Why [.c-red]Distrito[.c-red] moved to Rocket.Chat, the best Slack alternative

"We needed a communication platform to empower our community and help us manage the 250 startups that we care so much about. We chose Rocket.Chat because it was simple, very cooperative and customizable to our needs."
Diego Marrara Ranciaro, Partner at Distrito

Industry

Startup Accelerator

Use case

Secure communication hub with white-label branding features to replace Slack.

Number of users

250 startups and their employees

Industry

Startup Accelerator

Use case

Secure communication hub with white-label branding features to replace Slack.

Main Results

250 startups and their employees


About Distrito

Distrito the 3rd biggest online portal in Brazil for innovation and entrepreneurship. It also has the biggest Brazilian start-up database, with over 15k startups mapped so far.

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‍Industry: Startup Accelerator

Headquarter: Porto Alegre, Brazil

Headcount: 140 people

Mission: To uplift startups through a Strong Innovation Ecosystem focused on Community, Venture, and Data Mining

Startups Supported Annually: 250

Challenge

In their early days, Slack was compatible with their needs. However, as Distrito grew, the platform failed to deliver customizations, a crucial requirement for them: “Slack didn’t have that open source and customizable aspect”, said Diego.

Thus, their goal was to strengthen its communication with diverse businesses and activities by using a communication hub with the following features:

  • Team collaboration: For efficient communication among employees and 250 startups being mentored by them;
  • Omnichannel: In order to automate daily communications and supporting their community;
  • Engagement Dashboard: Being able to monitor and receive data about the community’s engagement, determine the ROI (return of investment), best hours for creating posts and talking to members, etc.
  • White Label & Customization: A communication platform with a full set of white-label branding features, that were not possible with Slack.

Building a robust community is one of the targets in our business and for that, we needed a useful communication tool. So, I looked for a single platform that went beyond Slack’s limitations. An innovation hub with a communication channel.
Diego Marrara Ranciaro

Results

As Distrito migrated to Rocket.Chat, implementing, and customizing the tool was effortless. “Most things can be changed without needing a developer and can be simply understood by only looking at it. That’s been amazing”, said Diego. Thanks to the High Scalability Cluster, a feature included within the Enterprise plan, Distrito is now able to scale their usage of Rocket.Chat with thousands of new members, without compromising their infrastructure capacity. Most importantly: people have been enjoying it as well.


As an ever-growing community, having a holistic security approach was also one of Distrito’s reasons to adopt Rocket.Chat. Crucial resources to data encryption, especially end-to-end encryption for chats, Identity Protection Secure and granular user permissions were a few benefits gained after adopting Rocket.Chat. On top of that, the secure infrastructure provided by the platform allowed Distrito to choose where to host their data: self-management or cloud deployment.


In 6 months, Distrito turned Rocket.Chat into a vast ecosystem that not only facilitated their communication with their startups but also made it possible to build:

  • A news aggregator, so users can consume news without leaving Rocket.Chat.
  • A virtual organizer to manage their coworking spaces, enabling people to make room reservations, check if their deliveries had arrived, invite guests to visit, etc.
  • An entire database with articles and content pieces that can be directly downloaded through Rocket.Chat.
  • A mentorship portal that allows people to find qualified mentors to provide advice based on their expertise and industry.

To help boost engagement in their community, Distrito built a strategy around how to use Rocket.Chat and its most important features. It was so successful that a few months later, stakeholders already had a great impression of Rocket.Chat, said Diego.