My secret weapon for creating power contributors: The Idea Bot 🤖

I cofounded GoWild, a tech startup focused on social commerce. We’re small enough that I have an onboarding session with all new employees. On day one, everyone meets with me for an hour to talk about GoWild’s culture.

We don’t talk through the company’s history, we talk about its soul.

We don’t talk about why Brad founded GoWild, we talk about finding your own story here.

And we definitely don’t talk about Brad’s vision, we talk about how to contribute to the team’s mission. 

If my onboarding session ended here, it would be a bunch of lip service. It’s not enough to say we want contributors, I have to show how the team can participate or it was all performative. It’s my job as a leader to ensure we have processes and a culture in place that enables and empowers feedback.

We have several ways we get people meaningfully engaged and contributing, but today, I’m sharing one very specific tool we use. This captures ideas from the team, and rolls them into road map meetings as we plan the future of GoWild.

Today, I give you the Idea Bot.

It started with the anti-meeting meeting

Before I tell you how to build Idea Bot, or even what Idea Bot is, you have to understand this:

If you don’t really care about your team’s feedback, don’t ask for it.

It does more harm to ask for feedback that you’re going to ignore. You’re better off to be a total dictator and just rain down ideas on people than to ask for opinions you don’t want or utilize.

Now that we’ve covered the “don’t be a dick dictator” thing, let’s continue.

The Idea Bot itself is a simple Slack tool, but make no mistake—it was a foundational philosophy of the GoWild founders. When we started this company, it was never about capturing my brilliance as the idea guy (in fact, if you know me, you know that I generally don’t remember what ideas were mine vs. any one else’s—I don’t care about credit). Instead, we believe good ideas can come from anywhere and any one. That was there on day one in the first meeting in my basement. When we started hiring team members in 2018, we kept that spirit up, creating collision opportunities for people to work together and pick other people’s brains.

One of the first of these efforts was a recurring Wednesday afternoon meeting called “Scurry.”¹ We’d bring in snacks and beers and just hang out, working on projects and talking about the future. The rule for Scurry was you could talk to anyone about any task or project, but you could not set up a time to do so. This was the anti-meeting meeting. Scurry was a free-for-all-creative-problem-solving session. We often found ourselves inspired, writing down ideas on post its, the walls or windows. These two hours became sacred due to the productivity and progress they created.

We added our first remote team member at the end of 2018 and another in early 2019. Scurry meetings continued², but we wanted to keep everyone involved. I don’t know that we could ever truly recreate the magic of those early days of just walking up to someone with an idea on making GoWild better, but we did create a process that has become a core component of how we plan.

While the magic of the moment was gone, in some ways, we created something even better.

The Idea Bot

“What if you could log an idea from anywhere?”

While I said I don’t remember who generates any particular idea for GoWild, I’m pretty sure the Idea Bot was a concept from my Cofounder, Chris Gleim. Prior to having the Idea Bot, we just had a Slack Channel where people would word vomit ideas and sometimes I would remember to come back through and add these ideas to my Google Doc, but the channel had become where great ideas go to die (we’ve also never paid for Slack, so ideas literally died as our history became unavailable). Chris saw an opportunity to build a process that documented these ideas and create a process for review.

The Idea Bot is simple:

1) Everyone in our company uses the Slack app for mobile and desktop. To start logging an idea, they can type /idea and then type their idea out and press enter. So, for example, I could say:

2) Whatever the person types gets logged into two places. The first is the Slack Channel called “Ideas” where everyone can see and discuss. The second is it goes into a Google Sheet, which documents:

• Time stamp• Contributor• Idea

The sheet is accessible by the whole company, which keeps the process transparent and also makes the archive available since we’re cheap and don’t pay for Slack.

3) When we revisit the company road map (typically twice a year), our Project Coordinator first reviews and prepares a list of recommendations based on what priorities she knows are key to the company in the nearterm. Then, I review everyone’s ideas since our last road mapping, and compile a final list to put forth to the founders. We discuss together, then move forward in a roll out meeting.

As I review these items, I’m looking for easy to mid level wins. We’re not trying to find earthshaking impact here. Great ideas are on strategy, achievable in a few sprints, and contribute to one of our three pillars of the business—social, sharing or shopping. We average about 25 ideas a month, or about two ideas per team member per month.

This may sound simple—that’s the point. Taking feedback from your team is simple, but so many companies either completely ignore the feedback from their teams, or they don’t get it because they don’t have a system. With a system like this in place, we both grease the wheels of ideation (which makes a better product), as well as make a strong statement that everyone is expected to contribute.

How to execute this for your team

I’ve talked about the Idea Bot at a few speaking events without giving it much thought, and it never fails that people ask about how to do it. I can’t tell you how, but my Cofounder Chris Gleim collaborated with me to create the official “how to” for anyone who wants to do the same. This is a powerful tool, if you can get leadership to sign off on it. Read Chris’ how-to here.

If you’re not using Slack and can’t build a bot, fear not. You can create a Google Form for your team with two simple fields—name and idea. This will feed into a Google Sheet all the same, and you can essentially run the same process.

3 tips to making Idea Bot work for you

1) Only ask for help if you mean it

Before you put any thought into this, don’t create a virtual suggestion box if you’re not going to read it or have any interest in executing the feedback. Facades of teamwork and collaboration will fall hard in due time.

2) Onboard everyone to the system

You can’t just email this out. It needs an onboarding meeting, then a reminder meeting every month until people are contributing. Encourage discussion to maximize your collaboration.

3) Publicly showcase the ideas at work

If this is new to your culture, I recommend showcasing ideas and contributions as they come to life. Thank the contributors and praise their concept. As team members see this, they will both realize your efforts are genuine, and they’ll want recognition and start to participate. If you have people who don’t care about contributing to the company’s growth, might I recommend this blog?

What I’m reading: “The Voltage Effect” by John A. List

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¹A group of squirrels is called a Scurry. One of our mascots is SqEarl, a stuffed squirrel. He inspired the name of our Wednesday meetings.

² Scurry meetings were a victim of COVID. After everyone went remote in March 2020, we were hybrid and it just never came back together.