Find your Bot’s first 100 users & feedbacks
So, you have an MVP and you’ve run out of friends to give you feedback. (If you’ve not already asked every man, woman and their dogs that you know, do it now!)
You need some critical eyes before you’re ready to release your bot to the world.
You have some important questions to answer:
- Do users understand how to use your service from the opening sequence?
- What questions haven’t you planned for?
- Can users navigate your bot as expected?
This guide won’t necessarily help you find paying customers (although it could), instead it will find you a supply of bot enthusiasts who will think of things that you haven’t, spot issues, and suggest improvements.
There is no need to reinvent the wheel as there plenty of channels that will help reach these enthusiasts.
Here’s a step-by-step guide to help you launch.
🔳 Step 1: Get your bot listed online
Imagine Yelp but for bots. Where the user base are people looking for the next hot restaurant bot to share with the friends.
These sites produce a lot of content and, because of that, draw a lot of visitors.
Check out and list your bot on each of the following:
🔳 Step 2: Join the Facebook communities
There are quite a number of Facebook groups around the topic of conversational interfaces. Here you’ll find plenty of people interested in bots; some developers, some designers, and some interested in using bots for marketing and lead generation. Some of these groups even have a specific focus, for instance Bot Academy and Facebook Messenger Marketing.
Many of these groups have Bot sharing threads specifically for the purpose of getting feedback. Check this one out in our group:
Here’s a shortlist of Facebook groups with a minimum of 30,000 members between them:
There’s no need to wait around for these users to find your post in the groups.
Be Proactive!
Find active members of these groups and message them, there’s a good chance a high percentage of these will spend a few minutes chatting with your bot and pass on some feedback.
If you built your bot on a platform there’s a good chance they have a community group too.
🔳 Step 3: Use Messenger codes in physical locations
Messenger codes are a lightweight way to take the physical world online. An interactive way of saying “Hey, let’s meet on Messenger.”
There’s 1.3 Billion people on Messenger, which means there is a pretty large chance most people you come across have it.
If you’ve built a bot for your existing business, a shop, restaurant, or real-estate agency print out some flyers and ask customers to try it out.
If you’re an online business attend a meetup and hand out the flyers.
Check out our guide about the potential of Messenger codes
🔳 Step 4: Launch on Product Hunt
Product Hunt is a tightly-knit community of early adopters, investors and entrepreneurs. It started out as a mailing list answering the question of “What cool products are you using”?
Three years later it’s a community of over 500,000 early adopters ready to try out new products, people prepared to ask you difficult questions and provide constructive feedback and evangelise your product if it’s just what they have been looking for.
How do you launch on Product Hunt? We’ve got you covered.
Here’s the #1 guide on the web for launching on Product Hunt by Salesflare Head of Growth — Gilles De Clerk. It’s even been used by Y Combinator.
When you’re ready to launch let me know and I’d be happy to Hunt you. Reach out to me on Messenger.
By this point, you’ve hit 100 users. Your job is to internalise all the feedback, find the quick wins, prioritise features, change the poor copy.
Re engage those that have helped you in the past and repeat.
Now you’re ready for a larger audience.
🔳 Step 5: Use Messaging Platform Discovery channels
The Discover Tab, is Facebook’s solution to chatbot discovery. It’s a place you can apply to list so that users searching for a service in certain category can find you directly in Messenger, for example News or Sports.
The Crème de la Crème of bots can be selected to show in the “Featured” section. Facebook has some criteria that it uses to decide who makes the cut.
These are the ones they list publically:
- Low block and report rates for your bot. Can be found in Page → Insights -> Messages.
- High responsiveness rate. Can be seen from within Messenger thread with a page.
- Making good use of platform features, including the persistent menu and get started button
If you’ve built on Slack, check out their discovery mechanism: App Directory
By the time you arrive here hopefully you’re starting to find a common user profile using your service, and a common pain that you’re solving for them.
You’re ready for the next step.
Content & Paid.
Watch this space, we’ll be back with a guide from Ryan Maynard of Chat Dynamo on creating & optimising Ads that send users directly to Messenger.
