Linen syncs your Slack and Discord threads to a search engine friendly website to improve SEO and repeat number of questions
Hi YC community!
Kam here. I’m the founder of Linen.dev https://linen.dev, a website that makes your public Slack and Discord community Google searchable. Linen will sync your threads and make it SEO friendly so your community can find content that was previously hidden.
Previously I worked on a popular open source project which had a sizable Slack community. Slack was great for engaging with community members and with early sales. However as community scales Slack becomes this black hole where context becomes lost. Most public communities can’t afford to pay for several hundred/thousand members so they are limited to 10,000 free messages. You run into the problem of people asking repeat questions and not searching in Slack. It also doesn’t help that the Slack UX encourages posting and not searching. We experimented with Github discussions and Discourse but didn’t want another channel to maintain and split the community on.
Solution
With Linen I wanted to build a tool that is very low maintenance without changing my current workflow. By making it search engine friendly and putting it on a website the community members can find answers to repeat questions before ever getting into your Slack channel. Linen is the first result that comes up on Google if you search for “seeing a weird issue with flyte” https://www.google.com/search?q=seeing+a+weird+issue+with+fl...
As a side effect of syncing conversation to a website you end up with a very long tail of unique and relevant content for your community. Linen is free to use and get setup but I offer a paid version (I am still figuring out the pricing model for it) where you can get the content redirected to your own subdomain where your domain gets all the SEO benefits.
The product is very simple right now but I want to add features like related questions detection with semantic similarity, integrating with Github to notify the thread when it is finished, auto thread detection for conversations that aren’t in thread form.
**Progress + Communities:**
We have 20+ communities on Linen right now including Kotlin and Cypress. In total we have over 2 million messages synced with members in communities totaling over 172 thousand.
Here are a few public communities that are using Linen right now.
https://slack-chats.kotlinlang.org/
https://www.linen.dev/d/cypress
https://community.supertokens.com/
https://community-chat.infracost.io/[
](https://community-chat.infracost.io/)\%5C) You can sign up for free today at https://www.linen.dev.