Helping You Launch a Home-Based Business
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1 reviewI am the CEO of a digital marketing agency and the founder of several online course platforms where we help budding digital marketers, coaches and online course creators kickstart their business working form home. As an early adopter, what struck me first with ActiveChat (AC) was how the tool was oriented towards ease of use (drag&drop) and natural language processing using Google's powerful AI engine (Dialogflow).
After some analysis of the person behind AC I came to learn more about Andrii Ganin (who likes you to think his real name is "Andrew Ganine") and came to like his entrepreneurial spirit. Way too many SAAS kickstarts have great ideas - and not the stamina to see things through. Very early on, it became clear to me that Andrii is not that type of entrepreneur: he doesn't let you have the bone without a fight - and that's how real companies are made.
In terms of positioning AC, a few pitfalls became evident early on, the biggest one being that the team seemed to perceived AC as a "tool to build superior chatbots", while the real positioning - in my mind - needed to be customer centric, ie.: "What solution does the tool solve for the end-customer?" I knew that the team behind AC needed some time to come to that understanding - and I was happy to learn recently that that this understanding seems to sink in.
For example: while AC offers the "possibility" to build a superior INTERCOM or ZENDESK helpdesk and ticketing system, it would require outlandish effort for us to re-create such a system from scratch. We are not developers - we are marketers and customer support agents. We are not "drag&droppers", we are solution providers looking for fast deployment of scalable marketing and customer help solutions.
At the same time, AC is on the right track: it absolutely excels in offering a tool that solves customer problems at scale with the help of a (relatively) easy -to-use tool and backed up with AI looking for the intent behind a customer question. What's missing for us are demo use-cases or pre-built platforms that can be used out of the box - and then then be adapted to our specific needs, such as: customer pre-segmentation quizzes for top-of-marketing-funnel (like Questionscout), customer help-desk with fully-featured ticketing systems (like ZenDesk or LiveAgent) - etc... This may be too much to ask as it may AC nail down to a specific niche while its real strengths probably is its to be a "jack-of-all-trades" with unlimited possibilities and top-of-the-shelf power wherever you look.
My initial plan when investing into AC's Life Time Deal was (and still is) to offer AC chatbots to each of my students at www.ppc.university and www.mylifestyle.business. We will teach our students how to add AC chatbots to optimize marketing funnels and with the objective to answer pre-sale questions, generate leads and increase customer satisfaction on our student's websites - so they in turn can be successful with running their business right out of the gate.
As an early adopter we could give each of our students almost unlimited access to ACs powerful features, but to be fair, we plan to actually limit the access and entice students to rather opt for paid higher-tier plans directly with AC.
It's our way to give back to a solution that deserves to grow - and for growth, you need funds :-)