Hey Product Hunt!
After seeing over and over how unnecessarily complex it is to build automated customer journeys on WhatsApp at previous startups, we tried to understand exactly why.
What we found is that there’s companies that are great at specific parts of the process (automation, inboxes or connecting data to your CRM etc.). However, unlike email where there are already tools that handle the whole process for you (or connecting them is relatively straightforward), building the equivalent customer journeys on WhatsApp requires in depth knowledge of the way WhatsApp works, as well as engineering time, so we built Hilos.
Hilos is the full stack for WhatsApp that starts with access to the WhatsApp API, includes an Inbox to manually respond to messages and grows with your company as your automation needs get more complex.
We’ve been particularly focused on building the no-code flow builder that lets you automate chats with clients and send validated answers from those conversations to your CRM or other systems (through our webhooks). This lets you set up cool things like:
▶️ Improve your retention by running campaigns to users who have paid but haven’t realised the full value of your product to prevent them from churning.
▶️ Run lead gen campaigns on Facebook that go straight into WhatsApp where you can ask the user a few questions and get their contact info.
▶️ Send notifications to your users like “will you be able to attend your scheduled appointment?” and add followup actions like rescheduling, while sending all that info to your CRM.
▶️ Support your operations team by automating repetitive requests and keeping track of those actions automatically.
If you have any questions feel free to drop them below!
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@flo_rae This is a very interesting and perhaps relevant app for many building for Whatsapp. I am curious to know what people would usually do for Whatsapp prior to Hilos.
@absamma Hey Abraham! What we've done in the past was use a tool designed for email and force it to send WhatsApps, but this presented various little problems which add up to a bad experience as the WhatsApp API has a thousand little details that need to be taken into account (like needing an approved template to send the first outbound message in 24h).
For simpler use cases we just connected straight to the Twilio WhatsApp API and built it manually, which works, but definitely takes time and knowledge of how to implement it.
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Congratulations 🎉🎉🎉🎉, this looks very promising. I just have a few questions:
I can see in the menu you have "Broadcasts". Is this a feature you'll be releasing as well? And if so how does it play with Whatsapp's restrictive spam filtering?
Will we be able to integrate flows using zapier, integromat or our own APIs? Can we trigger kinds of triggers do you currently support for flows?
@johnparkerg Hey John, thanks for the feedback!
The broadcasts feature is already live and works with WhatsApp's template messages to prevent spam, but still allow you to send relevant messages 🙂. What that means is that you need to send a template to WhatsApp for approval, and once that is done you can use it in a broadcast message. As WhatsApp officially requires an opt in to contact a number, we recommend tailoring these messages to add value to people who have already expressed interest in your product.
To answer your second question, at the end of every flow, you can add a webhook that will trigger every time a user completes a flow, which sends all the answers to Zapier (with the catch webhook step), Integromat or any other place where you can catch webhooks!
On the flow triggering side, we have an API where you can do exactly that. Alternatively you can trigger it with a csv file directly on the platform and we're in the process of building a Zapier integration to make all that easier.
@farokh_shahabi Hey Farokh, thanks for the feedback!
You can run most forms that you would on Typeform directly within WhatsApp, with the idea that through WhatsApp's 90%+ open rate as well as the ability to contact anybody who has started a form, you get higher completion rates. You could then send these validated responses to Formaloo's CDP (or trigger flows from the CDP).
There are some use cases where WhatsApp's text based interface is not the best option and there are benefits to linking out in the middle of the flow, coming soon 😉
Congratulations on launching! I can definitely see a huge need for this - WhatsApp was THE mode of communication for both personal and work where I used to live and this makes a ton of sense. Wonder if you guys are at all interested in expanding horizontally and building out integration with Slack as well.
Hilos by ActiveCampaign
Hilos by ActiveCampaign
Hilos by ActiveCampaign
Formaloo
Hilos by ActiveCampaign
CmdKay
Mage
Spiritory
Hilos by ActiveCampaign