Shutting down howsthisgoing

howsthisgoing is now closed. Here's what it was and what I took from it.

howsthisgoing was a Slack standup bot. It collected daily standups from a team, connected to GitHub, and turned them into daily, weekly and monthly summaries of what actually shipped. You could also ask it questions about past standup comments in plain English.

I built it to answer one question for myself: could I build a product end to end, on my own, and get someone to pay for it?

It was my first real coding project, and it was before AI assistants could write most of the code for you. I learned Django, databases, deploying on AWS, and the basics of working with AI, including an early memory and retrieval system built on embeddings.

So, could I? I built it, shipped it, and one team ran their standups on it every day for over two years. That still feels a little unreal to me.

What I wasn't good at was selling it. Building was the part I could do alone. Finding the right people, and getting them to care enough to switch, was the part I kept underestimating.

As of September 29, 2026, the service is off. Nothing has been deleted, and if you were a user and want your data, ask and I'll send it.

Thank you to everyone who used it, and especially to the team that stuck with it for two years.

I'm working on PointsCasa now. howsthisgoing might come back as something different: an AI teammate that lives in a company's Slack.