Startup investment, the search for chatbots.
Obviously Activate Capital don’t speak for all investors. But when we began selecting Startups for our programme we asked ourselves a simple question “What are we looking for in a digital startup?”
The answer was not a simple one and is still something we are working on. Currently it includes a number of key factors including a strong team, a clear and exciting value proposition, a viable market, and some evidence of traction.
Often while all the factors mentioned above are met (in our eyes at least) something that always piques my interest is an awareness from the startup’s founders of current digital trends and how that can play into the strategy of their business.
As an example let’s talk about chatbots. Working in the digital innovation space it’s been hard to miss all of the hype around about bots and conversational commerce. I’m not going tell you that every startup should be building bots right now, because it is not always the right choice. But when Facebook messenger gives you access to roughly 800 million active users, and through WhatsApp you can make your brand available to over a billion active users it is clear that bots needs to be considered. This is not about jumping on a technology bandwagon, there are real business strategy decisions to be made here.
Does that mean that we will not select startups without bots?
No, we still want to help the numerous startups who have not considered current digital innovations. We not only offer investment opportunities but as a digital startup studio, we help founders design and develop both their business and their product. Naturally, this includes giving guidance on the right technology choices.
From our experience, a number of the startups we have met need to be thinking about how their current product development roadmap could lead to the introduction of bots. If not immediately at least at a later stage.
But aren’t bots complicated?
When many of us think of a bot we start to imagine a super mart AI like Hal 9000 from Arthur C. Clarke’s Space Odyssey series. Or we think of Siri trying and often failing to answer every question we throw at it. How can a startup with limited resources succeed where Apple have failed?
While a super intelligent AI, that can answer our every question and perform a multitude of tasks for us, maybe a holy grail that we will achieve one day. I think there are a number of design decisions we can make right now that will make it easier to plug in smarter AI at a later stage.
- Create simple bots to perform specific tasks. When we do this we must explicitly define how you interact with them and limit users expectations about what they will do.
- Begin to design these bots around a conversational interface. This will not always mean giving the user an open text field to answer any question they want. Instead a number of different GUI’s can be built into a chat interface to solve user’s problems.
- Support the conversational interface with humans to plug the gaps that the current level of AI cannot handle.
To get going there are a number of automated bot building services launching which mean you won’t need to write a line of code. A startup can get something simple together and then test it with real users. The end goal is the same as it has always been. The bots we create must solve your users problems or perform their tasks so quietly and efficiently that they don’t even notice they’re there. The difference being it will take place in a messaging app that they access every day.
If you are a startup with a business idea that you think could benefit from a chatbot we would love to hear from you.
