I’m a Facebook Whore
Or, why we’re sticking with Messenger for our chatbot.
Last time, I ended the story with this question:
Do we stick with Messenger, or explore other platforms?
As a designer with an idea for a chatbot, the choice of platform is very closely tied to the target market. Let’s recap before moving on.
We started by making an assumption:
It takes a lot of time for people to go back and forth between a group chat and their favorite restaurant discovery app — like Yelp, Google Places, or Zomato.
We did some secondary research, and ran a survey which gave us an idea about how people actually figure out where to go eat.
What are their habits? Do they decide in groups? What apps do they like?
By the end of it, our target market had morphed into something like this —
Groups of friends that love going out. Love having fun. Sometimes, they want to try something new.
It’s important to recognize that these are people getting together primarily for social events, and they’re communicating with their friends to make those decisions.
Our goal was to create an inline chatbot (for group conversations), eliminating the need to go back and forth from app to app. With Messenger’s upcoming launch, my team was hopeful.
Facebook did come through with a lot of incredible things. But not the ability to include chatbots in your group conversations (inline chatbots).
So now we’re back where we started:
Do we stick with Messenger, or explore other platforms?
The answer is yes. We do stick with Messenger.
Because there’s room for growth.
Here’s a review of the user base for the three top restaurant-search apps in the US:
They’re doing well. But none of them can compete with Facebook Messenger’s current usage of 900 million.
So there’s room to scale by leveraging Messenger’s user base.
But, other platforms provide the inline chatbot features that our original concept was banking on. We ran a competitive analysis and reviewed the numbers.
Aside from not exceeding (or even equaling) Facebook Messenger’s user base, each had other complications too.
WeChat has a competitive range of users, supports inline-bots, and is made for our target market: social people. But the majority of their market exists in China, and that’s not within our current demographic reach.
Skype also has a competitive range, but their bots aren’t even entirely chat-based. They tend to focused on other uses, like within videochat. So that knocks them out of the running.
Kik, Telegram, and Slack are all wonderful alternatives. But each of them has under 142m users (Yelp’s current user base).
From a business perspective, if the user base of the platform is smaller than the largest user base of a competitor — Yelp — then it loses efficacy.
The features we are providing with inline bots are not revolutionary enough to demand a switch to a platform with a smaller user base.
So, we’re sticking with Facebook Messenger.
While conducting this research and discussing the business aspects, Nick Braver and I have both been exploring options for getting this thing off the ground.
Nick has been working with Facebook Messenger integration, while I’ve been starting to train it using Wit.ai. It’s slow going, since neither of us are developers by trade. But, it’s something we want to attempt.
Now that Facebook Messenger is looking like the preferred platform — we’re going to keep moving forward with setting it up for testing.
