Looking Back At 2016

We decided to enter the messaging space in 2016 despite a handful of products and competitors already in the market.

As an entrepreneur, I’ve always said that founders shouldn’t worry too much about competition (it validates the market opportunity and makes you better), so we took our own advice to heart and launched Drift’s free live chat in April.

But in our case, the reasons for entering this space went beyond the fact that a market already existed.

To start, this is the problem that we know and love.

The connection between businesses and their customers is something that we’ve been focused on for years, rewinding back to when Elias Torres and I started Performable and on through our time at HubSpot.

And, as it usually does, a shift happened a whole lot faster than anyone anticipated.

Messaging exploded — and that is fundamentally changing the way that businesses communicate with their customers (but if you take a quick look around, you will still see most companies in the B2B space relying on cold calls, cold emails, gated content, lead qualification/nurturing, and MQLs).

We feel this everyday and I see it everyday. Not only inside of the walls at Drift and with our customers, but I see it happening with my kids and the next generation. I see the way that they’re interacting with brands, businesses, people, and groups — and how messaging is at the core of it all.

And this is exactly why I’ve never been this excited about a company before.

The shift that’s happening has massive implications for how companies do business, and we put ourselves right in the thick of things when we launched in April.

So as we’re gearing up for 2017, I wanted to take a minute to share some highlights and look back on the progress we made in 2016 during our first eight months in market.

Live Chat Without The Noise

We talked to hundreds of sales teams about their frustrations with the existing messaging and live chat products out there and they all said the same thing: chat helps close deals, but there’s too much noise.

So we set out to build chat that only delivered the conversations sales reps actually want to have, and in 2016 that started with routing and the launch of Driftbot.

Driftbot brings the power of AI to the most important part of your business: your customer relationships.

Driftbot uses machine learning to understand the conversations your prospects and customers are having with your company and can help ensure they are always connected with the right person or team (from marketing to sales to support). That means no more worrying about sales reps wasting time with support questions, or VIP customers going unanswered for days.

So now you can generate leads and close sales without the headaches and noise of traditional live chat.

Driftbot was one of Product Hunt’s most-loved products in the summer of 2016.

Intelligent Messaging

One thing we noticed was that our customers were spending a lot of their time answering the same questions — and we were feeling this pain too.

“How much does this cost?”

“Can I integrate this with WordPress?”

“Do you have a Slack integration?”

And then it hit us: we already have all of these answers written up in our help docs, so what if the bot could automatically answer these questions for us?

So we gave customers the ability to connect the bot to the tools they were already using for their help docs and FAQs, like Zendesk, Help Scout, WordPress, HelpDocs, and Helpjuice.

And now, in addition to routing questions to the right people on your team, Driftbot can actually answer questions for you when customers write in via chat on your website or inside of your product.

Driftbot can connect with your knowledge base and automatically give customers the answers they need.

A Whole New Way To Connect With Customers

Customers expect a direct line to the people at the businesses they are working with today. They don’t want to fill out a form and then wait for hours to hear back from a sales rep or to get help from support (you don’t; your customers don’t want to either).

They expect businesses to respond on their terms when it’s most convenient to them as a customer — not the company. So we launched Drift Profiles to give every business a way to connect with customers directly and personally.

A Drift Profile is like your digital business card.

Take Isabella for example. She works in Customer Success here at Drift, so all of the customers she works with will be able to message her directly from her Drift Profile, see if she’s online or away, and even learn more about her (like the fact that she lives in Boston, speaks three languages, and went to Cornell).

Here’s mine for example: https://team.drift.com/david (and yes, you can message me from there too).

Integrations

We’ve been focused on making it super easy to connect Drift to all of the tools that your business is already using, from Slack to HubSpot to Zapier to Segment.

Speaking of Slack — this quickly became our most popular integration (since you never have to leave the app that you use the most to talk to leads on your website and give customers some help inside of your app).

Now you don’t have to leave the app you’re using the most everyday in order to talk to customers.

That’s a quick look at some of the highlights from 2016 — and it’s all powered by the amazing team at Drift and the support of all of our customers.

We still have a ways to go, but every day we are getting closer to our mission of being the company that powers messaging for businesses.

Thanks to everyone who has helped support us so far on this journey.

I can’t wait to see what 2017 brings.

David