About 1.5 years ago, I started @RickBurpBot on Discord.
Now, Rick is currently serving over 7,000 servers and 12,000 groups; this journey has been amazing—thank you all!
A short story…
Initially, it began as an AI chatbot (10 times more toxic than he is now, by the way) as I was just playing around and learning how to code. At this point, I had one simple goal: to make an AI chatbot that “lives” in your group. After this was achieved, I started to explore crypto features; at this point, my goal was to simply make a good pricebot.
After the Discord bot went public, it didn’t take too long for users to ask me to make a Telegram bot. I was not a fan of developing on Telegram; in my opinion, Discord seemed much easier to start with. Considering I was still a beginner, I wasn’t really comfortable doing Telegram, but 2-3 months after the Discord launch, I started porting to Telegram anyway.
My goal was never to dominate this space, especially on a saturated platform like Telegram; I really had no expectations and was doing this for my users. My approach was unique, and people were used to other bots. I never really thought about this and was doing my own thing because I was never focused on growth.
Fast forward, and things like Active Token Tracking, leaderboards, and $cashtag querying quickly became a standard for all bots, and not long after, most other bots began implementing similar functionality.
Rick has changed a lot of things for this space in a positive way, and I’m very proud of that; for me, this is quite an achievement.
I was simply building tools I personally use on a regular basis, and other people seemed to like these.
How did I do this?
I never did any marketing, and all growth has been organic. Other than some basic Linux/sysadmin experience, I couldn’t code in Python (or any other language except simple Bash), but ChatGPT has taught me a lot. Use it right, and it can be a personal teacher with unlimited patience.
While the bot was growing, challenges would spawn out of nowhere, forcing me to learn something new almost every other day (yes, sometimes this sucked, as the timing was not always perfect). But what was the key to Rick’s success?
It was mostly just listening to every little piece of feedback I got. We call this complaint-driven development. To read about this approach, visit:
As a solo developer, this approach helps me to stay focused on what matters instead of chasing every feature request as soon as possible. This allows me to ship fast and make improvements where they are needed the most.
Burp
I’d like to thank all of you for the support and encouragement. I have had a lot of people asking me about how or why I started Rick, so I figured now is a good time to get the story out. I hope you enjoyed reading.