Why did the founder of a $2.0B tech co build this bot? He wanted it for himself

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ddouble

10 min readNov 29, 2016

Know what information you need, but don’t want to go through the hassle of all the manual research to get it? That’s one of the core insights behind Growthbot, a new Slackbot from Hubspot. If you’re a marketing, sales, or growth professional, there’s a lot of information that you access everyday as you go about your job — and that’s exactly what Growthbot is here to help with.

I really enjoyed using Growthbot over the past couple of weeks. It fits very nicely into how I think about what ‘makes sense’ right now for conversation-based products (more on that later…) — so, on with the teardown!

About

Growthbot was released earlier this year, on July 14 as a Slack bot. It came directly from the hands of HubSpot Founder and CTO Dharmesh Shah:

…who built it for a pretty straight-forward reason:

I wanted it for myself. So I built it for myself. — Dharmesh Shah

But also, of course, because it makes sense for HubSpot to create a tool like this for both their current and future customers:

My hope is that not only will the tool be useful to existing HubSpot customers but that it also extends HubSpot’s brand and reach to prospective customers. HubSpot believes strongly in the idea that you should create value for your market before you to try to extract value.
We have reached millions [of users] through our free content, free education and training, and free tools. GrowthBot extends that idea by offering another useful (and free) tool built for our target market. — Dharmesh Shah, in Inc. Magazine

What does it do?

Growthbot responds to common questions a web-focused sales/marketing/growth person may have. For example:

What keywords is website.com buying?
How many monthly visits does website.com get?
What is the top performing content on Specific Topic?
What marketing software does website.com use?

There are also some general company queries that Growthbot can respond to, such as:

What is the stock price of $ticker?
How many employees does Company have?
How much funding has Company raised?

Talking to Growthbot

To get started, you have to follow the standard ‘Add to Slack’ process, starting at the Growthbot website:

Once you’ve added Growthbot, there’s the option to add it to other channels, to move the bot from outside of your private DM-based conversation. Growthbot sits in your DM panel, with the inactive indicator. There seems to be no best practice yet around what type of status bots should be in — while it’s true that they’re not actually ‘active’, it’s also true that their activity state is solely determined by the user, meaning they’re basically active all the time (or at least when you need them to be).

Natural Language Processing and tone

There’s some NLP being used to understand the questions that someone asks to Growthbot. It’s pretty good, but I definitely hit some errors when some of my questions were not asked in a specific way:

That said, if you have an understanding of specifically what you’re looking for, simple keyword queries without any formal sentence structure will return what you’re looking for:

I’m assuming that once the HubSpot team has some more data around the types of questions people are asking, what returned errors, and what the intention of those questions were, they’ll be able to improve the accuracy of responses and lower the rate of returning an error response.

Growthbot is also pretty humble and polite. If you hit an error, Growthbot is self-effacing, and almost embarrassed that the answer can’t be found:

There’s another type of error too, that reinforces the idea that Growthbot is pretty great, and is only going to get better — so stick around:

There’s no need to end your queries with a question mark, as Growthbot assumes that anything you send as a message is a question — a fair assumption for the product and one that save key strokes, too.

Behind the scenes

Growthbot responds to all of these requests by cobbling together various APIs — some from Hubspot, some from other services that generate intelligence on web-based products (e.g. Google Analytics, Alexa, SimilarWeb). As you can see in the previous screenshot, the source of the query is given at the bottom of the response from Growthbot if you want to dive deeper into the information provided.

The Growthbot experience

So — what happens when you start asking Growthbot questions? What types of responses can you expect? Let’s get into what it’s like to interact with Growthbot…

Marketing tools and behaviors

One of the most compelling parts of Growthbot is how quick and easy it is to find information about the marketing tactics and tools of any website. IMHO, this is where the product really shines.

Growthbot can tell you what keywords a website is ranking for:

…what keywords they’re buying, and for how much:

…how much of their web traffic is organic, and what is the value of that traffic:

…how many total monthly visits their website gets:

… and lots more.

I’m uncertain as to how accurate all of these responses are, and I haven’t been able to dive into the methods that HubSpot or the supporting services are using to provide the information. For example, as the Founder of Quibb, I know that this list of marketing services isn’t accurate (some are missing):

At the same time, if you’re a marketing/sales/growth professional and Growthbot is simply a tool to help streamline your process for finding the information you need and already use to do your job, you’re hopefully already familiar with the potential errors these services might let slip through, and the process they go through to serve you that info.

Errors and what I’m hoping for next

There was one error that I hit fairly often. Unless you append a ‘.com’ to a company or website you’re asking questions about, Growthbot will assume you’re looking for a teammate on Slack with that username:

I’d assume that people using the tool would be more likely to use Growthbot to find information about companies than their colleagues, so I’m unsure why this product decision was made ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Can I trust the answer?

I was served some wrong information when asking questions that I expected to be in-scope:

This is one of my main problems overall with Growthbot, and also one of the more difficult problems the product has to solve. If you’re browsing a website, and actually clicking the buttons, reading the menus, glancing at the heading of the table — you know whether or not the information you’re being shown is the information you’re looking for. This isn’t the case with Growthbot.

There were also some other (imho) more obvious, clearly articulated questions that gave me incorrect answers:

On several occasions with Growthbot, I was unsure — is this actually the right answer to the question I asked? I have an understanding of what I’m looking for when I search for ‘Top post on Poodles’, but what exactly does this list mean?

Are these the top posts on poodles from the start of time? In English? Is it based only on total number of page views, or shares, or some combination of those and other metrics?

While listing the source is nice, if anything I would appreciate having some sort of a glossary, potentially listed on the Growthbot website. This document could list exactly where the information is coming from, how it’s calculated, etc. If I’m going to be using this information for anything more than navel-gazing or quick gut checks, I need to make sure I have an understanding on accuracy, source, time horizon it was pulled from, etc etc.

HubSpot-only features

I’m not a HubSpot customer, so there were a few features that I was unable to use. For example, for any company you ask about via Growthbot you can ‘add to crm’, or ‘add to watchlist’. As a non-HubSpot user, these commands (shown in the UI as buttons) were a bit confusing. Clicking on them didn’t do anything, except display a simple update note.

I’m assuming (though I’m not positive, and am unsure why) the ‘show employees’ button is also a HubSpot-only feature, as that button didn’t yield any output for me:

…or perhaps it was just an error?

This points to another issue I had with Growthbot — some interactions that I made where I expected an output yielded nothing, leaving me with a confused feeling and wondering what I did wrong. Not a good position to put the user in!

Limits of a list-based output

One final tweak that I’d like to see would be how Growthbot displays list answers that are >10 entries. For example, almost 40k (!) companies in San Francisco use MailChimp… but Growthbot’s output is a 10 item list, of unknown order (size of company? alphabetical? random?):

Here, the ‘enter its number’ action doesn’t really allow me to do much. And there’s no other way to expand beyond that list of ten.

Similarly, while Growthbot is pretty new and cutting-edge… emoji aren’t quite understood, yet 😆

But, what is really nice with that flow — if you type ‘2’ after the error, Growthbot remembers the question that you asked previously, and what that new entry relates to:

🎉🎉🎉

What about mobile?

One of the biggest pieces missing from Growthbot are metrics and information on mobile-based companies and products. I assume that Hubspot is used almost exclusively for heavily web-focused companies.

Still, it was a disappointing that Growthbot couldn’t give me any information about mobile apps (and instead, I think, gave me content about it?):

Why I ❤️ Growthbot

When a sales/marketing/growth professionals needs to access some information to do their job, their process looks something like this:

encounter a question
think about/ask colleague/research where to find the information needed
navigate to that website
look around, confirm how the UI works
interact with the website (probably via search field) to query for the information you need
website serves response
comprehend UI to extract core content (is it a graph? table? text?)

Some of these steps can be cut out over time (i.e. the two points around comprehending how the UI of the website works or displays information, where to find the info you need, etc.), but otherwise this is the typical process we all go through.

Let’s compare that to Growthbot:

encounter a question
navigate to Growthbot channel in Slack
ask Growthbot for the information you need
Growthbot serves response and core content is extracted

That’s a simplified comparison, of course. It also assumes that a conversational UI creates a more seamless and accessible interaction model (which we all think is true, but are we really 100% certain? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯).

This comparison highlights what it is that Growthbot does so well, and why it’s the perfect bot — it reduces the cognitive friction for an action where the product itself is irrelevant. Getting the content or information itself to the user is all that matters, and Growthbot constructs the fewest possible barriers between that initial user intent and the content they seek.

What I’m most excited about for the future of Growthbot is the potential to string a much more complicated series of questions together, and have Growthbot understand exactly the outcome and final information I’m looking for. For example, if I want to know which companies are my competitors and which keywords all of them are buying — I can do that that now with Growthbot, sure, but it’s a lot of steps and back-and-forth. It’s cumbersome:

But it feels like Growthbot is on the path to making exactly this type of repetitive, clearly defined type of question and data collection process much simpler and faster than the current human-powered version. Just like Dharmesh — that’s a tool that I’d like to have, too.