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Varko

Hey, I'm Dalton. Here's Why I Built Varko.

The story of one guy, two dogs, a foster pup, three cats, and a lot of 2am debugging, and how that turned into Varko. Grab a drink, this one's personal.

· 10 min read
Table of contents

Hey, I'm Dalton 👋

So hi. I'm Dalton, and I built the thing you're reading this on.

I've got a personal site too, itsdalton.com, where I put basically everything I make. Not just Varko. If I ever think "hey, this would be useful for me," I build it and I stick it up there, hosted on my own domain, free for literally anyone to use. About 90% of everything on there is open for the public. It's got my socials on there too if you ever want to see what else I'm up to when I'm not staring at error logs.

A little about me outside of code. I have two dogs, Milo (a pug, chaos in a small body) and Willow (a Great Pyrenees, an actual gentle giant who thinks she's a lap dog and will fight you on that). I'm also currently fostering a husky mix named Mickey, and no I have not figured out yet if I'm keeping him, ask me again in a month. On top of that I've got three cats, Toby, Bella, and Luna, who mostly just judge me from across the room while I code.

I love tech. Like, genuinely, stupidly love it. And I love people even more than that, which is probably why I ended up building a Discord bot instead of just keeping this stuff to myself. I'm on Discord constantly (who isn't, honestly, oh wait, apparently a lot of people aren't, which still blows my mind).

The Nerdy Kid Who Taught Himself Everything 💻

I'm self taught. Fully. YouTube was basically my babysitter growing up, and I mean that as the highest compliment I can give it.

I was around 11 when it really clicked for me. We had a school assignment in science class where we had to make some kind of project, a video, a game, something, using a list of science vocabulary words. Everyone else made a poster or a slideshow. I built an entire playable game on my own website instead, because apparently that's just who I was even back then. If you want to see the actual thing, it's still up. Go ahead, laugh at it, I dare you: https://itsdalton.com/science-game

That project is basically the first domino. Once I realized I could just build the thing instead of asking someone else to, I never really stopped.

Outside of building stuff, I'm an Xbox player, I play a lot of GTA 5 and Rocket League, and I listen to way too much indie pop. My favorite artist is Tate McRae. I already know some of you just rolled your eyes reading that, and to you I say: listen to one song, just one, and get back to me. I promise you'll get it. Unless you don't, in which case, I have a gift for you. It's called bad taste. Kidding. Mostly.

Okay But Why a Discord Bot Though 🤔

Here's the honest answer. It wasn't one lightning bolt moment. It built up slowly, over a long time, from running my own Discord servers.

Every time my server needed a new feature, I'd add a new bot. Need music? New bot. Need leveling? Another bot. Need someone to announce when I go live or post a new video? Yet another bot. Before long I had a graveyard of bots in my own server, each one doing exactly one thing, each one with its own commands to remember, its own dashboard to log into, its own quirks and downtime and weird permission issues.

And at some point I just sat there and thought, "yo Dalton, why don't you just make your own bot. Make it have everything that's normally locked behind a paywall somewhere else, and just give it to people for free."

I want to be really clear about something here because I don't want this to come across wrong. I have zero hate for MEE6. None. But if we're being honest, a huge chunk, we're talking over 90%, of the useful features on a lot of popular bots like that sit behind a paywall. And it's not just one bot doing this. You want music in your voice channel? That's a different bot. You want a leveling system? Different bot. You want stream or video announcements? Yet another different bot. It becomes this exhausting scavenger hunt just to get a fully functional server, and half of what you actually want still costs money somewhere along the way.

I wanted to build the opposite of that. One bot. Everything included. Free.

That's Varko.

The Night Varko Almost Ended Before It Even Started 🌙

Okay, this one's my favorite story so far, and it's very "me."

I built an alert system into Varko early on, mainly for myself, so that if something broke badly I'd actually know about it instead of finding out three days later from a confused user. Phone call and text message, straight to me, if something goes seriously wrong.

A friend of mine was testing the bot out one night, just clicking around, poking at commands. And of course, because the universe has a sense of humor, several errors happened all at once while he was testing. At 2am. My phone rings. Then a text. Both explaining, in detail, that things were on fire.

In hindsight I absolutely should have just turned the whole thing off and dealt with it in the morning like a normal person. Instead I woke up, groggy, squinting at my phone, and actually fixed the bugs right then and there at 2am because apparently that's the kind of unhinged dedication this project pulls out of me.

sigh of relief, I survived

That's a pretty accurate picture of me at like 2:47am that night. Exhausted, slightly delirious, but weirdly proud that I fixed it instead of just letting it sit broken.

Nobody's Used It (Except Me) and That's Kind of the Point 🦗

Here's where I get real with you for a second.

Varko went public on day one. Like, actually public, anyone could technically use it, as long as you were in the Varko support server to grab the invite. My honest thought at the time was "nobody is going to use this, it's not going to grow off of a few minutes of me sharing a link somewhere." And you know what, that's still true today, as I'm writing this.

crickets, nobody's here yet

I started actually building this roughly, and I mean roughly, about a month ago. I spent six whole hours just landing on the name Varko, because trying to find a bot name and a matching website URL that wasn't already taken by fifty other things was somehow the hardest part of this entire project so far. Six hours. For a name. I have no regrets.

This project has been solo from day one. Every feature, every bug, every 2am phone call, all me. And I won't lie to you, some days that's genuinely hard. Every day, honestly. It's hard pouring hours on end into building something, adding new features, writing new commands, fixing things nobody's even hit yet, knowing that as of right now, basically nobody outside of myself has actually sat down and tried it. Not a friend, not a stranger, nobody but me clicking my own buttons in my own server.

But I keep going anyway. Because I believe in what this becomes, even on the days it feels like I'm just talking to myself.

Why the Name Varko 🏷️

I knew from the start I didn't want some generic name that just describes what the bot does. There are a thousand bots out there named some version of "Mod" or "Guard" or "Helper," and sure, that works, but it doesn't really give you an identity. I wanted something people could actually recognize and remember, something with room to grow into.

That's how Varko happened.

It's not a real word. You won't find it in a dictionary, and honestly that's the whole point. Because I didn't build it around one single feature, the name isn't stuck being about one single feature either. Whether Varko is moderating your server, running tickets, protecting you from a raid, tracking stats, or doing something I haven't even thought of yet five years from now, the name still just works.

To me Varko is supposed to feel like reliability. When you add it to your server, I want it to feel like you added a real, dependable member of your team, not just another bot icon sitting in your member list doing the bare minimum.

It's also just short. Clean. Easy to say, easy to type, easy to remember, whether you're seeing it in Discord, on the website, or scribbled somewhere in my notes app at 1am (which, let's be honest, is where most of this actually got planned).

I picked it with the future in mind too. This was never just meant to be "a moderation bot." The actual vision is way bigger than that. Over time I want Varko to grow into a full platform, moderation, automation, analytics, logging, tickets, leveling, dashboards, AI powered tools, and things I probably haven't even dreamed up yet, all living under one roof instead of scattered across ten different bots like my own server used to be.

The name doesn't mean anything on its own right now. But that's kind of the beautiful part. Some of the best things out there didn't start with a dictionary definition, they earned their meaning through what they actually became and who they served along the way. That's what I want for Varko. I want the name to mean something eventually simply because of what it turns into, not because of some clever backstory I forced onto it.

I Can't Do This Alone (And I Don't Want To) 🙋

Like I said, this has been a one man show since day one, and honestly, I'm ready for that to change.

I'm looking for people to help out. Staff to help with support tickets, to catch small user errors before they become big headaches, to keep an eye on the support server, and yes, beta testers too, people willing to actually click around, break things, and tell me what's wrong before it becomes a 2am phone call.

If any of that sounds like you, genuinely, please apply. I'd love to have you.

👉 Apply here: https://apply.varkobot.com

Everywhere You Can Find Me (All the Links, In One Spot) 🔗

I know I dropped a bunch of links throughout this post, so here they all are together so you're not scrolling back up trying to find one:

Thank You, Genuinely 💙

If you made it all the way down here, thank you. Really. That's not a throwaway line, I mean it.

This whole thing started as one guy who was tired of juggling ten different bots in his own server, and it turned into something I think about constantly, good days and hard days both. I'm proud of it. I'm also, if I'm being fully honest with you, a little scared of it too, in that good way where it means it actually matters to me.

let's go

So welcome. Welcome to Varko, welcome to whatever this turns into next, and welcome to my very chaotic, very sleep deprived, very genuine journey of building something from absolutely nothing.

I love you all. I mean that. Thank you for reading, thank you for being curious enough to click on this post in the first place, and thank you, in advance, for whatever part you end up playing in this story.

More soon. Probably after I sleep.

Dalton