2 years as a solo product manager building a minimalistic chatbot
I realized that until that interaction is smooth and believable - not passing a Turing test, but closer to an actual dynamic conversation, it provides much less value, more slowly. Also, most of the responses were reliant on scanning profile text which wasn't a great idea to capture upfront. Interestingly, a large portion of the users perceived the chatbot as a general-purpose AI agent capable of responding effectively to random questions (for example., What’s the meaning of love? How far is the moon from earth? Who was the 16th president of the United States? What’s Baby Yoda's real name? Believe it or not, these were some of the popular questions. Presbot was able to respond with vague "I'm not sure" type responses at best. At one point, I added top N results from Wikipedia in the response to at least point users in the right direction but ended up removing it eventually. Let me know if you’d like more of the questions and I'll be happy to share)
I ended up pivoting to a more minimalistic rule-based bot focusing on lead capture via a conversation curated with custom lead generation questions. I added an option to offer a service (e.g., newsletter signup) in exchange for users' email and the ability to retarget with a deeper discount or a more engaging value proposition if the initial offer did not go through and updated my value proposition to lead generation vs it being a self-learning chatbot.
I am reaching out for feedback and, in appreciation for your time, would love to offer a limited-time 50% off on all paid plans (Use Code HALFOFF at Checkout). The app has a free tier as well which should suffice for exploration. Thank you!!
https://presbot.com/