Built in a bedroom, during a lockdown
Rimpllee was never a company plan. It was one teenager, two Discord servers and a lot of empty afternoons.
public/story/loek.jpg
My name is Loek, and Rimpllee started in my bedroom during the COVID-19 lockdowns. School was closed, everyone I knew was on Discord all day, and the Minecraft server I ran got busier than it had ever been.
It had two Discord servers next to it, and both needed the same thing: a way to handle questions without losing them. I wanted one bot that could run tickets for both, set up in a dashboard instead of a config file.
Nothing I tried did what I had in mind. I had all afternoon, every afternoon, so I started building it myself.
I had never touched a database
That is the honest starting point. I could not write a query, I did not know what belonged in a database and what did not, and half of the first version was probably held together with hope. I built it anyway, because the alternative was waiting for someone else to build it and that was not going to happen.
The bot went live under a different name first. It did not fit, and not long after we landed on Rimpllee. That one stuck, and from then on the project had a name to grow into.
Then it kept growing
The first hundred servers felt unreal. Then it was five hundred, and people started asking for things I had never thought about: panels per category, transcripts, permissions for their own staff, other languages. Every one of those requests made it a slightly more serious piece of software.
Ten thousand servers came next, and today Rimpllee is used in nearly thirty-five thousand Discord servers by more than two million people.
2020
First line of code
10k
Servers in year three
33k+
Servers today
2M+
People reached
What has not changed
Rimpllee is still built the way it started: you set it up in a dashboard instead of a config file, and the bot does exactly what you told it to. Tickets are still the heart of it, and everything around them exists because a server asked for it.
It is no longer a lockdown project, but it is still made by people who run Discord servers themselves. That is the part I would like to keep.
Want to be part of the next chapter? Come say hi in our Discord.
Discord server