Meet The Robin Hood of the Internet: Joshua Browder, the Founder of DoNotPay.
Written by Amrit Sharma (Smokey) for BotList
While most of us are still tinkering away to figure out how to ride this chatbot wave for our businesses, Joshua Browder has been ahead of the curve and made quite an impact already. 20-year-old Joshua, a Sophomore at Stanford University is dual majoring in Economics and Computer Science, and is the founder of DoNotPay. BBC calls him the “Robin Hood of the internet.”
Joshua launched DoNotPay in early September 2015 to help people challenge their parking tickets with an easy-to-use chatbot. Next semester, Joshua is guest lecturing at Stanford University’s The Future of Mobile Entrepreneurship course.
Amrit Sharma caught up with Joshua Browder to talk about emerging platforms, chatbots, the future of apps, parking tickets, haters, 100 duck-sized horses and much more. Most of the answers are direct quotes, but lightly edited to be easily read.
HAVE YOU ABANDONED APPS COMPLETELY?
BotList: When you were 13, you built an app for a sandwich shop in the UK. I read the BBC article that explained your unauthorized app was so good that a lot of people were using it, and the sandwich shop eventually adopted it as their official app. Imagine you were 13 years old right now and you wanted to build something for that sandwich shop, would you build an app or a chatbot?
Josh: Wow. You’ve really done your research. I would build a chatbot, because nobody downloads apps anymore. I didn’t download any apps this month. The real question is what new platforms are available to help these brands. When I was 13 everyone was downloading apps and it was just the coolest thing for a shop to have an app. I would try to find the equivalent in today’s world. Maybe it’s not a traditional chatbot on Messenger, it could be an Amazon Alexa bot. Emerging platforms have always really excited me, and certainly apps are no longer emerging.
BotList: Have you abandoned apps completely?
Josh: No, I think apps are very useful in some narrow circumstances. Enterprise, for example. If you’re developing something internal for a company, not necessarily consumer facing, but an internal tool that employees need, then apps can still accomplish a lot more. Also, PokemonGo shows that apps are not completely dead and that there is still a lot of opportunities. But I’ve always liked to do things that nobody was doing. Even when I released my chatbot, chatbots weren’t that popular.
LET’S TALK ABOUT DONOTPAY.
BotList When did you launch DoNotPay?
Josh: The very first version went up on September 1 of 2015.
BotList: You recently tweeted “Bots that connect you to real lawyers are counter-intuitive.” Can you elaborate on that?
Josh: Legal technology is such an interesting field because technology has the potential to accomplish so much, but in legal technology everything is focused around lead generation, and getting people back to the traditional service of getting lawyers. That creates a tremendous opportunity because there are very few services that actually automate the tasks themselves. When the bot craze started, the main focus of a lot of chatbots in the legal space was primarily to get you a lawyer, and that actually isn’t very helpful.
BotList: Machine learning. What does it actually do?
Josh: I need machine learning to understand what the user needs help with. For example: “I got a parking ticket” vs “My flight was delayed.” IBM Watson very kindly gave me lots of free credits, and I’ve been using their service for initial classification of the legal problem.
BotList: You believe that technology or chatbots can help provide all people the same level of legal or medical assistance that billionaires can afford, right?
Josh: Even if I don’t do it. Someone else will. We’re getting driverless cars today and sending people to space, how is it that we haven’t yet automated a few documents yet. It’s really such a low-hanging fruit. All you have to do is figure out how these documents are constructed and then use technology to automate them. I think we’re already doing far more complicated things successfully.
BotList: What’s it like to be the Robin Hood of the internet?
Josh: I’m really lucky. It’s such an honor. When you do this sort of thing, you get pigeon-holed with a nickname. I’m not making any money. All the services are free. There is no advertising. It sums up the service well. It’s taking money away from lawyers and parking authorities, or if you’re fighting your landlord, in which case it’s taking from landlords who are wealthy. DoNotPay is helping to level the playing field, so I think it’s a good nickname. I’ve very lucky. I’m not sure if it’s completely true, because there are other people who have done a lot more. But I’m working towards it.
BotList: How many people have used DoNotPay to challenge parking tickets yet?
Josh: More than 225,000 tickets have been successfully voided so far. It’s difficult to put an exact dollar value on that because the ticket amounts vary. In the UK, parking tickets are 120 pounds, unless you pay within 10 days, in which case, it’s 60 pounds. In the USA, they range from $30 to $300 in San Francisco.
BotList: Do you get any commission from the money you help save people, or is there any way for people to donate to you?
Josh: No, the service is totally free. I’m not in it to make money in the short-term. The people who are using DoNotPay today are people who don’t have money to spend for legal help.
HOW DID YOU GET PRESS FOR IT?
BotList: How did you get press for DoNotPay?
Josh: I’m very lucky because I created it and send it to a few friends and a blogger at the HuffingtonPost picked it up and named me the “Entrepreneur of the week.” Then the mainstream press in the UK picked up on it, and then the mainstream press in the US picked up on it. It was quite amazing. I’ve never dealt with journalists in my life before that, but all of a sudden CNN was phoning me up and it was great.
BotList: Wait, so you just build DNP because you thought it would be cool?
Josh: Yes, this was a tool that I could use it myself because I was getting a lot of parking tickets. And I sent it to a few friends to use too. I really just built it for fun and didn’t expect this would becomes such a big issue and that the press would really want to write about it. It really goes to show how big of a pain parking tickets are.
BotList: Do you market or promote DoNotPay? If so, how?
Josh: The best products are the ones that do good. Nobody is interested in yet another app that gets you an Uber quickly or order flowers. When anyone launches a product, hopefully you know that people will use it in advance without worrying about marketing because it has some social good aspect. I don’t believe in paying for marketing. I believe that products should speak for themselves by being socially beneficial that everyone will use them.
BotList: Have many parking tickets did you get in the UK?
Josh: Honestly, too many to count.
HOW DID YOU GET STARTED WITH VERSION 1?
BotList: How long did it take to build the first version? Who did you talk to or approach while building this?
Josh: This was an informal project, so there wasn’t a formal design process. I found the top 12 reasons for why parking tickets get dismissed, through the thousands of FOIA requests that people had filed. Then I used my limited knowledge of the law and drafted sample letters for each of these reasons, and I got a lawyer who is a family friend, to make sure they weren’t completely terrible, and that was it.
BotList: So you’ve got these 12 sample letters vetted by a lawyer friend. Now a user signs up for your chatbot, tells you which reason they want to challenge the parking ticket for, and then you ask for their information and essentially “fill in the blanks” on the form and send it off. Is that right?
Josh: Yes, exactly. Since then I’ve had the additional challenge of identifying the legal issue because now it does more than parking tickets. So now it figured out the legal issue, it takes down the details as variables, then changes the letters. Sometimes it’s not just putting variables in the fields, but even rearranging the letter completely.
BotList: It’s a web only chatbot? Why not build on iMessage or Messenger?
Josh: It’s a free service and people already have a strong incentive to use it. I don’t want to give away all the data to Facebook.
BotList: What platforms did you use to build it?
Josh: It’s got a customized scripting language built with NodeJS on the backend and JavaScript on the front-end. That interacts to a scripting language similar to AIML.
GOODBYE 2016. HELLO 2017.
BotList: What’s next for DoNotPay?
Josh: It’s really exciting. In the next few weeks, I’m launching a legal platform that will allow anyone to automate any legal document without any technical knowledge. I’ve noticed that there are so many low hanging fruits in the law, and why should I be the one to decide which one gets looked at. I’m just one person and I’ve expanded to homelessness, eviction, flight delays and things like that. But so many lawyers come to me to launch a chatbot for tax or medicinal drugs, etc. So I’ve created a platform where you can upload a document, select all the variables within the document, specify what questions you want for each of those variables and a bot is automatically created on the backend that will automate the document. So essentially it’s an automated bot creation service for lawyers.
BotList: What else do you have planned for 2017?
Josh: I don’t know yet, but I would like to build something on Amazon Alexa so you walk into your house and complain to Alexa about your landlord and the house will fix itself, for example.
BotList: Ha. That’s brilliant. You don’t have to talk to your landlord anymore. Just complain to Alexa and it will handle sending the request to the landlord. That’s a big win for both the tenants and the landlords.
Josh: Yes.
SUCCESS STORIES & HATERS GONNA HATE
BotList: What’s the best positive story about DoNotPay?
Josh: Two categories of people — Everyone assumes that parking tickets are a middle class problem, but I don’t think that’s true. Lots of homeless people get parking tickets for sleeping in their car or lots of elderly and disabled people get them because they’re more prone to make mistakes. I’m always flattered with these stories of homeless, elderly or disabled people.
BotList: Do you have any haters? You build the first AI-powered robot lawyer? Got a lot of press. Has anyone been anything less than supportive?
Josh: A lot of lawyers have said that “you can never automate the law.” On the other hand, I’ve received so much support from the American Bar Association that a lot of lawyers are keeping quiet about criticizing it. The #1 group of haters I’ve had is when I was first starting out and my own parking tickets were a part of the story, a lot of people were saying “oh he just can’t park properly” and “i’ve been driving for 30 years and I’ve never received a parking ticket” “he’s such an idiot.” When a news agency shares a story about DoNotPay on their facebook page, it can get thousands of comments. Some of them are particular nasty. Apart from that, not really.
SOLVING HOMELESSNESS WITH CHATBOTS
BotList: Tell us about how you’re tackling homelessness and record high evictions across the UK with DoNotPay?
Josh: The UK government doesn’t directly house the homeless. They pay for a lawyer to draft up a letter to send to the government till they process their application. It takes a lot of time, and when you’re homeless, time is not something you have. The bot will first check if you’re eligible for government housing which most people are, then it submits their details over to the correct government office to be processes.
BotList: How long does it take for someone to fill out the DoNotPay homeless form, and what’s the average turnaround time for the government?
Josh: It takes about 5 minutes to fill out the form. The biggest challenge I had here is that people who are homeless obviously don’t have access to the internet, so I partnered with Center Point, a huge charity, with centers that help homeless people across the UK with internet access. They’ve been directing people to use DoNotPay on the computers in their centers. After the form is submitted, the government is legally obligated to respond within 48–72 hours, especially if they’ve been a victim of domestic violence.
BotList: Have you come across any legal issues that you don’t think can’t be addressed with chatbots optimally?
Josh: Yes. If you’re standing in front of a judge and you can’t afford to pay for bail, there’s probably very little a chatbot can do for you. A lot of people have approached me already with bail issues. If it’s one of those situations where you have to state your case in person, then it becomes very hard to do with chatbots. The language barrier is also another challenge, for example around immigration.
WHAT’S NEXT FOR JOSH BROWDER?
BotList: You’re giving a talk at Stanford soon. Will it be recorded or live-streamed?
Josh: It won’t be recorded or live-streamed, but I’ve giving similar speeches in the past which are online.
BotList: Has dropping out of Stanford ever crossed your mind?
Josh: No, I worked so hard to get here and I was so lucky to get in. I’m learning so much here at Stanford. We have these mobility professors and AI professors — I don’t think I could continue to do what I’m doing without learning more stuff. I think the benefit of technology will go to people who are comfortable with emerging platforms. Until now people could get by with knowledge about cloud computing, but now you really need to deep dive into AI in order to do well.
BotList: What are some other emerging technology platforms that we haven’t talked about?
Josh: VR is a big one. Even in the legal industry, where you can show the crime scene to a witness. Voice chatbots. Blockchain, especially with the law. I think everything should be recorded on the blockchain. I’m a huge believer in the blockchain.
OBLIGATORY INTERNET QUESTION
BotList: Would you rather fight a horse-sized duck or a 100 duck-sized horses?
Josh: Definitely a horse-sized duck because it’s just one creature and you can deal with it. You could even distract it and get it away from you. But if it’s a 100 different animals, then the only way you can fight them is with physical force and that would be quite tough!
That’s the end of the lightly edited transcript of my interview with Josh. As Yogi Berra famously said, “It’s very difficult to make predictions — especially about the future.” I don’t have a crystal ball or a time machine, but I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that it’s difficult not to get a feeling of greatness while talking to Josh. Not because of his age. But rather how Josh is well on his way to making a serious dent in the universe and I look forward to following his journey with DoNotPay and inevitably other ventures in the years to come.
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Written by Amrit Sharma (Smokey) for BotList, an App Store for Bots.
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