It may not seem like much of a task, but finding the right chair can be a very tough process. We’re a small company, so the task of “purchasing” office supplies is often split among us.
In our struggle to find the perfect balance between comfort, aesthetic, and price point, we visited several shops in Bangalore’s “Office Chair District” just off Infantry and Central. After scouring over multiple options we finally arrived at one chair that fit our budget, and our bums, perfectly.
Lo and behold, they had only one of that beautiful chair left! Although the shop did warn not to take picture, we did manage to sneak one in. The chair in question is shown below.
No distance is too great to travel for true love. Where could we now find more of these beauties? Armed with a picture and steadfast intent, we set about on a mission to find our perfect chair creating our own home-brew of a web crawler, Trucaller, WhatsApp’s API, and a rudimentary chat bot all rolled into one.
Step 1: Finding Chair Dealers Online and Getting Their Phone Numbers
India Mart provides listings of a whole range of chair dealers in Bangalore. It’s a very long list, and to call each person would be cumbersome. So, we start with crawling India Mart’s site for chair dealers and get a large dataset with company name and phone number.
Step 2: Who are we really talking to
If someone called you and asked if was talking to your company, for example “Hi, am I talking to Apple Computers?” versus “Hi, am I talking to Vivian?”, you’re more likely be more responsive to the later. To make sure we had the same effect in our communications we cross verified each phone number we had in STEP 1 against true caller to get the real names of the people we were going to reach out to.
Some of the numbers shared previously were landlines, and these had to be discarded at this point.
Step 3: Using Whatsapp for Small Business
WhatsApp for business is exciting. If you’re living in India you may have received an automated message from Make My Trip with your ticket details sent across on whatsapp. But how can small businesses and individuals leverage something like this?
Whatsapp recently opened up 2 APIs. Full details are here:
https://faq.whatsapp.com/en/android/26000030/?category=5245251
The essence of it is, that you can generate a link like this:
Breaking it down, it gives you the option to populate a phone number, and a message. Using the list we created in STEP 2, this is what we’re able to send out:
Step 4: Automated Messaging
Once you’ve got all your URLs ready, we automate opening them up and sending them on whatsapp. In all, we sent out 20 messages but most importantly, this article was written on said chair.
Although just a chair, the core tech/processed used is exciting for marketers. We used it in a purchasing capacity but surely this raw tech combined with a few other frills could be an exciting tool.
Doing a little bit more research on this showed that there are paid versions of similar tools out there but we’re happy to share more process details and a detailed tech stack on what we made with anyone that may be interested.
