What we’ve learned from building one of the biggest chat bots for FB Messenger #BuchWeekly
Today our chat bot 🐳Swelly reached 1.8 Million users and grows 10–20k new users per day, 38% organically.
🐳Swelly is a chat bot that let’s you compare anything and gives you feedback from friends & community members. You simply send 2 photos to the bot, add a question and wait for feedback. Currently the most popular categories are Fashion (#whattowear), Food (#whattoeat) and Social (#whattopost on Instagram; #whichprofilepic for Facebook).
Before I go into detail I want to give you a brief background on how we started building 🐳Swelly and why.
In April, when Facebook launched it’s Bot Platform at F8 my CTO Philipp started building chat bots on the weekend. He’s always curious and into new technologies and wanted to explore which use cases would make sense for a chat interface.
I remember when he approached me in our appartment in Marina del Rey and asked me what I thought about creating a chat bot for Swell, our core product: An app that ‘makes decisions fast and fun’ by comparing 2 things and ask friends for feedback. My reaction: “No, that’s not gonna work. Swell is so great because of it’s UI and you can never show the pictures in such a nice way as within the app”.
Here’s some screenshots of the Swell App for iOS:
Well, this conversation was followed by 4 months of slow growth and a Swell App that made it to 100k users round about 6 months after we launched. For some reason we decided mid of August 2016 that we’ll give the bot thing a shot. First we thought of the 🐳Swelly chatbot as a way of acquiring new users and funnel them into the native app. For that reason we added many ‘download App’ buttons and reminded the user all the time about the benefits of downloading our native App for iOS or Android. Turns out, this whole thing didn’t work at all. No body cared about the native app, but people really loved 🐳Swelly. It’s so simply and easy to use and provides the fastest way to get feedback. Also it’s great to explore content you’re interested in and share your opinion.
Here’s how 🐳Swelly looks like on Facebook Messenger:
And here’s how you find it on Facebook Messenger:
100k 🐳Swelly bot users within the first month!
Well, the 🐳Swelly bot was a success from the very beginning. Within 30 days we had more than 100k people using it. I wrote an article on VentureBeat about our early growth:
We basically grew through 3 things:
1. Growthhack-Feedback: Constantly talk to your users (human takeover) and build a great product
2. Focus. We focused our whole Marketing team on one thing: ⚡️Heroes: Our Swell ⚡️Heroes program features Influencers who are big on Instagram or YouTube and helps them build an audience within the 🐳Swelly bot as well as gives them valuable insights about their existing fanbase by asking them A/B questions.
3. Viral-Loop: 38% of our Growth is organic meaning our users invite their friends via FB Messenger or public sharing of a created 🐳Swell to get faster responses.
The Key learning for us is that for a new field like chatbots all you need to do is focus on one thing and do it extremely well. As stupid and simple it may sound to compare 2 photos ala ‘Hot Or Not’ it was the perfect start for us a get things going. Adding more complex AI features to help people make better decisions and suggest them the best outfits for a job interview or the perfect place for a first date are thing we’re working on. But the key really is to focus on something so simple everybody immediately understands. It’s hard enough to teach and educate people in this new field of chat, so the use case needs to be crystal clear.
Generating Revenues is key and hardly any bot developers have done it right:
Therefore we created Swell.biz, a Market Research Platform where brands can place A/B tests and get insights by specific target audiences within 24 hours. It’s an easy to use SaaS tool and brands love it:
BotCast:
If you’re interested in learning more about how we grew and what we’ve learned along the way, please subscribe to our weekly BotCast, a PodCast about ChatBots on Facebook Live, YouTube and Soundcloud: http://www.botcast.wtf
Last week we launched 🐳Swelly 2.0 with a new onboarding as well as some AI features. Please feel free to test 🐳Swelly and give us feedback.
You can always reach me here: [email protected] for questions and feedback.
I’m also responding to every comment here,
Have a 🐳Swell Day,
Pete
