Learnings: Customer discovery with bots

I usually built Apps and do all the customer discovery and interviews in the design phase. This time round I built a 🤖 bot for the PH Makers festival for two simple reasons:
1/ I only had a short time to build and deliver a product and website;
2/ I knew to make habits stick I needed a coaching style of interaction with the user (and a conversational bot is ideal for that).

From a MVP perspective a bot leaves the UX quite open.
There is no UI (other than chat and simple prompts) so actions users want are not prescribed. I can see how they want the product to work. It might be clunky if the bot does not have that feature (this was built in <2 weeks! so it is limited) but over time I'll be able to see what users actually want out of a "habit coach" app/bot and iterate.

I am sharing this insight as I've been monitoring conversations since last night my 🌱 GreenHabit messenger bot went live on Product Hunts' 😺 Green Earth 🌏 edition competition voting board:
https://www.producthunt.com/makers-festival/green-earth/voting

yes, pls vote - it's a great cause. But, more so I am finding it interesting that difference. That is: with an app you are left wondering why a user did not return.... with the Bot I can actually continue the conversation 1-1 with the user.

... just sharing as someone here might save going down the path of UI design and build out of an app only to find they missed the mark on customers needs.