Poll Bot was the first programming project I worked without help, and has since grown to be on over 125,000 Discord servers with about 10 million users across those servers.

It was April 2017 and I just finished Code Academy’s python course. My friends and I used Discord for messaging and voice chat while playing games, but there was no built in poll functionality like there is in other chat apps. Without a way to create polls, our group chats were a mess. Someone would send a message like “Should we see a movie this Friday?” which then kicks off a flurry of responses:

What time? What movie? Where? Friday doesn’t work for me, can we do Saturday? How about 9pm? Guardians of the Galaxy? No, I’ve already seen that, how about Blade Runner 2049?

The original message gets buried by a sea of followup questions that eventually devolves into unrelated conversation. If someone wasn’t paying attention and didn’t want to catch up on the hundreds of notifications they received, they might miss the original message and not know about the plan to watch Blade Runner 2049 on Friday at 9pm.

We started creating polls manually by adding ‘reactions’ to messages to indicate which option you wanted to vote for. I built the first iteration of Poll Bot to automate this process. Poll Bot reacted to any message that started with ‘+poll’ with ‘👍’ and ‘👎’.

I also added the ability to create polls on strawpoll.com. Users could type in ‘+strawpoll#’, where number was the number of options they wanted their poll to have, and Poll Bot would guide them through the creation of a poll. The backend would then take the title and options the user provided and use the Strawpoll API to generate a link to a poll for the user.

As mentioned previously, this was the first project I worked on without following a tutorial, and I didn’t even fully understand how to use for loops, as demonstrated by this code from the first commit to the Poll Bot repository:

I was hosting Poll Bot on my gaming PC at the time, and every morning I’d wake up and turn on my monitor to see if it was still running. After a few weeks of the LED lights and loud fans from my computer disrupting my sleep, I looked for a new way to host the bot.

I ended up hosting Poll Bot on a Raspberry Pi, which worked well until Poll Bot started using 100% of the memory on the Pi. For a while I thought it was a bug, so I refactored some code and logged in to the Pi every few days to restart the bot. After a few weeks of doing this, I realized something else must be up, so I figured out how to get more statistics about the bot and learned the bot had grown so fast that it could no longer be hosted on the Raspberry Pi, so I switched to using a VPS. For about a year I used an AWS instance that let me log into a Windows computer through a browser and see a desktop screen because I didn’t know how to use a command line. Eventually, I learned how to ssh into servers and run Poll Bot in a more effective way (both cost and time wise), and now Poll Bot runs across 3 Digital Ocean ‘droplets.’

Throughout this time, I was fielding questions in the customer support server I set up for Poll Bot. Using their feedback, I made improvements to Poll Bot.

“Imagine talking to a customer support person who not only knew everything about the product, but would apologize abjectly if there was a bug, and then fix it immediately, while you were on the phone with them. Customers loved us… If you listen to them, they’ll tell you exactly how to make a winning product.” - Paul Graham, How to Start a Startup

Though useful, the original way to create a strawpoll led to a lot of messages being sent back and forth in order to create the link.

To fix this, I created a way for users to put the title and all the options of their polls in order to generate a strawpoll in one message.

Using this same format, I developed a way for users to create polls with multiple options directly in Discord (previously, Poll Bot only added ‘👍’ and ‘👎’ for yes/no questions).

As Poll Bot grew, it became increasingly expensive to pay for hosting, so I started looking for solutions. I didn’t want to make people pay for Poll Bot, so the best option seemed to be advertising. I added a little message to the bottom of polls telling people to contact me if they wanted to advertise on Poll Bot.

After about a week of having that message up, I didn’t get any emails, so I decided to actively seek out advertisers. Because Discord is mostly used by gamers, I thought game developers might like to advertise with me. I emailed over 200 indie game developers on Steam and asked if they wanted to advertise, but no one wanted to.

With no success finding advertisers, I decided to create and advertise a story of my own and sell gaming products. I created a few versions of the ad copy and A / B tested them to see which one led to the most sales. This worked well, and I was finally breaking even on Poll Bot, however Discord servers with large amounts of people don’t want advertisements that they don’t have control over in their server. Though this is a small group of users, I created an ad-free version of Poll Bot that they could pay a subscription to access.

Now / What’s Next

Poll Bot is still going strong, and I continue to develop it and do customer support. Discord plans to add some new features for bot developers at some point, and one of them will enable me to create a super clean way for users to create polls, like the image below.