ericmarcos

Martian

1) Work your network. Our first few customers were personal connections or connections of a strategic business angel of ours. Identify the ones that most feel the pain you're solving. I'm talking about specific roles in these companies, not the companies as an entity. For example, imagine you're building a tool that improves collaboration between marketers and devs, find out who needs this more: the CMO? the CTO? VP Eng? a project manager? Find your champion and deeply understand his pains.

2) Even if your technology solves a company wide process, I wouldn't sell it like this at the beginning. Touching many departments it's a pain in the ass for your champion: need to convince a lot of people, etc, so it's unlikely they'll do it. Optimize for your champion pains and find a reduced version of your product that solves his pains.

3) Engage your champions in the product discovery, make them feel like if they're also defining the features (but don't build exactly what they asks for!!). Once they're excited about it start selling them the grand vision so they can sell it internally involving more departments.

I'd recommend you to do some consulting. I know it's counter-intuitive and something you don't want to do forever, but at the beginning of a B2B company it's extremely useful for 3 reasons:

1) It provides quick cash so it removes the stress of having to look for money too soon.

2) Direct customer feedback while working with them on day to day problems. At this point you really want to understand your customers pains so later you can solve them with technology.

3) Initial validation/traction for your product. At the beginning, customers will value your consulting way more than your product, but for every new customer, try to provide less consulting and cover the rest with your product. Check if your customers are equally happy.

Simplicity of features != UX Simplicity It's way more simple to tap on a button than to write complex sentences. We've studied this, when users have both options available (buttons and input text), 80% go for buttons.

Chatbots on Whatsapp are kind of hard from a UX point of view because the platform don't support rich elements like buttons or webviews (unlike Facebook messenger). I hope Whatsapp adds these kind of features soon, otherwise users will get frustrated when interacting with bots and never use it to talk to businesses again. And no, AI/NLP is not the answer to this because users are lazy and prefer to tap on buttons than to write 20 characters... I know this because I'm the creator of Botonic (a React-based conversational framework) and we've been building conversational apps on Whatsapp and other platforms for years. By the way, if anyone is interested in access to the Whatsapp Business API beta feel free to drop me a line at eric@botonic.io

Hubtype (http://hubtype.com) | Barcelona, Spain | Senior Full-Stack Engineer (First Employee) | Onsite | Full-time | Equity

Hubtype is a messaging/chatbots platform for developers and businesses. Banks, insurers, TVs and others use our products to attend their customers through messaging apps combining chatbots and human agents. We're growing fast and we're already profitable.

Now we're building the next generation of our framework to build bots and we're looking for talented generalists with entrepreneurial mindset. We use Python/Django, Node, Angular, Redis, PostgreSQL... If you know some machine learning (Tensorflow/Keras/Pytorch) or are motivated to learn it, that's a big plus. If you know about Docker and DevOps then you're our hero.

We're based in Barcelona (22@) and we're super flexible with schedules. Besides a competitive salary we'll offer equity.

Interested? Send me an email: eric@hubtype.com

This is extremely similar to BotSON (https://hubtype.github.io/botSON), but it looks a bit more complex (disclaimer: I'm one of the authors of BotSON). I encourage you to try it and reach me out with comments at eric at hubtype dot com. I'd love to hear some feedback from the HN community =)

The spanish government is trying to ban everything related to the referendum: physical urns, ballot papers, websites and apps, violating the most basic human rights. However, for each ban, 10 new websites/apps/bots will pop up. I created a chatbot so that people can vote at referendumvirtual.cat and it went viral in the last 48h. People will always find ways to excercise freedom of expression and decide its own future in peace.

Startup School was great, but it doesn't end here. I expect we all will get more value from this amazing network in the following months.

Best of luck for all the founders!

BTW, I'm one of the founders of Hubtype (https://hubtype.com), a messaging and chatbots solution for businesses. Our pitch here: https://www.startupschool.org/presentations/344

I agree with that. And I would add: over regulation "imposed" by the old unicorns this article mentions. They don't want new, disruptive players enter their well stablished monopolies / oligopolies. In EU they have lots of administration levels they can lobby and it's easy to increase barriers to entry. I can assure this is absolutely true in Spain.

The D-Wave computer is called a quantum computer because it uses some quantum properties when running a simulated annealing kind of algorithm (which is a well known classical algorithm so find sub-obtimal solutions to combinatorial problems, aka NP-Complete problems). But it is NOT a universal quantum computer in which one could run Shor's or Groover algorithms. In order to do that, you need to keep a quantum system with entangled qubits, something that is extremely difficult to achieve due to quantum decoherence, etc.

So, saying that "the new processor considers 2^1000 possibilities simultaneously" is basically a ton of bullsh. Even a real quantum computer cannot do that effectively.

Nevertheless, I think D-Wave is doing a great work and is definitely taking steps towards a real QC.

SEEKING WORK - Remote (Barcelona, Spain). Full-stack engineer (Python/Django, AngularJS). I'm currently working on my own projects (http://www.dareyoo.com and others), but I'm willing to take freelance projects (max 20h per week). I have a MS in Computer Science by UPC/UTD and 8 years of experience working with web technologies (both backend and frontend). I learn fast, I work fast, I have good communication skills, and I deliver good products!

linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/pub/eric-marcos/17/5bb/b10

email: ericmarcos.p@gmail.com

phone: +34 620135269

ericmarcos.p at gmail

I don't think whatsapp will change their protocol too much, as they'll break millions of clients installed in old phones.

The benefit for the company looks obvious to me: save money on call centre / community management. Deliver a service to millions of mobile users without requiring them to download your app (just adding a phone number to the agenda).

The benefit for the end-user: having a conversational interface with a system is probably the lowest barrier entry to that system for a human. Everybody knows how to chat using whatsapp, but not everybody knows (nor is willing to learn) how to use your "user-friendly" GUI.

I'm woking on a AI/NLP interface to connect enterprises to customers through whatsapp and other messaging apps.

I'm using Python/Django and Yowsup (a python lib that reverse engineered whatsapp's protocol) with PostgreSQL/Redis.

I wonder what you guys think about building a company around this idea. I have a prototype and a couple of customers, so the market is there, but I don't know if whatsapp could sue me or something.