Introducing Octane AI, The Easiest Way to Create a Bot

Drive sales, capture leads, and increase engagement on your Facebook Page.

We are thrilled to announce the private beta launch 🚀 of Octane AI, the easiest way to create a bot and engage your customers or audience via messaging! Starting today, we are opening up access to the Octane AI private beta with the intent to open up the platform to everyone in the near future.

We are also announcing our initial funding: a $1.5 million seed round led by venture capital firm General Catalyst. Evernote founder and GC managing director Phil Libin — a friend of mine since my early Mashable days — led the investment. We are thrilled to be working with Phil and the rest of the General Catalyst team!

Other investors in Octane AI include Boost VC, Dimension 6, Ustream founder Brad Hunstable, angel Larry Braitman, and Hired founder Allan Grant.

Octane AI’s founders are Matt Schlicht (CEO), Leif K-Brooks (CTO), and me (CMO).

Octane AI Launch Partners

For the last few months, our team has been working quietly to build out the Octane AI platform. To that end, we’ve been quietly deploying bots on the Facebook Pages of our launch partners, including:

• 50 Cent / G-Unit Records
• Aerosmith
• KISS
• Magic Mike
• Shots Studios
• NextShark
• SPiN
• Curejoy
• Joanne Peh
• Cinta Laura
• Gushcloud
• Epic Rights
• Free Association

We want to thank these initial partners for working with us really early in our product development cycle. We’re looking forward to adding many new partners to this list very soon!

Building a Community

Octane AI came into existence as a result of the difficulty that exists in creating and managing chatbots. My co-founder Matt Schlicht became fascinated with messaging ever since he learned that the top messaging platforms are growing faster than the top social network’s. His interest in messaging led him to create Chatbots Magazine, the Bots Group on Facebook, and the definitive beginner’s guide to chatbots.

The magazine and the group took off like rocket ships. Chatbots Magazine now captivates over 200,000 readers per month, and the Bots Group has become the largest community for chatbots in the world, with 17,000+ developers, investors and enthusiasts discussing bots, messaging, and artificial intelligence.

Matt will be diving deeper into the genesis of Octane AI soon. Stay tuned. :)

What’s Next?

We will be giving more and more people access to our private beta over the next few weeks and months. We will be using this time to refine the product and add new features and plugins. We will also be adding new people to the team, so if you want to help us build the future of communication, check out our careers page and our open positions.

We will not be charging for Octane AI during the private beta. Pricing is a really difficult thing to figure out, but our goal is to make Octane AI accessible to everyone — that means a price that’s reasonable and affordable.

Octane AI / Chatbot FAQ:

1) What Is Octane?

Octane is a service that lets you easily set up a chatbot 🤖 in minutes — no programming or designing required.

2) What Does Octane Do?

Octane provides the tools you need to interact with your customers on messaging applications, such as Facebook Messenger.

3) Why Should I Use Octane?

More people are using messaging applications than social networks, and messaging is growing faster as well. Thus, every business needs a strategy to engage with their customers via messaging — just as they have a strategy for email and social media. Octane gives you the tools you need to do this.

How? Octane lets you create a powerful chatbot — a simple application that lets you interact with customers via messaging — in minutes without the need to design, code, or build anything.

Businesses receive messages on Facebook all the time and usually don’t respond. This is because they don’t have anyone focused on interacting via Messenger. Octane fixes this.

4) What Is a Chatbot?

Chatbots are computers you can talk to via messaging apps like Facebook Messenger, Kik, WeChat, and SMS. Chatbots can automatically respond to your messages for you.

Modern-day chatbots provide the same functionality that mobile apps provide while living in a messaging conversation. No app installations required. They are used for customer support, automatically answering questions, delivering content, and even games and entertainment.

For more, read our in-depth guide to chatbots on Chatbots Magazine.

5) What Are the Benefits of Octane for Businesses?

99% of businesses don’t have someone dedicated to responding to incoming messages via platforms like Facebook Messenger. Octane makes sure that incoming messages always get a response — without requiring ongoing attention from the business.

More and more business customers are on messaging apps. Octane lets businesses engage with their customers on these popular platforms.

Octane bots have features that make the lives of business owners easier by saving them money and time, such as customer support, showing off content, collecting information from customers, showcasing merchandise, and letting customers subscribe to notifications from your business.

6) How Does Octane Work?

You create an account on Octane, create a bot, choose what you want your bot to do (by installing features/plugins), customize your bot, connect it to a Facebook page, and you are done!

Once your bot is live, you can see how it is doing on our dashboard, which includes analytics and the ability to send messages, polls, and links to your subscribers.

You can also train your bot on how to respond to incoming messages in our “Train Your Bot” section.

7) How Easy Is Octane to Set Up/Use/Customize?

You can have a chatbot up and running on your Facebook page in less than five minutes! No coding required. It’s easier than setting up a Facebook Page.

8) How much does Octane Cost?

Pricing is a very difficult thing to figure out, so during the private beta we will not be charging. Our goal is to make Octane AI accessible to anyone, so while we will charge, it will never be an outrageous price.

9) How Do I Sign Up?

Just go to Octaneai.com and request access to the private beta!

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