In this syndicated blog post, Mike Williams (founder of Thinkbox, Studiotime, and Codeity, as well as a Mentor for the Los Angeles Founder Institute), outlines his reasons for building a chatbot, and how other founders can benefit greatly from building their own chatbot.
The article, "Why I Built A Personal Chatbot And How It’s Scaled My Reach", originally appeared on Medium and has been republished with permission below.
As a serial entrepreneur and maker, one of the biggest rewards for me is seeing products that I’ve built being adopted and loved by people at scale. Something else that I equally enjoy (if not more) is documenting the builds, launches, and the following growth stages in an attempt to provide transparent insights and takeaways to others. With both of these, the more I can build, document, share, and reach along the way, the more personal reward there is for me.
One of my recent side projects that I built “in the open” and documented (Levels and Ben Tossell style) was with a weekend chatbot build for Artchatbot. To be honest, I was a bit taken back by the amount of positive feedback and questions I received from sharing the process, launch, and results along the way (even analytics). Not only was there overwhelming interest in the weekend build, but I also discovered an amazing community of others in the chatbots space that I was now a part of.
With this recent experience building a chatbot, I also immediately saw how I could leverage chatbots and the ability to rapidly prototype, test, and launch a product via chatbots in other areas where a conversation-like product interface is the best solution. I knew that my next chatbot was going to be one for my personal brand to have a conversation, engage with people, and scale my personal reach where I could share my work.
I’m not going to dive into the benefits of chatbots in general, since that’s been extensively covered by other domain experts (here).
Here Are The Personal Brand Benefits Of A Chatbot And Why I Chose To Build One For Myself:
Social Platforms Consolidated Into One
With multiple channels to share content across, it can be hard to connect the dots. Since I do have a very small, but hyper-engaged following on some channels, it is my goal to be omni-present and relevant where these people spend their time and those similar to them I haven’t reached. Some of these channels are:
By using a chatbot, I can push out a core message in one centralized place where I can promote, people can have a conversational experience, and also consume my content without being dependent on discovery and consumption through one of the various channels above.
Ability To Control Your Narrative
I’m not the most brand conscious person, but I do understand the value being able to influence (or sometimes control) how a message you want to convey is received. With a chatbot, you can control the narrative through the flow, states, interactions, and interface while also having the ability to modify this as you see how users interact with your content.
Push Messages To People Where They Spend Time
Since Facebook Messenger has been unquestionably adopted by the masses and is perceived a social interaction instead of business (for now), this is where I want to reach people and have their attention. If I had to choose email or chatbot, I would choose chatbot since it is social and thus far I have seen impressive engagement when I send messages to “users” through it versus emails.
Building My Chatbot
Before I began the actual chatbot build, I established a goal, which was to allow people to learn about, consume, and contact me regarding side projects and startups that I’ve built in a way that is scalable. I also identified the way that I would achieve this and deliver value, which would be through Medium articles I’ve previously written that I could package as a playbook to show real examples, tactics, and insights of going from idea to scale, and profitable startups. These Medium articles were all high performing pieces of written content, thus there was some pre-validation to them and I knew that there was an actual value being delivered to users through my chatbot and not just regurgitated startup advice sent via Messenger.
For the actual build, I used the same toolkit and process that I previously used to build Artchatbot (more on both here), but the entire process from start to finish took less then an hour this time. A majority of that time was spent defining the flow to simulate a conversation of someone wanting to learn more about my projects, packaging up the content I already had published on Medium that gives more insights and detail, and also iterating with real people going through the flows as I was building.
A screenshot of my Chatfuel Dashboard that shows the blocks to the left that organize the content through the chatbot conversation flow.
How Well It’s Been Received!
Following a similar launch framework that I used for Artchatbot (minus a Product Hunt launch), I added one more essential launch resource for generating awareness and interest in my personal bot, which was Botlist. It’s a chatbot discovery platform and Seth (the founder) works incredibly hard to build a resource for bot makers to generate awareness and users for their bots, while also connecting with other makers. Since my bot adds value to other makers, it was well received by the Botlist community and resulted in the first real users.
The Botlist submission for Yoroomie bot received 3,900 views!
It’s still in the early-stages for my chatbot, but the responses I have received thus far have been very positive. I’m planning to improve the flow, add more content that will be exclusive to my chatbot, and also amplify my marketing efforts since the chatbot has proven to increase my reach, brand awareness, and also network from those that have contacted me through my bot.
You can check out my bot at bit.ly/yoroomie.
Be sure to tweet at me with any questions you have, feedback on how I can improve it, and also let me know when you launch your own chatbot! I’ll be sure to retweet comments you leave below or tweets.
