.
- That’s it, your newsletter will send every week with absolutely no need for manual input.
We’re also sharing transparent bi-weekly progress updates in our quest to achieve $10K MRR by July 2020. https://getlowdown.com/blog/ and developing a version of Lowdown specifically for tech teams using Slack. Register your interest here https://getlowdown.com/teams
We’d love to hear any feedback or ideas on how we can improve Lowdown, so please tell us what you think. Cheers! 💬📰🖖
Looking forward to giving this a go once I have a bit more traction in my community.
Is it easy to possible to add links/articles to the newsletter by posting them in Slack?
@kylegawley Yeah any post in Slack can be added to your newsletter directly from Slack including links. We're working on an update that will represent any links in a nicer more visual way too.
I love how this summarises the best of our reading channel, and turns it into Sunday reading.
Fascinated by all the potential of turning real-time messages + team/community votes and essentially automatically crowdsourcing newsletters.
Keen to experiment with it as a way to do investor/customer updates.
- Is it possible to make a newsletter from a private channel?
P.s. really like your blog and transparency.
@chrismcclelland Thanks Chris. Yeah you can do this right now. When you join you get to select the channels (including private) you'd like your newsletter content to be generated from. 😊
Oh wow - this is actually exactly what we were looking for to avoid the manual task we have each week for Traffic Think Tank 2.0
Certainly don’t want to take focus away from this great idea (and the ease of use), but for those of you wanting to build this with no-code and Zapier, here’s the tutorial for this exact solution (plus take into account threads instead of just reactji’s): https://brycevernon.com/slack-ne...
@bryce_vernon1 Cheers for sharing Bryce, nice tutorial. We're at an early stage in our product dev. In the next few months we hope to add tonnes more value beyond the first version we have live now.
I'm with @ben_lindsay1: How did this not exist before?! Lowdown is superhelpful, especially when you're in a lot of Slacks and are time poor. Great work, Steven! 🎉 🚀 What it is is what it is!
A great idea and product! I absolutely love it! Keeps our team engaged to what is going within the company. Nice job @shylands and @overture8 🙌🥳
Really awesome product - I run into the problem of keeping all of the community members engaged, and have tried to drag content into Mailchimp and send manually to a list of emails exported from Slack (but need to add new emails every time that I get new members since it doesn't update itself). Will try it out this week :) Would love if the platform populated previews of content as well.
@dominicl Hey Dominic - thanks 😊When you say "populated previews of content" which content are you referring too. Keen to understand your use case. Thanks again
@shylands for example, when i want to include an article shared in slack, i'd love to have it show a preview (kind of like when slack previews the article with the image + subtext) or when i want to include a pdf attachment, maybe showing the title page as well.
@dominicl Ah got ya. We're on it ;) Specifically for links and images attached to posts at least initially. Generally we plan to make the newsletter much more visual and interesting 😊
@budibase Thanks Joe. I'd highly recommend building a community especially as an open-source project. We recently launched a guide on how to setup a Slack community and landing page in one hour. Might be helpful :) https://getlowdown.com/how-to-cr...
This is something I could really use... I am always losing things to the Slack history. Probably sign of my own ill-discipline! But sure, what's software for anyway!
@mike_budi I hear you Mike - many people have this problem with Slack. We expect Lowdown will get better and better at helping you keep track of the important stuff you're losing to the never-ending Slack wall of chat!
I'm part of a few Slack communities and I struggle to keep up sometimes, but I don't like feeling like I've missed useful or entertaining content so I generally have to find time to scroll through the various channels for updates - not great! Thank you for creating this, huge problem solver! 🙌🏻
@keizgoesboom Thanks Melissa, I hope your communities find us so they can make your life a little easier!
👋 I’m Phil, Co-founder and CTO at Lowdown. If you have any questions about Lowdown, I’d be glad to help.
You know you are onto a winner when people's first thought of your product is "why didn't this exist already?"
Lowdown is one of those products.
Awesome idea, slack has proven continually over time how challenging it can be to keep people engaged with so much going on. Lowdown will certainly help take any slack based communities to the next level!
@armstrong IKR? Welcome to my world. Would you want control over which channels you receive updates from or are you happy to go with what the community surfaces?
@shylands I think I'd be happy with a general summary of what's going on in the Slack workspaces I’m a part of. May want more fine-grained control down the line, but not at first
@armstrong Cool, we really need a way for community members like yourself to recommend Lowdown to the Slack's they are in!
Sweet tool! Does this have a RSS-style feed or even a dedicated way to get the highlights to catch up? (Like Mailchimp has a way to view all archives)
online micro communities are on the rise... this is a good way of keeping people engaged in targeted content !
Nice! Is this only for groups where you are the admin of? Needs admin to install right?
@tony_nielsen Hey Tony, yeah that's right. Currently it's for admins to create newsletters. Would you mind explaining a bit more about the use case you have in mind? Thanks!
@shylands Hi Steven, I was curious if I was able to distill other Slack groups I'm in down to the top posts when I'm not the moderator. For example I'm currently in 7 Slack groups but only one of which as an admin.
@tony_nielsen Unfortunately I'm unsure of how you could do this without access to install and setup apps within the Slack. You'd need permission to pull these data out. In future we may look at a way for Slack members to create their own notifications from Slack but the admin would need to install Lowdown and offer this to their Slack members.
