We’re extremely proud to be sharing Sure with the world today. Although we’ve been live for over a year now with a few thousand users, we never properly launched — and this day feels great! 🎉
The greater vision of Sure started with the idea of using data in context to better understand our users and point them to the right direction in the overcrowded scene of decision making. We wrote more on our vision here.
And since food is a highly personal choice that represents who we are and ties us with a community, we decided to start by answering the ‘Where shall we eat?’ question once and for all.
The journey to Product Hunt
Back in the summer of 2015, we started getting really excited about conversational interfaces to which Chris Messina contributed with his post.
Our motivation was simple. We weren’t satisfied with the existing restaurant discovery and travel apps and we quickly started believing that we can build a much better product for the next generation, already spending more time in messaging apps.
To quickly learn if anyone else cares, we built an SMS bot and flew to Web Summit. I should say that it was rather just a number that people could text and we would manually respond to them. And I should also say that Web Summit was more or less waste of time, except that we met our advisor Paul Roberts there.
With a bunch of assumptions validated, we all met in San Francisco in March 2016 and gave ourselves a deadline to have the first version of the Facebook Messenger chatbot ready to show to everyone.
At this point we had a bunch of users, mostly our friends, but the experience was nowhere close to being better than the existing alternatives.
This has changed during Facebook’s annual developer conference where they launched the Messenger Platform. We were definitely not one of the launching partners but somehow appeared on several early lists of available chatbots.
Quickly after, The Guardian among others featured us next to Uber and CNN and we suddenly went from 3 messages per day to 3000. I wrote another post about the speed at which we were able to improve the experience based on real usage.
All of this was extremely encouraging and we decided to follow all the advice we got and worked on getting it right in 1 city before rolling out globally.
Today, we’re introducing Sure to 22 cities 🌎 including San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York City, Austin, Chicago, Toronto, Vancouver, London, Copenhagen, Berlin, Rome, Paris, Vienna, Barcelona, Stockholm, Amsterdam, Prague, Bratislava, Sydney, Tokyo, Singapore and Hong Kong.
What took us so long?
I love this post by Loic Le Meur that talks about the speed at which startups are designed and launched. We were too slow for a bunch of reasons (and not excuses).
- This was a side project for all of us and keeping up the pace while also working full-time can be challenging.
- We’re a remote team with 8 hours between us. And although there are some great things about this, I particularly learned how hard it is to build a strong company culture if we’re not all working in the same location.
- Our thinking has changed a lot. What started with the excitement around chatbots has now turned into an appreciation for API First and smart backends.
What now?
We just launched on Product Hunt and would love to hear what you think. You can also send us an email at founders@surebot.io or hit us up on Twitter 👋
Special thanks to Lucia Ciranova, Jamie McInally, Paul Roberts, Rich, Suzanne, SPACE10, Founders and others who supported us along the way ❤️
