Bots are Products just like anything else
Last week I caught up with Raphaël in SF, Goosebump’s Co-Founder & CEO.
I’ve laid out the key lessons from our conversation which served as a reminder that product fundamentals apply to bots too.
Goosebump was created to solve a personal problem for a group of friends based in Paris who are big fans of electronic music.
Over the past few years the number of events each week has increased dramatically as artists now primarily make money from live performances. Finding the right event across multiple listings sites and co-ordinating with friends is hard work, particularly at the last minute.
Goosebump grew out of a Facebook community that is now nearly 20,000 strong, and is currently part of Y Combinator’s Summer 2017 batch. Their bot now has 15k MAU and is growing at 13% WoW.
Key Lessons:
1/ Expose a great service, don’t build a bot for the sake of it.
Expose a service through a conversational UI because it is the best platform for you do so. Goosebump proved demand in the market through their facebook community before starting to build their primary technology, an event recommendation engine.
A conversational interface made sense for Goosebump. Their primary use case is someone spontaneously looking for a party or after-party on a the weekend and want to ask a “friend in the know” whilst keeping their friends in the loop. A typical user might ask “Techno tonight” and expect the most relevant events in their city to be recommended.
A GUI with drop-down menu’s here is too clunky, too much work. A conversational interface is fast, and can be used to drive emotion through choice of language, personality and rich content.
2/ Personalise without frustrating the user
A common product problem, send relevant content to users without a super long onboarding process to find the info to enable it. A conversational interface allows you a few questions, since it’s almost natural to ask, yet the more you can find out without asking the better.
Goosebump does this through each of it’s signup methods, it uses likes on Facebook, Soundcloud or Spotify to determine the type of music a user enjoys.
3/ Find your ‘Aha’ moment
The moment at which the user sees the value in your product. Once you’ve found it optimise so that your users see it again and again. The more they feel this the more frequently they will come back.
The initial ‘Aha’ moment for a Facebook user was seeing a friends profile, For Goosebump this ‘Aha’ moment is finding an event they want to attend and being able to share this with their friends. Goosebump gives them the “in-the-know” factor.
4/ Relevant Push Notifications are KEY
Once you have found your ‘Aha’ moment, find more reasons to get them there again.
Goosebump signs users up to push notifications through their response to a question in the onboarding process. Based on their music preferences and city a user will receive an update each weekend via a push notification which appear on a user’s lock screen and drive them back to Messenger.
For each event that Goosebump recommends there is an event page which, when opened, shows info including the venue and the artists playing. Each artist and venue can be followed by a user, in doing so a user subscribes to push notifications about that artist when they’re playing in their chosen city or events at that venue.
These notifications ensure users find more events they want to attend and share with friends, the ‘Aha’ moment, and Goosebump stays front of mind. 20% of users use Goosebump more than 3 times month, 40% twice or more.
5/ Acquisition by Platform & Product Virality
The importance of creating and implementing viral loops in the product is Raphael’s key take away from Y Combinator and in particular from their main mentor Michael Siebel, former exec at Twitch and Founder at Socialcam.
Building on Facebook Messenger allows you to take advantage of not only a platform where all of your friends exist, but Facebook’s power of ranking your friends in order of relevance.
Through partner deals with promoters and venues Goosebump is regularly able to offer users the chance to win free tickets on the basis that they share an event with three friends.
There is so little friction to inviting friends, no need to leave the platform, and friends are ranked in order of relevance that sharing on Messenger has helped Goosebump go viral.
Goosebump knows whether you or any of your friends have clicked attending / interested on an event on facebook, as well as all of your artist likes across platforms. This allows it to suggest events a user would likely want to win a ticket to on a regular and easily repeatable basis whilst staying relevant.
This has helped Goosebump to grow at 13% WoW and reach 15k MAU.
6/ Don’t forget marketing fundamentals
Bots are products just like an App, Web App or Games Console. Standard marketing methods apply, don’t rely on Bot discovery channels. That’s extremely unlikely where your target customer hangs out. Write content, build a community, attend offline events, make partnerships.
Goosebump does all of these, writing content about electronic music to inform and entertain, they manage facebook communities and have a network of ambassadors that attend events in target cities and incentivise users to chat with Goosebump.
In summary I think it’s important not to treat bots as fundamentally different products or services, rather leverage their core advantages without forgetting product fundamentals.
Try Goosebump out at m.me/higoosebump/
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