I built a chatbot.

Here’s 7 reasons why

Yesterday evening I started making a bot, and this evening it’s ready to go live.

The bot is really simple; it sends you a little nugget of startup wisdom every morning. And that’s it. I’ll add more features to it in the future, but for now it’s literally that basic.

There’s a bunch of reasons as to why I built this, and writing medium posts after you’ve built something seems to be the done thing so here goes

1. I follow a lot of awesome people on twitter who post really good stuff. People like levelsio, nbashaw, shpigford, mijustin and a load of others tweet about their startup journeys and building products. If you read into what they post, there’s a hell of a lot of valuable knowledge that can be extracted. I thought that some non-twitter users might benefit from that knowledge.
2. I want to force myself to read around more. If I want to create useful content I need to find good content that inspires me to think. This will likely mean looking in places I didn’t previously think to look.
3. I’ve not really built anything before. Admittedly I didn’t code anything from scratch to build this. Nor did I code anything at all. But I still had to learn a new tool, create some content, stick it all together and click publish.
4. Chatfuel is super easy to use. (If you want to build a bot, check out chatfuel.com it’s really straightforward) Once I heard how simple the tool was to use, I couldn’t really not build anything.
5. I want to learn more about bots. Bots are everywhere at the moment. Some are rubbish, some are really good. People aren’t really sure why or how to use bots — should they be chatty assistants or just push info to you as and when you need it? I’m not really sure what the future of bots is, nor if bots will be the future, so I’d like to play around with them and see if I can figure it out.
6. I want to force my self to think more about things. Normally when someone posts something on twitter, I read it and scroll on to the next tweet. Now I need to create these nuggets of wisdom, I actually have to think about what I’m reading, find the point the author is trying to make, maybe challenge it, and then distill it into a useful piece of knowledge.
7. I needed a side project to occupy my evenings. After spending a day at work, it’s really easy to come home and spend all evening on Facebook or watching Netflix. This really pisses me off because it adds no value to my life and I end up in an exhausted and depressed cycle of ‘I’m not doing anything productive, what’s the point of my life, let’s watch more Netflix’. I’m not suggesting that this bot has suddenly added great value to my life, but it’s going to make sure I keep learning and stop procrastinating so much.

I’m not really sure what this bot will become, but I’m looking forward to finding out!

You can start chatting with it on Facebook Messenger here

Follow me on twitter, I’d love to get your thoughts!