AKA, "Bot To School" ;)
It's a Facebook Messenger-based virtual assistant that can help you find backpacks, school supplies, gadgets, lunch boxes and shoes for kids in preschool through elementary school, broken out by Big Kids v. Little Kids.
This is a step up in complexity from the Fatherly's DadJoke bot (https://www.producthunt.com/tech...) into the realm of commerce v. content. This is a good use case for a bot, esp. as the modern parent is likely having their first back to school experience and tapped much more into messaging tools than older generations.
@mjrawth, it seems like you're spending a lot of time on bots. What makes you excited here and how does this fit in with the rest of the Fatherly strategy?
@daveambrose The Fatherly team is psyched about bots. Messaging apps have surpassed social networks in monthly active users*, and present a massive opportunity for connecting with our audience on channels they’re frequenting multiple times a day. The average adult downloads zero new apps per month** as their phones become increasingly saturated, and bots skirt this challenge, requiring neither download nor data entry.
The Fatherly Dad Joke Bot confirmed our audience’s interest in messenger bots, seeing nearly 50,000 messages in the week leading up to Father’s Day. The next Fatherly bot iteration, the Back To School Gear Bot, merges Fatherly’s product curation that our readers have grown to rely on with the concept of conversational commerce, providing a really awesome interactive chat experience tailor made for high-anxiety, mobile-first parents.
Sources:
*http://www.businessinsider.com/t...
**http://www.recode.net/2016/6/8/1...
Report
I bet that at least 150 of the Dad Joke bot messages were mine. I love that bot, as does my kid. The wife, not so much. :) Congrats on the B2S Gear Bot. Is all of the gear curated by Fatherly, so I will only receive your best/coolest in category recommendations? Can't wait to try it out!
@kevrmoore Some of the recommendations are in Fatherly and most of them are on Amazon. Since we don't have a cart functionality on Messenger, we thought the better user experience was to curate from our existing recommendations as well as the greatest/latest on Amazon to smooth the path to purchase as much as possible as most parents likely already have an Amazon account.
Polywork
Fatherly's Back to School Gear Bot
Fatherly's Back to School Gear Bot