Chatbots Are Cool but Chatbot Developers Are Cooler
Come Be a Big Fish in a Small but Growing Ocean
Hey. What’s up? My name is Jhamar Youngblood, I am the captain over at Blastchat. Blastchat is a mobile messaging app that allows users to send one message to many recipients with the use of push notifications and then get individual responses from all recipients. Think BCC (Blind Carbon Copy) on email but for mobile.
Our value proposition:
1: As a sender you can communicate with large audiences faster than any other time in human history. Seriously, let’s say 100,000 people turned your blasts on. You create content, press send, and a second later 100,000 people will see your message via push notification. So, yes, in theory we are the fastest mass communication tool in human history.
2: As a receiver, you can have the information that is most important to you delivered to you a second after it is created.
Here is how I came up with the idea. One day while in graduate school, I wanted to play tennis. So I went to Facebook and Twitter to post and tweet: “Anyone down to play some tennis today?” No one replied. I checked the analytics and it showed that less than 2% of my friends and followers actually saw the messages. These were two of the most effective mass comm platforms of all time and my messages were only visible to less than 2% of my audience. Then it hit me! What I needed that day was a messaging app that allowed me to send one message to a group of people and get individual responses a second later. The key to my idea working was the push notification. This was important because I needed my message to be seen immediately by all recipients. So I built the first version and sent it to friends and the feedback started gushing. I realized that that my problem was shared by everyone. And not just individuals but groups, brands, companies and cities as well. We recently won a grant to create a product to help protect women. We are calling this product Blastchat Safety and it will be released next week. When a women feels she is in danger, she will be able to hold a button and send an alert to her safety network with her address letting them know that she’s in danger. She will also be able to record what’s going on around her for evidence collection. Watch a demo of Blastchat Safety in action here.
So, Chatbots!
We are in the process of building out our API and we are working on our documentation so all developers can start building bots on our platform. But prior to that we are looking for some developers to come build some cool bots as a test run and here are some reasons why you should:
1.One to many — not one to one. Most messaging platforms focus solely on one to one messaging. Meaning users can only message other users individually. On Blast, bots will be able to message many users with one message. Similar to twitter bots but way more interesting because we think the magic will happen once the individual conversation happens after the initial blast is sent. We can give users the ability to message your bots to start a conversation as well.
2. Push notifications. I’ve been researching the industry and I learned that it is hard to know when to send push notifications from your bot. The beauty with Blast is that users come to the platform knowing that they will receive pushes. So if they turn your bot on it means they want to receive your push notifications. This is unlike other platforms because on Blast your bot can start conversations as opposed to waiting around to be messaged. Here is an example:
Monday
Bot: Hey Jhamar, did you drink a gallon of water and run 3 miles today?
Me: No. I’m a loser.
Bot: No you aren’t a loser, you just have to do better.
Tuesday
Bot: Hey Jhamar, did you get a chance to drink a gallon of water and run today?
Me: No. I’m a loser.
Bot: It’s ok, there is always tomorrow.
Wednesday
Bot: Drink a gallon and ran today?
Me: No
Bot: Yeah, you are a f’n loser.
Thursday
Bot: Hey Loser!
3. Newark, NJ. The city was once the most thriving city in our country. It’s the home of Prudential, Audible and NJIT. The city is an emerging tech hub with tons of potential and guess which company is at the forefront of it all. Yes, us. We are planning to have 5 digit growth this summer with the Mayor joining and hopefully former mayor Cory Booker as well. It’s a cool opportinity to be noticed by a unique and targeted audience.
Here are some bot ideas that we thought of:
- Reminder bot. (Send alerts/push notifications to users whenever they tell you to.)
- Dating bot. (Users will tell the bot another user they have a crush on and when that user does the same, the bot will send notifications to both recipients and they will have 24 hours to chat in the app)
- Content bot. (World news, sports, etc)
- Marketplace bots. (Users can tell the bot the items they have for sale and other users tell the bot items they are looking for. When there is a match, the bot can send pushes to both users).
If you love hacking or you are a new startup this may be great for you and I would love to hear from you. If you need help with the storyline, I can help with that as well. I once self published a poetry book, wrote a 70,000 word novel and earned over $1,000 writing personal statements for my friends college applications. They all got in!
Let’s chat!
Twitter: @Blastchat
