Swelly’s 2017 in letters & figures: Growing 5 Million new Users & more

This year flew by like non other. 🛫
Catching one wave at a time and riding the swell to grow our community all over the world by 5 Million people.
It paced up and down and was full of surprise.
Both, positive and challenging - for us and the whole team.

By building our chatbot Swelly — your new best friend on Facebook Messenger — we all pursue one mission: We want to help one Billion people with their daily decisions to dress better, eat better & feel better! Join a swell: Swelly

Today I want to recap the features we built, as well as the success and challenge we faced as an award-winning startup throughout 2017.
Furthermore, I will provide current stats and give an outlook on what we
are momentary working on. 🚀

In retrospect, 2017 started up enthusiastically. We grew our team in Vienna and Los Angeles and launched two projects within the first couple of weeks. Heroes, a project that recently re-launched as a broadcasting tool for social media creatives on Messenger and Waves, which also took another path as firstly planned but I’ll come back to it later in this post.

In spring, our market research SaaS solution Swell Biz went live.
As our community grew internationally, brands could now ask questions in defined markets and get detailed results after 24 hours. 📊 Compared to an average Research Project with Big Market Research Corporates we save our customers months of valuable time and provide insights while they are the most relevant.

Our biggest focus was always our community. Consumer-sided we tried our best to continuously improve our chatbot products. We shifted Swelly’s conversational UX to an app-like webview experience and made it even easier to help others or ask your own question.

In return, we got rewarded! 🏆
In April, Facebook showcased us as a success story at their yearly F8 conference in San Jose. A great, memorable night with good press in hindsight. In cooperation with Facebook, we launched one of the first chat extensions for Messenger at F8, our Swell Pod. A fun decision-based game you can play with your friends to see how well you match with each other. Since then more than 16 Million Pods were created and it’s still one of our biggest growth channels.

We kept on innovating and improving our products till we made a big decision in mid of May. We decided to rebuild our mobile apps (iOS & Anroid) in
React Native. At this time, our mobile apps were still super important to us as app users engaged a lot more than people retained in our Swelly bots. The intention behind this move was to accelerate prospective development as we’re now able to deploy features on multiple platforms at the same time.
This took our dev department roughly 4 months but definitely slowed other projects down for a while. But hey, that’s life.

After launching the new apps in September, we could gather speed again and continue improving our bot experience.
We started split-testing a lot (on-boarding, notifications etc.) and got in touch with our power users to create a feature roadmap that raises satisfaction and meets their needs. Since then we launched cool specifics like a Power Voting or the Helping Friends feature⚡️

The latest thing we launched is something I’m personally really excited about:
Swelly for Devs. It grew out of waves.ai, which I mentioned earlier in this post. We changed the general approach and now enable bot developers all around the world to integrate our highly engaging A/B voting interface to their existing chatbots. We’ve been testing this with several bots in the last months and could prove an increase in engagement & interaction rates. 📈
As this integration is directly linked to our market research tool, you’re also able to gather important information and consumer insights about your audience.

Currently in Beta, we’re looking for another 10 bot companies that want to get their experience to the next level. Up for testing? - Reach out: joe@swell.wtf
We even have some specials on hand, let’s get things moving together.

Overall, we look back on a great, successful and eventful year with Swelly.
We could grow our user-base from 1,3 to now more than 6 Million people living in 60+countries around the world.
Now we’re looking forward to continue working on what we do best:
Build products that our users love!

Thanks for reading! 😎
In case you are interested in learning more about our marketing approach at Swelly - how we measure success and acquire new users - please let me know in the comment section below.
I’m happy to answer questions or write another blog post if desired ;)

Best, Joe from Swelly
joe@swell.wtf