Swell is now part of the bot game for one month
The moment I’m writing this we have 33,349 daily active users sending 533,176 messages to our bot Swelly.
Continue reading if you want to learn why we’re building this, how we started as well as the main benefits of each platform (Facebook Messenger, kik & Telegram).
It was about 2 months ago when we first thought that bots could be an interesting space for us. We always thought of Swell as a Multi-Platform Social Network that needs to be accessible wherever the user needs help with decisions.
Our long term vision is creating technology to empower people to make better decisions. May it be finding the perfect outfit for the day, a restaurant for a date, a rental car in your area that matches your needs or help deciding which app logo is better for your product. Swell makes decisions fast & fun!
The Swell community answers any questions within seconds and let’s you ask your friends, a public community of educated users or community experts, depending on your current needs.
If your Swell get’s featured you can currently get 10k votes within 24h.
The story behind Swell
I came up with the idea while I was operating fashion stores back home in Austria with my co-founder Fred.
A lot of people left our stores without buying so as a store owner I needed to find out the reasons for that.
Turns out the number one reason for people to leave a store without buying is being indecisive. 40% of the people (mostly teenagers and people in their early 20ies) told us they couldn’t decide and also they don’t trust the opinion of a shop keeper as she is most likely biased. With the Swell App we created the simplest possible experience to solve this problem faster then current solutions like messaging apps. We launched the Swell App 6 months ago on ProductHunt:https://www.producthunt.com/tech/swell-4
Get the Swell app here: http://www.swl.wtf/app
Bots for User Acquisition?
However, since we were in the app-game and worked 5 months on growing an audience for our native apps we first thought of bots as a new marketing/user acquisition channel.
Here are our thoughts we had back then: https://medium.com/swell-wtf/swell-meets-bots-a0738daf493e
So we built Swelly for Facebook Messenger and launched it on ProductHunt (https://www.producthunt.com/tech/swell-bot) with the idea to get free traffic to the bot and do as much as we can to convert bot users to app users.
We put a lot of effort like ‘download app’ buttons and questions about which smart phones the users have. Problem is, this kind of destroyed our smooth experience. Swelly had some nice early traction and we soon realized, that our bot can be a fully functional — stand alone — platform connected with the app-community, but definitely more then just a user acquisition channel.
So where can I find the bots?
?Swelly for Facebook Messenger: http://swl.wtf/fbbot
?Swelly for kik: http://swl.wtf/kikbot
?Swelly for Telegram: http://swl.wtf/telegrambot
Now after the first month, I want to share some numbers with you (provided by BotMetrics):
- new users: 101.539
- current DAU: 33.454
- Average daily new users: 1259
- Total Messages: 1.826.741
last week:
- new users: 50.406
- Average DAU: 7909
- Average daily news users: 7200
- Total Messages: 1.067.245
Today:
- new users: 31.101
- Average DAU: 33.477
- Total Messages: 536.009
Now Let’s compare the platforms
Facebook Messenger — Massive Audience, weak explore function, a lot of data!
The great thing at Facebook is the massive audience it potentially provides. The downside here really is, that it’s not so easy to explore bots within the Facebook Messenger.
It took as 3 weeks to make it to the top results on Messengers Search function. Since we hit that, it drives some really nice traffic (1000–3000 new organic users per day)
The best thing about Facebook Messenger is the data you can collect. Messenger gives you the users name, profile pic, gender, location, time-zone, etc.
Besides the obvious benefits of getting more data this let’s us make our feed more personalized and helps us to send smarter notification-like messages to remind users to come back.
Kik — great explore function, weak on data, perfect audience for Swelly
Kik and it’s Bot Shop makes it easy to explore new bots and helped us from day 1 to build an audience. Right now we are #4 in the Entertainment category so every kik users see’s us first when opening the Bot Shop.
Another great thing about kik is their team. They are very accessible, super responsive and help as much as they can when it comes to technical problems or even just to chat about how to build a perfect user experience.
I also like their Chat-Interface better then the one on Facebook, it let’s you do beautiful things like putting buttons in the text field.
The only problem with kik is that it only gives you very little data like username and profile picture. Pretty much all the rest needs to be collected later with smart questioning.
Cool thing here is it’s young audience, for us teenagers and users in their early tweenties are perfect, also they are eager to provide data to get a better feed.
Telegram has a great interface, doesn’t give you a lot of data and also it’s not really a good match for us in terms of their target audience.
Thanks for reading this, shoot me an e-mail to pete@swell.wtf if you have any questions and have a ?Swell day,
@Pete