SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
EP 507: $300k Raised, ChatBot Helps Your Audience Talk To You and Get Answer with CEO Abhimanyu Godara
13 Dec 2016
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is The Top, where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of revenue or customer base. You'll learn how much revenue they're making, what their marketing funnel looks like, and how many customers they have.
Chapter 2: What is BOTTR and how does it function?
I'm now at $20,000 per top. Five and six million. He is hell-bent on global domination. We just broke our 100,000 unit sold mark. And I'm your host, Nathan Latka. Okay, Top Tribe, this week's winner of the 100 bucks is Rhett Gillins. He is a restaurant industry.
Chapter 3: Who are the primary users and target audience for BOTTR?
He's in the restaurant industry and he feels stuck. He wants to start his own software business. So congratulations, Rhett, for your guys' chance to win 100 bucks every Monday morning.
Chapter 4: What is BOTTR's current business model and revenue strategy?
Simply subscribe to the podcast on iTunes now in order to enter and then text the word Nathan to 33444 to prove that you subscribed. Folks, many of you reach out to me and you say, Nathan, so many guests on your show talk about the importance of batching. But whenever I try and batch, you tell me this. You go, Nathan, they don't book back-to-back times. Or they don't show up after they book.
It's frustrating. The answer is, guys, you have to use smart tools. I use a tool called Acuity Scheduling at NathanLatke.com forward slash schedule.
Chapter 5: How does BOTTR plan to enhance user experience in the future?
I'll tell you specifically how I use it later on in the episode. Nathan Latke here. This is episode 507. Coming up tomorrow morning, you're going to learn from Jerry Collier. He has raised $4 million with his company, Siftery, and they just passed 25,000 users to help you find software tools. Good morning, folks! Nathan Alatka here.
Chapter 6: What challenges has BOTTR faced in its validation phase?
Our guest today is Abhimanyu Gadara, and he is the CEO and founder of Botter.me. He previously managed portfolio investments at the T Labs Accelerator, where he worked with over 40-plus startups around strategy and things like that. He's very, very well-educated, now sitting on a platform that he thinks is going to be very exciting coming up. Abhimanyu, are you ready to take us to the top?
Yeah, absolutely, Nathan. Great. So tell us first, what does Botter.me do and how do you generate revenue? Sure. So first of all, thanks for having me on the podcast, Nathan. Of course. So yeah, so Botter is a personal bot platform, basically, that allows anyone and everyone on the planet to turn anything they want into a conversation.
So let's say as your digital avatar, you come and sign up on Botter and train it the way you want. Now, anybody can come and talk to your bot as if they're talking to a real person. So let's say botter.me slash Nathan will be your bot and anyone, let's say your fans, followers, friends. can come and query your bot and ask things like, hey, when is your next podcast coming?
What sort of content I can see around entrepreneurship? Do you have any blogs that I can read?
Chapter 7: How much funding has BOTTR raised and what are the future plans?
How much do you charge for your services? So things like that. So it's basically an assistant of you, like a replica of you, that anyone can come and query. So that's pretty much the model, right?
So initially, we are focused on influencers and celebrities who have a lot of fans and followers, and they want to automate and simplify their life by creating a bot that can take questions on their behalf. Now, they can also, as part of that experience, sell merchandise, which is, let's say, any sort of store items that they have, or maybe their services itself, like as part of the conversation.
to the users who are coming and talking to their bot.
Chapter 8: What is the current team size and hiring strategy for BOTTR?
So that's pretty much in a nutshell what we are doing. Now, we went the other way around. We first generated the revenue and then found a model to sort of figure out what would work in the market. We have been dabbling with the conversation commerce space for last six to 12 months, pretty much. So Abhimanyu, are you pre-revenue currently?
No, actually, so we made revenue as part of the previous model, but we pivoted to a different product now. Just refine that model into more scalable version of what we were doing previously. So what is that model? Is it a SaaS model? How's it work? You know, it's a consumer model.
So this model that we have, so you can come to the platform, you can start providing your services, you know, and you can start charging for your services, which could be, you know, anything. So from, let's say, you are a freelance designer to a developer to an assistant. So initially, when we started, we focused on virtual assistant as a service that you can provide through a chat interface.
But gradually, in six months, we made like more than $10,000 in revenue and realized we need to build more of a platform that can scale. So now we are focused on providing a platform to different kind of creators, influencers who can start selling their, let's say, expertise, their services through the conversation itself.
So that is one thing which we are now sort of working on in terms of scaling that platform. I'll be on you. Are you taking a percentage of sales then? Or I mean, again, how do you make money?
yeah so we are taking up so initially we were providing the services ourselves because you know we wanted to validate there is a potential to provide services through chat uh we realized there was because we made like more than ten thousand dollars like i said uh now we are opening up the platform through butter so that anyone now can come on the platform and start providing their services and now we'll be taking a cut from the services that they provide or even charge them for featured listings on our platform
Okay, got it. So how many people are paying you as of today, November 2016? So yeah, so in terms of the services model that we had, we had around 250 customers, paying customers on our platform. Those are customers, but we were taking in all the money.
Now that we've opened up the platform for other sort of suppliers, so to say, or vendors who will provide the services, now we can scale it to their own audience. And those vendors and people, those are celebrities, right? Is that who you're targeting? Yeah, influencers primarily. Okay. Yeah. So, so like, for example, I'm in here, I'm on your website right now.
I'm talking, I clicked on Donald Trump, right. Cause he's popular today. Right. So I'm messaging back and forth. And I asked him a question, like, where did you study? And he wrote back with all of his colleges. And I said, how old are you? And he said, I was born June 14th, 1946. And then I said, okay, well, let me test the commerce part. So I said, what do you charge to stay at Trump hotel?
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