2016 in review — startups & bots
I got inspired by David Pichsenmeister’s review (sorry for stealing part of your title but it was just perfect!) to write a review about one of the most interesting, hardest and awesome years ever. I never learned more about the future and myself.
I’m Antonia and one of the founders of chatShopper, Europe’s first fashion chatbot on Facebook Messenger. I had the idea “shopping via chat” in April 2015 while working for OTTO (big e-commerce player in Germany). My co-founder Matthias Nannt didn’t believe in the idea at all when I spoke about it the first time so we tested the idea very lean — a simple Website and a WhatsApp number. We got so many requests we soon knew that there is something so we started this idea properly with several student fashion experts and our own chat-software in September 2015. In October we had so many requests we had up to one week waiting time and we knew we would need a technical solution to scale our service.
If you can’t wait: here you’ll find the result of the work in 2016 🤖👗. If you want to see even more of my past year follow me on Twitter (love it!).
January 🤖👗🔍📧
We had built the first fashion chatbot prototype in November 2015 and I reached out to our current and possible future partner-shops. Only AboutYou saw the potential immediately, the others were either technically not able to provide us an API for our chatbot or didn’t believe that bots would be “a big thing in the next 5 years”. The problem was, that AboutYou did start to make changes on their existing API and therefore we needed to wait for the new API. We had to find a scalable solution (humans scale very bad) and as we didn’t know if we could find a fashion retailer for our bot we did marketing tests in different markets: chatbot to compare bank loans (Finochat), insurance products via chat (ChatDichSicher), chatbot for food-ordering (Kulano with Timur Ercan), travel booking service (Journero with Timur) and a chatbot for erotic products (Secretie). Also in that month Alexander Graf wrote a nice article about us in the famous German e-ecommerce blog Kassenzone, which was named “Kaufen per WhatsApp” (buying through WhatsApp)…
February 😧📱💰👩🏻🤖
… shortly afterwards WhatsApp blocked us 😧. No notice, no time to find a new solution, they just blocked our number. Suddenly we had 15 employed students without work. Within one week we changed the service to Facebook (all became page admins and had to answer the requests there) and we managed to connect the Facebook API shortly afterwards (the old API to our own chat-software — not very suitable for such a service as it took up to one minute for Facebook per message to send it to our software). We also started building an own app as we feared not to have any channel. We won Paypal as partner but because of the WhatsApp trouble we soon changed our business model and therefore never could profit from the partnership (but I have great ideas for something in the future together with them 😍). We got our second business angel investment, which reassured us that we’re going into the right direction even if it looked like a big mess at this moment. The marketing tests from January in different segments suggested insurance as the category to look into so we spoke to the first insurance carriers who were really interested in the topic (which surprised us a lot!). We employed our first full-time employee: Cathi, who worked as a chatShopper fashion expert before, started as project leader for the insurance test as she was a trained insurance agent and we loved working with her. We also organized the first AI & Chatbot Hackathon in Kiel (back then this was our home-town).
March 📱😥
Our app was finished and released and we had amazing KPI’s with first ad tests (average CPI 0,20€ for a fashion app in Germany!). We made the decision to stop the human backed service by the end of April and completely focus on the development of our chatbot which we named Emma 👧. This was a very sad decision as we had a great team and it was a lot of fun to work with them, but necessary to cut down the cost and focus on tech rather than operations. The rumours that Facebook would launch a new bot API at F8 became a fact for us and we wanted to be one of the first bots there. We set-up the insurance MVP (it was renamed to Insurgram) and won ERGO Direkt as a partner for the test. The crazy part: only with a landing-page we got messages from major insurance carriers and insurtech VC’s.
April 👱🏻📈🤖😍🎤🏆
We hired Jordan, a great full-stack developer who should help us to build the best fashion chatbot. We already had our own “bot-framework” (there were no tools at that time) but there was a lot to do. A big German TV news magazine showed our app and we had several thousand requests. The bot handled the requests — the feedback was very mixed but we didn’t expect other results as Emma was still a baby and had to learn much more (the bot uses NLP with machine learning and therefore it needs a lot of data and training to become better over time). Then there was the F8 ant Facebook announced bots for Messenger. We were so relieved and happy to finally have a proper channel for our chatbot. During the Keynote we submitted our bot for approval to Facebook — they weren’t even able to process it as we were too early 😉. At the end of the month I had to launch Insurgram to the public at DIA in Barcelona (excellent event!). This was the most scary thing I did in 2016 — talk in public (over 500 people, big stage, mostly male suit-wearing insurance people) for the first time about a service that was basically just an MVP which should start several weeks later. We were named as one of the most innovative insurtech startups worldwide and I pushed myself to do it. It wasn’t the best pitch I ever gave but I was so nervous I completely forgot my practiced text. Still it was a great experience as I never pushed myself that hard and I learned a lot and became much more secure since then. I started the InsurTech Meetup in Berlin which became a great event series for the industry. We also won the ECC Startup Battle with chatShopper.
May 🚛😫
We moved the team from Kiel to Berlin and got an office at WeWork. We received the information from AboutYou that their new API wasn’t any longer suitable to handle our use-case. It now looked as we would need to stop our fashion service. We were in contact with Zalando for some months now but we were passed from one department to the other and at one point we nearly gave up on them.
June 🗓🎉🎓
The Insurgram MVP started and we learned fast, that it takes longer for corporate employees to handle chats as we imagined it. But after some weeks we were ready to start promoting the service and they did an awesome job (special thanks to Andrea at this point and Christian, our contact person from Ergo Lab who made it as easy for us as possible to manage the cooperation between a small startup and a big corporate). Thanks Christian, without you this wouldn’t have been possible! Suddenly at the end of the month we got a confirmation from Zalando that we can use their API and become a partner to them — this was a turning point for our startup as we could now really start to build a great fashion bot! I wrote my last exam for my business administration bachelor which I started in my maternity time in 2011. Looking back now, I have no idea how I managed to do it and even get a good grade for it. By now I was named as one of the top 50 people in insurtech, I had a Twitter account with a lot of industry followers and started to enjoy the space.
July 💻📉😢🎤📧
Matthias and Jordan were coding like hell and rebuilt the whole bot. Money was getting less and less. I spoke to a lot of VC’s and spending my time with 2 startups, fundraising and the fear of not being able to pay our two employee drove me crazy — this was the hardest time in my life (!) and I never want to make such an experience again. I pitched Insurgram at ExecInsurtech (great event with even greater people), we pitched chatShopper at Zalando during TOA Berlin and finally ExcitingCommerce wrote and talked about us (Jochen & Marcel are German e-commerce “guru’s” and we were listening to their podcasts for years and we couldn’t understand why they never mentioned us). Pitching different startups (sometimes I pitched both in one day) was very disturbing, I always had to be very careful not to say something wrong. It was very hard to have two startups at the same time but it was just a stupid time coincidence — the Insurgram MVP should originally should have started in April and that we got the Zalando go wasn’t foreseeable.
August 🎯😥
The insurance MVP ended (it was planned to run for 10 weeks) and although ERGO Direkt wanted to extend it to generate more KPI’s and learnings we said no. We sat down and made a very brave decision: we would stop Insurgram and focus 100% on chatShopper. We had to let go our great employees, move our office into our home and coffee shops and ask our first angels about more money which they immediately gave us. We made this decision even though we got an offer from an insurtech VC for a seed-round. If we had taken that money we would have needed to focus on insurance — which is a vey interesting field and there are a ton of opportunity for chatbots but our “hearts” are with Emma and we were already able to automate the service. With insurance we would have needed to start from scratch and we guessed it would have needed another year to get to the same point where we were with chatShopper at the same time.
September 🤖🎉🎤
We released the alpha version of the “new” Emma in German, tested and made improvements to release the open beta just a few weeks later. I organized the first mCommerce Meetup in Berlin at Zalando’s Tech Lab which was a great success and I met awesome new contacts there. I went to Dmexco and realized there, that chatbots are a big topic already in marketing (which really surprised me as I haven’t met many German startups/companies in this field). At Bits&Prezels (thanks for the free “woman in tech” ticket, it was great) this was not so much of a topic — we had a bot people meetup there and you can see here how many founders were interested in bots there :)). It was great meeting you, especially Juraj Pal & Natalie Korotaeva 😍👋
October 🤖🤖🤖💰
We built the English version of chatShopper as we had a lot of English speaking requests and in order to get international attraction we knew we would need to handle both languages. By the end of the month we merged the two bots and Emma was able to handle both languages (you can change the language in the menu). I was named as one of the top 100 people to watch in the bot space by Peter Buchroithner from great Swelly bot. Facebook started to test promote our bot in certain regions (mainly Asia) which was exciting but also a bit overwhelming and not useful for users as we only supported products from European stores. I didn’t go to ChatbotConf, the first bot conference in Europe, which I still regret (sorry oratio). I could have met a lot of great people from the bot community but I thought I need to focus and not spend money on traveling. It would have been worth it, I certainly will visit the next one. Promised! We got our 3rd business angel investment and suddenly had a lot of angels asking “do you need money”. We don’t look for money instead for the right people to support us on our journey, who believe in us, trust us and challenge us. So far we are more than happy with our angels, without them all this wouldn’t have been possible. I ❤️ you guys, thanks for the trust!
November 🤖📷🎤💻
We moved into our new, great coworking space in Berlin. We built more features for our bot: search for presents, have your own wishlist, integrated an image recognition feature (powered by the great guys from Fashwell — contact them if you need a fashion image search service) and much more. We built and published our first Alexa skill to test voice assistants and because we believe in AI assistants. I went to Websummit (thanks to you as well for the woman in tech ticket and Naor Weissmann for suggesting me) and although there were a lot of talks about bots I haven’t learned much as I already knew all the stuff about bots & messaging. At least I met great people (James Campbell, David Pichsenmeister, Bernhard Hauser and many more) and we had a great time! I helped organizing a Hackathon with the topic Open Data (with great people such as Daniel Banck and the guys from Toppoint & Starterkitchen). We handed over Insurgram to oratio and it was relaunched as Insurista (note to myself: never include insta or gram to your startup name). I’m sure it will be a big hit and I wish them all the best. My husband is continuing all the other insurtech stuff (he even set up the worldwide first insurtech startup directory) and I’m no longer part of this great & fun community (I’ll miss you!).
December 💻🤖💻🤖
We were really busy getting deeper into AI (I even started learning python with Codeacademy — great courses!) and learning/testing stuff with machine learning and deep learning. We also started thinking about future business models, as the in-bot-checkout/payment had been postponed due to technical challenges from November to February 2017. We’re currently building a lot of small tech solutions which we use for us and big retailers (you’ll soon see an awesome beauty bot on Facebook Messenger). We believe in an AI-first world and that’s the topic we want to work on. At the end a chatbot is just another frontend but conversational interfaces require a very different “backend” and skills which weren’t necessary before. We’re looking forward to a very exciting 2017 with lots of learning!
I had planned to write a few more learnings & goals for 2017 but I will do this soon in another post. I also wanted to include some privat stuff but I realized, there isn’t so much. Sorry to all my friends. You’re the best, don’t hate me!
2017 🏆🤖🎉
The new year started very exciting, I was named as one of the top 25 people in the bot space and chatShopper was nominated as one of the top bots of 2016 and is currently leading e-commerce (wohoooo!). If you like our bot please vote for us. Thanks!
THANKS 😍
Special thanks to my great co-founder Matthias Nannt, it’s a joy working with you, I couldn’t have a better co-founder! Thanks to all the people who supported us, challenged us and helped us in this year! A big thanks to my great husband and my two kids — being an entrepreneur with family is sometimes challenging. They support me, believe in me and give me the power to always go forward. I love you. ❤️
