SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
991 He's Built 400+ Chatbots Making $800k in The Process
11 Apr 2018
Chapter 1: What is the background of Andrew Warner and his entrepreneurial journey?
This is the Top Entrepreneurs Podcast, where founders share how they started their companies and got filthy rich or crash and burn. Each episode features revenue numbers, customer counts, and other insider information that creates business news headlines. We went from a couple hundred thousand dollars to 2.7 million.
I had no money when I started the company. It was $160 million, which is the size of many IPOs.
We're a bit strapped. We have like 22,000 customers. With over 5 million downloads in a very short amount of time, major outlets like Inc. are calling us the fastest growing business show on iTunes. I'm your host, Nathan Latka, and here's today's episode.
Chapter 2: How did Andrew transition from email marketing to chatbots?
Hello everyone, my guest today is Andrew Warner. He started a $30 million company built on email marketing back when email marketing was just getting started. Many of you know Andrew from his company Mixergy and where he's interviewed over 1,500 entrepreneurs and startup founders such as the founders of Airbnb, Twitch, Groupon, and LinkedIn.
Now, what you might not know about Andrew is in recent years, he's been an angel investor in two of the early chat messaging platform companies. That's ManyChat and Assist, which eventually led him to build Bot Academy that we're going to talk about today. Andrew, are you ready to take us to the top? Oh, yeah.
It's always fun for me to interview you just because our backstory, and I've told you this many times, you know, my first call ever as an entrepreneur in my dorm room was with this guy, Andrew Warner, who I found a mixer to interview and you published your phone number. So this is fun for me. You've come on before.
Chapter 3: What is Bot Academy and how does it help marketers?
I don't want to talk about your past success because you've had a lot of them. Tell me about chatbots. You're a guy that has sold, you know, you built a company of 30 million. You sold it a lot of success. Why chatbots?
Because I remember when a friend of mine from school came to the 12th floor of the 575 building in Manhattan, he looked around, he goes, this whole floor is yours. And I said, yeah. He goes, how did you afford this whole floor? And I said, we do email marketing. I created this business.
Chapter 4: Why are chatbots becoming more relevant than email marketing?
Here's the landing page. Anyone can give me their email address, sign up for email newsletters, and we make money from advertising. And occasionally we sell stuff to people. And he said, whoa, you're so lucky. I said, lucky. I told you about this. We both graduated from school. I said, here's the thing. People are going to want email newsletter email.
Then we're going to send them email newsletters.
Chapter 5: What mistakes do people make when setting up chatbots?
And once someone's on our list, we can keep selling. We can keep running ads to them. It's going to be huge. I told you about it. You listened and you kept saying, nah, no one's going to want to hear from anyone other than their boss or their mom via email. They're not going to want to hear from companies. I told you about the opportunity. You didn't jump in.
And so I feel like with chat, the same thing's happening. We're not using chat.
Chapter 6: How can businesses effectively integrate chatbots with existing marketing strategies?
You and I, right now, I needed your Skype name. I sent you a text message. Last week, we got together. We were text messaging each other. We use iMessage with friends. We use Slack with work colleagues. Email is now becoming outdated. We're all shifting to messaging, and I feel like the same opportunity that existed back when we shifted from paper mail to email is happening now in chat.
Now, this is a really special moment, and I hope we look back on it 10 years from now and go, that was really valuable because... From what you just told me, you're kind of selectively placing a bet.
Chapter 7: What are the pricing models and revenue strategies for Bot Academy?
Let's say this becomes a billion-dollar thing for you. You'll never look back and say, I knew it. But what you'll say is, I saw enough indicators. It was worth kind of getting some information and making some investments and kind of throwing my head in the ring to build a community around the space. Why is that such a smart way to attack a new market that you think might be big?
I want to to attack it from as many directions as I can. As you said, I did a couple of angel investments. That's one way. I think at some point we're going to add software. I think where you've started services and that's another way.
Chapter 8: What advice does Andrew give for entrepreneurs starting out in new markets?
I don't know how we teach it. So people who want to learn how to build chat bots and use it for marketing can do it. I'm trying lots of different directions to attack this space. And frankly, so far, they're all working well. And who knows? Who knows which one's going to be the big the big runaway success.
OK, so tell me about the current kind of focus, the bot academy. What is it and what's the pricing model? How do you make money?
We do a couple of different things. One is we teach people how to build chatbots and get paying clients. People will actually pay them to build bots for them. The other thing that we do is we say, look, if you don't want to learn, if you need a chatbot build, come to us, pay us. We'll take the money. We'll teach you how to how this thing works.
And then we take almost all the money and we give it to one of our graduates and say, OK, now go build a chatbot for our client. And so we're both getting clients and talking to businesses who want chatbots and we're talking to students and teaching them how to do it.
And what's the general price for this?
At this point, it's $2,000 for each option. So $2,000, we teach you how to do it. We set you up and show you how to do it as a business, tell you how to charge for it, how to demo it, the whole thing. Or if you want us to build it, you pay $2,000. We pass the work on to our graduates.
And when you look at, uh, uh, kind of the history, when did, what year do you launch this? And, or how many months ago did you launch the Academy?
Uh, last year.
So actually this, uh, yeah, last year, sometime around 2017. Okay. So kind of January, 2017, December, 2016 ish. And how many people have gone through the program to date? I don't know the exact numbers, but it's somewhere around 400 people. Okay. Yeah. So, I mean, look, you know, getting 400 people to go through a program, you know, respond to all our support tickets about chatbots.
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