Product Hunt launches Kittybot, its first Slack bot

Product Hunt is extending its service to other platforms, starting with Slack. The company has launched its first bot, aptly named Kittybot, that provides you with the latest updates around your industry.

Since its debut, Product Hunt has offered ways to keep track of what’s up and coming in products, books, games, and even conversations. However, it was limited to the company’s website, its mobile and desktop apps, and its Chrome extension. Now the latest updates around bots, drones, virtual reality, developer tools, venture capital, and more will be available where you and your teams interact.

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Adding Kittybot to Slack is relatively straightforward. When you enable the bot, you’ll be asked about topics you wish to be kept abreast of, such as developer tools, marketing, design tools, smart homes, wearables, analytics, APIs, growth hacking, and a myriad of other topics. After choosing at least one, you’ll need to authenticate into Slack, designate a channel to post to, and that’s it.

If you want to add more topics in the future, you can visit Product Hunt’s Kittybot page to make changes.

Product Hunt CEO Ryan Hoover explained the company’s move to Slack, saying that many of his users work in the productivity tool, “which is one of the reasons why it’s one of the most followed topics. Although the bot could be useful for a broad audience of people that want to follow personal interest … we wanted to focus on the business use case. Many people already use Product Hunt to stay updated on industry trends, monitor competition, and learn about new products/startups in their space.”

In expanding its reach to third-party services, Product Hunt is targeting teams and showcasing itself as a useful research tool for firms to gather intelligence. The tie-in with Slack is smart since it’ll help companies better understand and communicate the latest hot item in the industry, streamlining the process. No longer will a person have to jump from one app to another just to know what’s trending — it’s all in a centralized place and customized for that team’s interests.

Although this is the first official integration built on another platform, members of the Product Hunt community have previously built apps and integrations using its API.