🐳Swellolution — Why One Of The Biggest Consumer Bots Turns Into A Market Research Company #BuchWeekly

meet the 🐳Swell Vienna Team

While building 🐳Swelly — one of the biggest chatbots on Facebook Messenger — with 2M+ users we faced a lot of challenges and learned more in a couple of months then we would could have imagined. (http://www.swelly.ai)

Swell yeah! - what's your opinion?

The 2 biggest learnings:

Number 1: Growth!

Focus on one thing and execute the hell out of it.

In our case we focused our whole marketing team on Influencer Marketing. Meaning working close with YouTubers and Instagram Celebs to help us grow our audience.

Of course we did a lot of experiments in Marketing to learn what would actually works, but giving the fact that Influencers are not just a great growth channel but also help us with keeping users engaged we decided to go all in on this strategy.

We built an internal data base of 500+ influencers ranging from 10k to 1M+ followers and worked closely with more than 50 of them. Besides money, which is of course a good motivator to get Influencers involved, we focused on providing them value and create win/win situations.

The Influencers that we decided to work with got accepted into our ⚡️Heroes team. ⚡️Heroes are 🐳Swell Influencers who are experts and certain areas and help people with daily decisions.

meet Luisa, one of our Fashion⚡️Heroes

🐳Swelly gives Influencers the opportunity to engage with their audience on a deeper level by answering their A/B questions.

Other than that, it allows our ⚡️Heroes to gain important insights and learn more about their audience.

So basically our whole Growth-Team focuses on building relationsships and help Influencers grow and learn.

The only thing that we didn’t solve on a scaleable level is the money part.

If we would continue paying influencers for talking about our products it would always be a kind of paid user aquisiton channel at best.

That’s why we decided to build a bridge between Influencers and Brands and help our ⚡️Heroes monetize.

Heroes.ai - Personal Chatbots for Influencers

At ⚡️Heroes.ai our top Influencers can apply to get their personal chatbot that can automatically answer their FAQs and distributed A/B questions to learn more about their audience. With the 🌊Waves.ai integration ⚡️Heroes. can also get paid by brands.

Which brings me straight to the next big learning:

Number 2: Revenues! It’s hard to monetize a chatbot.

Since we launched our Market Research Platform Swell.biz where we enable Brands to ask A/B questions to selected audiences and gain Market Insights within hours a lot of chatbot developers reached out to us and asked us about an integration.

Swell.biz - Make greater marketing decisions

At first we thought we’d focus on monetizing our 🐳Swelly bot and started selling to Brands. While onboarding the first companies in both the US and Europe we found out that targeting is even more important than we initially thought.

We thought let’s just build an open platform in the style of an ad network and allow brands to post research questions directly to the bots that have their perfect sample audience.

And than suddenly it all made sense. In our founding-teams combined business experience of starting 6 companies in Europe and the United States we always worked with brands & agencies mainly in the fashion and ad industry.

Our companies mission has always been to “help people make great decisions” so it’s only natural to help the people behind brands make better decisions.

That said, we decided to dig deeper and continue riding the swell. To make sure people won’t get confused when starting a Market Research project with us, that’s actually targeting users within third-party chatbots we needed a re-branding for the b2b business.

That’s why we built 🌊Waves.ai

Waves.ai is a Market Research Platform that enables bot developers to learn more about their audience and make money.

waves.ai - Monetize Your Chatbot

Within the first month of running Swell.biz we could already land a few 5digits deals with consumer-brands which gave us an early proof of concept that there’s a big need for Online-Market-Research in real-time.

3 days ago we launched 🌊Waves.ai into Beta and had almost 100 bot developers signing up.

ou built an awesome chatbot that gained some traction, but you can’t make money? You don’t want to place annoying ads, right?

🌊waves.ai shows your users context relevant market research questions that can be answered with just one click

So if you want to learn more about bot monetization in a smart way that doesn’t effect your retention rates reach out and ride the wave with us.

Have a Swell day,

Pete

Any questions? reach out: pete@swell.wtf