Hello entrepreneurs, freelancers and mobile workers!
We know that it can be difficult to find a space to work or to have a meeting (By the way, please don’t interview people in a cafe). So we’ve built a Facebook messenger bot that allows you to find a coworking space based on your location.
So, looking for a coworking space near Montreal? You can talk right now with Grindbase bot via Facebook Messenger here.
Presently, all coworking spaces you’ll find are located in Montreal. It is where we are located and in fact, there’s quite a big number of coworking spaces in this city. About 40 spaces and the number is growing. Recently, WeWork opened their second coworking space in Montreal.
Why a bot?
In April, Facebook launched it’s Bot Platform at F8. It was something really catchy, with a lot of potential. It was also a new channel to jump into, the Facebook chat interface.
The advantages of a bot is that it don’t take space in your phone and you don’t have to install it, as you would do for an app.
Onboarding is easy with a chatbot, no signup, you get immediate full value.
Also, it is a direct channel to exchange with people, the best way to gain insight. It’s way easier to listen to people through the bot.
The main caveat with a bot is when it bot doesn’t understand what the user is asking and stop interacting with the user. That’s why to aim to a good experience by guiding the user with clear call to action buttons.
With all the good things provided by a bot, it was easy to decide to give a shot to build a bot.
How does this work?
The bot after greeting you, will first asked you to give your location. Then, the bot will show you the ten nearest coworking spaces from your location (No more due to limitation of Facebook messenger).
You then have the possibility to navigate to the selected space using Google Maps. Click on the second link to learn more about this space, it will brings you to the space’s profile in Grindbase website. There, you’ll find the space website, opening hours, more pictures about the space and other useful information.
While challenging at first, it was quite fun to build this bot since it’s quite new, maybe technical details could be a good subject for an other story.
You practically don’t need to type anything, everything is quite smooth with a lot of buttons and links (And also emojis 😎)
Of course, it could be more refined, but it was more important to launch, to get real and to get things done. Of course, more coworking spaces from other cities to come in the future if we evolve our bot!
We hope that this bot will be useful to you! Feel free to give us your feedback to improve our bot!
