22 Bot Rules

22 BOT RULESAlex Godin, Founder & CEO, slash-hyphen
June 2016

👋
Let’s get something out of the way

some bots are
powerful@alex_godin | slash-hyphen
subscribe: letters.slash-hyphen.com

Let’s look at some strategies for building
powerful bots instead of dumb ones
@alex_godin | slash-hyphen

PS: We send a newsletter about Bots,
Slack & the future of work.
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RULE 1bots are about the platform

If I asked everyone here what a “bot” was
you would all have different answers

A bot is any software application that lives in a messaging tool.

It doesn’t need to be a text based interface.

It just needs to live in a messaging platform.

Whether it’s Telegram, WeChat, Facebook, Slack or
another platform, the power of bots is that they
LIVE IN A TOOL WE ALREADY USE

RULE 2look to the future

THIS IS HOW YOU BOOK A DOCTOR IN WECHAT
It doesn’t look like most of the “bots” we see today.

THIS IS HOW YOU BOOK A DOCTOR IN WECHAT
WeChat has a BILLION users. Their platform is used like crazy.

This interface has 27 buttons

All of the platforms are building towards a WeChat future.

THE BOTS OF THE FUTURE LOOK A LOT LIKE APPS

RULE 3@alex_godin | slash-hyphen
context is powerful

Name Hillary Clinton
Age 68 years old
Gender Female
From Chappaqua, NY
Building on a platform means that you know a
huge amount about your users on day one.

Name Hillary Clinton
Age 68 years old
Gender Female
From Chappaqua, NY
Slack tells you about how they work
Facebook tells you about who they are
Twillio now lets you learn about who they are

“Meekan schedule a team meeting tomorrow at noon”
Meekan is a bot that helps schedule meetings.

If it were an iPhone app, everyone on the
team would need to install it.

Instead, it lives in Slack, where it has access to your team by
default. The Slack platform enables new kinds of apps.

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RULE 4it’s about to get noisy

TAKE A STEP BACK
Why are we talking about bots? Two words.

Mobile!
Social!
Local!
VENTURE
CAPITALISTSA bunch of VCs decided to give money to bot companies
and now everyone needs a darn bot strategy.

WE ARE HERE
This is the Gartner hype cycle at work.
Tech comes in waves…

Social Networks
Before bots we had

Mobile Apps
Before bots we had

Mobile Social Apps
Before bots we had

Mobile Social Video
Apps
Then we got

Mobile Social Video
Apps
Then we got
There was one week in 2011
when 11 “Instagram for
video” apps launched

These apps all launched in 2011
Only one is Snapchat

The rest are dead
Sorry google+

250,000+
In 2011
Apps launched on the app store

That is to say,
get ready for a deluge of bots

you are not special

RULE 5it doesn’t have to be mass market

In a crowded market one winning
strategy is to build niche apps

You only need a small percentage of FB
Messenger’s 1 billion users to build a great
business

RULE 6@alex_godin | slash-hyphen
time adds up

Now a quick story about
a hero named Larry.

Larry works at Meetup. He built a bot that lets employees save 10
seconds by bringing data from an admin dashboard into Slack.
It gets used hundreds of times a day.

1 minute/day x 100 people
=
300 hours a year@alex_godin | slash-hyphen
That time adds up:

1 minute/day
=
300 hours a year@alex_godin | slash-hyphen
That time adds up:
How many ways are there
to save 1 minute a day.

RULE 7context switches take time

As developers we’ve built
command line tools and
added monitors to avoid
context switching

Bots like Larry’s let us
do that for non-devs.

RULE 7.5structure things people are already are doing

THERE ARE SO MANY PROCESSES
THAT CAN BE TURNED INTO BOTS

why try to create a new behavior?

1.Find existing behavior
2.Bot it
3.Profit
DON’T INVENT NEW BEHAVIOR

RULE 8redefine conversations

H0WDY.AI IS A GREAT BOTit takes synchronous meetings and parallelizes them.

Someone on the team triggers Howdy.1.

Someone on the team triggers Howdy.
Howdy goes out and asks everyone a question.
1.
2.

Someone on the team triggers Howdy.
Howdy goes out and asks everyone a question.
Howdy turns the answers into a simple report.
1.
2.
3.

Just because a conversation or process
used to happen one way, doesn’t mean
computers can’t restructure it.

RULE 9avoid disaster, use humans to filter

Blossom bot is the #1 best bot of all time

It was built in house at the New York Times

It uses ML to identify stories that are prime to go viral

It uses ML to identify stories that are prime to go viral
Stories it finds get 3.4x more views

Blossom could connect to Twitter.

Instead, it connects to Slack where the social media
editors can have a conversation about what makes
sense for each of their 100+ social media accounts.

RULE 10eliminate decisions

Imagine two ways to order a pizza
🍕

PIZZA APP ONE
Super custom
Customize volume of each topping
Pick your cheese type

PIZZA APP TWO
Push a button
Get a pizza

RULE 11build guard rails

If your bot feels like it can answer anything, people will ask it anything.

DON’T MAKE IT FEEL LIKE IT
CAN ANSWER ANYTHING

RULE 12understand your platform

RULEunderstand your platform
Build experiences that make sense for
the platform you’re on. Target their
audience and speak their language.

A TALE OF TWO BOTS
helps teens deal with
anxiety and depression
helps journalists find
breaking news

A TALE OF TWO BOTS
Lives on Kik. Lives on Slack.

RULE 13other people need bots too

THE SLACK APP STORE IS 5 MONTHS OLD
THERE ARE MORE THAN 6 STANDUP BOTS

DEVELOPERS. DEVELOPERS. DEVELOPERS. DEVELOPERS.
people other than
need bots

We love helping everyone in a company
(not just developers) use custom bots to
get more done in Slack.
Interested? Send us an email info@slash-hyphen.com

RULE 14be sustainable

many of the “ai” bots are actually
PEOPLE PRETENDING TO BE COMPUTERS
PRETENDING TO BE PEOPLE

That’s cool but…
MAKE SURE YOU CAN PAY THE PEOPLE
BEHIND THE BOTS.

💰pay your people 💰

💰pay your people 💰
X.ai, Clara and Fin all charge
subscriptions for this reason

RULE 15no one cares

No one (outside of SF) is sitting
at home frantically searching for
BOTS!Just like in 2011 no one was googling for
“social network with disappearing photos”

RULE 16this is new. no one knows what to expect.

The last bot most people used was an unsophisticated toy

RULE 17make starting easy

/operator
Onboarding is key with a new paradigm.
Growbot has a command that lets you
talk to a human right inside the bot.

RULE 18don’t build a commodity

THIS GUY IS BUMMED OUT
because all toilet paper is the same.
toilet paper is a commodity.

THE SWITCHING COST IS LOW
if you’re not careful, your bot will become
an easily replaced commodity.

THE SWITCHING COST IS LOW
can you add network effects?

RULE 19don’t expect promotion

IF YOU LAUNCHED A FART APP OR A
FLASHLIGHT APP ON IOS IN 2008
you could get a million downloads

THESE DAYS THE APP STORE IS
MUCH MORE CROWDED

EVEN IF YOU LAUNCHED A COMBO
FART/FLASHLIGHT APP…
you would get about 12 downloads

PLATFORM APP STORES ARE A GREAT
WAY TO GET YOUR FIRST BUNCH OF USERS

but they’re not a sustainable growth strategy

no one says it won’t be native
RULE 20

2 YEARS AGO: SCREENHERO LAUNCHES SCREENSHARING FOR SLACK

1 YEAR AGO: SCREENHERO BECOMES NATIVE SCREENSHARING IN SLACK

RULE 21don’t get hacked

WHEN YOU HAVE ACCESS TO SOMEONE’S MESSAGES
YOU HAVE ACCESS TO SOMEONE’S LIFE

WHEN YOU HAVE ACCESS TO SOMEONE’S MESSAGES
YOU HAVE ACCESS TO SOMEONE’S LIFE
don’t get hacked

RULE 22always bring a towel

RULE 22always bring a towel
SORRY! I’M A NERD…

JUST DON’T BLOW IT
ok. bots are great.

Want to learn more about how you
can take advantage of bots at work?
Send us an email: info@slash-hyphen.com

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22 Bot Rules

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