Six months ago, I graduated and faced a tough decision for a 23 year old: whether to work for a startup and grow with it or to stay independent and do it my own way.
I chose the latter and started freelancing as a growth marketer. Everything went really well and I had the chance to work with amazing people. However, I felt a bit uncomfortable working for someone else. Inspired by solo entrepreneurs like Pieter Levels or those featured on Indie Hackers, I decided to create my own business using my marketing and technical skills.
Luckily, I started to learn programming on my own 4 years ago. I eventually created a side project earning $1500+ per month thanks to a combination of SEO and advertising (here is the story about how this all started). It gave me the opportunity to focus on new projects and stop freelancing.
Three months ago, I was working for Recast.AI, a collaborative platform for developers to help create intelligent chatbots. I discovered the magic world of bot development and the outstanding possibilities attached to this new technology. As a marketer, I quickly understood how huge it could be to be able to broadcast messages to your audience through messaging apps.
Today, 1.3B people use Facebook Messenger and they spend on average 21,47 minutes per day on messaging apps. Communication is evolving towards a more personalized and authentic approach to the customer. That’s why messaging apps are quickly becoming the main channel for modern communication.
Unfortunately, there are few tools to easily send updates to your audience through messaging apps. You can use a bot development platform like Chatfuel to create a chatbot handling this particular use case but it's not as easy as a turnkey solution.
I discovered two startups, MindIQ and Botamp, that allow an organization to send newsletters or updates to their subscribers. Nevertheless, MindIQ's product was too buggy and Botamp's service could be way more easy to use.
I started programming one night using a Ruby client for Bots on Messenger. After a week, I had a really basic MVP and was testing it with one of my side projects. I quickly got 300+ subscribers to my "botletter" (newsletter on Messenger). The returns over investment were way above my expectations: the open rate was around 80% (against 18% for my email newsletter) and the click through rate was three times higher!
Botletter was born. 🎉
Botletter is a similar service as Mailchimp, but instead of using emails we use Facebook Messenger. Without any coding, you can connect our technology to your Facebook Page. Then people can subscribe to your botletter right through Messenger. You will be able to send them messages with rich cards attached whenever you want (see it in action here).
I have been developing bottletter for the past three months. I had the chance to gather 300 beta testers along the way. Botletter is now the best product to send newsletters through Facebook Messenger:
- ✅ Our format is simple and tailored for newsletters and updates. You can easily create the content of your botletter thanks to a form inspired by email newsletter solutions (Mailchimp, Mailjet...) and add up to 10 cards. Sending an update to thousands subscribers is a matter of minutes.
- 🚀 After solving many bugs, the product is now stable and ready to scale.
- 🕘 You can schedule the sending of your botletter or send it right away.
- 📊 In your dashboard, you can access detailed data in order to measure the impact of the campaigns on your business. For example, you can know which botletters were opened by a subscriber and how many times he clicked on a link.
More than just creating a product, I also learned so much and I'm sure it will continue while growing Botletter. I especially brushed up my design skills and decided to share my work in progress on Dribbble (thanks again Kevin Granger for the invitation!). I also keep learning more about programming everyday and I love it!
What's next? Botletter just got hunted on Product Hunt today! Now my short term goal is getting my first customers while continuously improving the product. I want Botletter to be the no-brainer solution to reach out to your audience on Facebook Messenger.
So... let's get back to work!
If you have any questions or feedback regarding Botletter please comment here ;)