BiteSpeed

Helping ecommerce brands retarget website visitors by building their own Facebook Messenger Chatbots using our chatbot-bot-builder.

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Inspiration

I was working with my Dad on his new online store and found that he spent a lot of money getting traffic to his website but a lot of visitors would not purchase (over 98%). He did email marketing but it was not effective. I thought a lot of online stores would face this problem so with my college friends I decided to build this Facebook Messenger Chatbot builder for ecommerce stores to help them retarget website visitors in Facebook Messenger.

What it does

It is a FB Messenger chatbot builder that ecommerce brands (Shopify merchants) can use to build their own FB Messenger chatbots and retarget website visitors.

Website visitors come to the website, opt-in to their FB Messenger subscriber list with an opt-in tool like a spin the wheel or discount widget with a Send to Messenger button.

After that when they leave the website without purchasing, based on their browsing behaviour they receive product abandonment or abandoned cart messages in Facebook Messenger with a chatbot to answer their questions.

How we built it

We built it as a team of 3 friends in college. We used node.js for the backend, studied react from the Facebook docs for frontend along with Redux. Our database is on Postgresql and we use Redis for caching.

Challenges we ran into

It was the first time we were building a complex product so the major challenges we ran into were around working with multiple platforms APIs, handling errors and making the application stable. It was also a challenge to understand the right architecture for our app, decisions about whether we need Redux or not, the right structure to store data. The way we selected class names was also silly and caused some issues initially when our app's code merged with other websites' code. We also faced significant challenges in estimating the time it would actually take to build different parts of the product.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that we are one of the fastest growing apps on the Shopify app store with 1000+ users in a couple of months and 120 5-star reviews. We don't have a single negative review till now and have generated thousands of dollars for our merchants in a couple of months.

What we learned

Besides the technical skills, we learned the importance of communication in a team, writing down all the decisions that we make, getting the architectural decisions right and then shipping fast. We also learned it's important to have the right architecture to be able to ship fast and make mistakes.

What's next for BiteSpeed

We are in the process of adding advanced functionality to our product with segmentation based on purchase data, user behaviour on the website and using Wit.ai in a better manner to improve customer support automation in our chatbot.

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