There’s no denying it, chatbots are a thing. If you conduct any kind of business online, you’ve looked at or thought about introducing a chatbox. And if you spend yourself any time online, you’ve no doubt encountered one.

But the problem with chatbots are, for the most part, they’re implemented poorly. You know, the experience, you ask a couple of questions, you fall slightly outside of that decision tree that somebody built and the chatbot doesn’t know the question and you’ve got to send an email and the entire experience makes you feel a little bit flat.

It’s a bit like if we go back to the early 90s and noughties with those phone bots and trying to get through to the bank and get to the right department and you find yourself screaming down the phone because they couldn’t understand you or your strange Australian accent.

But right now we’re living in a world where we all have a smartphone with some kind of voice bot in our pocket. We have a Google Home or an Alexa device in our kitchen, in our bedroom.

So we know this is where we want to go. We just want to make it a good experience. And that’s what we’re talking about in today’s episode. How to build great chatbots, what makes the difference and how to use them in your business, not just for customer service, but also for business and marketing.

This week, we are joined by Sean Melis, the Co-Founder of bot • hello.

We’re a team of dreamers, creatives, and nerds who are still shocked that we build chatbots for a living.

We actively discuss and embrace the exponential change society is going through as a result of technological innovation; and want to do everything we can to ensure our clients are taking full advantage of it—particularly in conversational AI. It’s an incredibly exciting space to work in, and we’re genuinely passionate about discovering new ways in which our clients can leverage and maximise the opportunity of engaging with these technologies early.

We also get a real kick out of watching our friends, family, and clients smile whilst using our chatbots. So we’ve made it our mission to help brands bring joy and personalisation to their customer interactions.

Your strategic partner, from design to deployment—and beyond. We equip businesses with the tools they need to survive in a world of exponential change. We are an innovation strategy company that has the ability to deliver solutions in-house and at scale. We don’t just tell you the solution to your problem, we build it and implement it for you.

Follow their journey on Facebook, Linkedin, & Instagram.

So I have a theory about ‘links in the comments’ – I don’t believe that Linkedin directly reduces the reach because of a link in the post, even though it is apparent that the reach is reduced. My theory is that the reduced reach is the collateral impact of people clicking on the link rather than clicking on a reaction. When those people come back to LinkedIn after reading your article, they often don’t see the original post or they are ‘done’ and so move on. So by adding the links in the comments, all we’re doing is shuffling the interactions between ‘reactions’ and ‘clicks’. The problem we face is that Linkedin does not want to credit driving traffic off-platform. So external link clicks are not earning positive interaction credits that expand the reach. So because people tend to either click or react, with only the later increasing reach, we’ve tricked ourselves into falsely blaming the existence of a link to the existence of a link, to the reduced reach, when it is the leaking of the positive engagement signals through clicks.

In Nuclear Physics, the minimum amount of physical material needed to create a self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction is known as critical mass. The idea is that in a complex system, moving the honour threshold can suddenly unleash powerful self-sustaining change. In my experience, this is the same thing with Startup companies.

Enter a market too early, no matter how strong the Founding team, and you can be stuck waiting for days, months, years for a time that never comes and too late and you’re fighting an uphill battle against incumbents with the greatest scale.

In Startups, market timing is everything. In this podcast, I’m chatting with James Fuller, the founder of Hnry and I think James has timed his market entry perfectly. Hnry is a bookkeeping and accounting service solution that appeals to solopreneurs, the freelancers, the consultants who are working for themselves, I see this market rapidly expanding at the moment and I can see the tax system and the obligation that’s being put on these people increasing all the time.

Way back in 2016, whilst working as independent contractors, we realised that far too much of our time was spent reconciling transactions, using online calculator apps and making manual payments. We weren’t ‘running a small business’ – so why were we being treated as though we were? We had an accountant and accounting software, but that still required us to have to do a load of work ourselves! We decided to create a service that brought everything into one place, making self-employment as simple as having a permanent or salary job somewhere.

During 2017 we designed the Hnry service, working with tax experts from Big 4 accountancy firms (nice suits), legal experts from the top law firms (even nicer suits), and technology experts from some of New Zealand’s funkiest startups (nice beards/Star Wars t-shirts). We collaborated with government agencies to refine our service, and soon became an accredited tax agent of IRD and ACC. We ran trials with a handful of customers, adapting our service and learning what they needed. Towards the end of 2017, we were accepted into KiwiBank FinTech Accelerator, an amazing 3-month programme designed to help refine and scale NZ technology startups.

In early 2018, we finished our trial period, and released Hnry to the New Zealand market. We started scaling very rapidly, bringing on customers at a fast pace. To help us support this scale, we raised funding through investment from the Banking and Financial Services industry, as well as from Angel Investors and private individuals. This allowed us to bring on a great team of experts, to help support our rapidly expanding customer base.

Follow their journey on Twitter and Facebook.

If you’re going to build a startup, and you want it to be successful, you need to solve a problem. And if you’re solving a problem, you’re solving it for a person, and what better person to solve a problem for than yourself. So many great Startups start by solving problems for the founder and this is exactly what Lachlan Palmer is doing with Kashy. 

Lachlan saw a problem in the mechanic market, servicing cars and he went about fixing that problem for himself, and now he’s rolling it out to his mechanic friends.

Kashy was founded in March 2018 by Lachlan Palmer, as a fresh take on an old concept where apprentice mechanics would often do work for family and friends as a way to make ends meet.

After dropping out of school, Lachlan followed his love and passion for cars into a job as an apprentice mechanic earning a mere $300 a week. With few family and friends having a car or needing work done he didn’t have the same access to extra jobs as his fellow mechanics. This was when the first idea of Kashy came to fruition.

After working in the industry for 4.5 years and becoming a fully qualified mechanic Lachlan became disillusioned by the way the current system works. In his experience, he found the current operation of the industry to be a rip off for both the customers and mechanics alike  – with vehicle owners paying exorbitant prices for services, while the mechanics were paid as little as a tenth of what the dealers charge per hour.

Since then he has put his effort into building Kashy, a business that shines a light on the current industry issues and fixes them by creating an ethical and fair trade for all.

Kashy coupon code: FRACTAL

So we’ve all seen positioning map in a standard Startup pitch, you know the ones where every company is to the top right-hand corner of the map. So a positioning map is a diagram drawn to illustrate the customers perception of the business offering based on price or quality of some other benefits, and how the perception compares against the competitors. In today’s episode, I’m going to dive into my ideas around positioning maps, and how you can use them with your Startup.

Two-sided marketplaces, one of the hardest types of startup businesses to get going. But this week, we’re speaking to Deb Morrison, the founder of PetCloud, who’s actually made a success, and we’ll cover the different ways she’s been able to build a two-sided marketplace to the scale she has today.

If you listen right to the end of the episode you’ll even hear the point I decide to become a pet sitting on her platform 😉

PetCloud is an Australian owned and run company guided by experts and industry leaders from the Animal Welfare, Pet & Vet, and IT industries.

Founded in August of 2014 and headquartered in Brisbane, PetCloud is a trusted community for Pet Owners to Search, Connect, and easily Book verified & insured Pet Care Services across Australia — from any internet-connected device.

It’s a safe, convenient and affordable way to make sure your best friend is in a loving home while you’re away.

When you book with PetCloud, you are helping to change the lives of pets and people everywhere.

PetCloud is part-owned by RSPCA Queensland, and the RSPCA’s National Call Centre provides us with Customer Support which we pay them for which helps fund their rescue work.

Our management team has over 50 years of experience running Business Operations. Our IT team has over a decade of experience creating online solutions for some of the most recognised brands in the travel, defence, and education industries.

PetCloud is based on a sharing economy model, & is the easiest way for animal lovers who want to monetise their backyard, car, and services and showcase it online to busy Pet Owners searching for in-home pet care services.

Follow her journey on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, & Facebook.

We all know the frustration of watching streaming videos when they start to buffer.

It might just be a TV show, but it could be a live sporting event or it could be the new release of Game of Thrones. 

Whatever it is, that buffering experience is crazy. 

You absolutely hate it. But you as a user who hates it, but the person who’s streaming the video, the person responsible for pushing that content out, that’s their job. And that’s the problem that the team at Teltoo are trying to solve. 

They’re layering a peer-to-peer network over the top of the CDN’s to deliver an even better experience by utilizing all the viewers’ browsers to help deliver that content to you. 

Follow their journey on LinkedIn & Twitter.

Teltoo is a decentralized video delivery technology that works alongside with Content Delivery Networks like Akamai or Level3, increasing the overall bandwidth capacity for live streams.

Teltoo is an HTML5 technology that integrates into the video player of our potential customers (streaming platforms, broadcasters, telcos, cable operators) and from there connects with our main server that is the brains behind the technology. This server, monitors and tracks the network identifying the best available sources to deliver the pieces of video content that viewers are requesting at every moment. The beauty of the technology is that not only finds those pieces of video content from offloaded CDN nodes but involves viewers devices’ themselves to increase the number of potential sources in order to kill the most hated enemy of video streamers: buffering

One of the surest ways to launch a successful startup is to define an entirely new market category, one that is easily understood and valued.

By doing this, you instantly become the market leader and the first mover.This is precisely what Liam Norris and the lads at Ant-Ordinary are doing by re-framing skiing safety helmets as fashion items.

Anti Ordinary is founded on the principle that helmets shouldn’t be a chore to wear anymore.  We looked out on the slopes and realised people didn’t like wearing helmets, from pros to punters alike.

Who could really blame them? Hard, unconforming chunks of foam that can bounce around, fit poorly and ultimately ruin the experience on the slopes.

We saw that most people who weren’t wearing a helmet (and even many who did) wore beanies. Instead of making a helmet slightly more comfortable, we decided to make a safe beanie.

And that’s exactly what we’ve done. After over 2 years of R&D, we’ve created the design that allows us to make a device that is not only safe but truly conforming and comfortable.

After our successful Kickstarter (raising over $200K AUD), we’re excited to be launching into the market in the 2019/2020 Northern Hemisphere snow season.

Follow their journey on Facebook, Twitter, & Instagram.

Also, check out their unconventional pitch here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65vGDvlsgaM

And their promotional video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=5&v=QFEIyETHYJE

Crowdfunding is no longer a new idea, but the number of successful crowdfunding campaigns is still relatively small, and that’d because regardless of the method fundraising for a Startup is still a hugely difficult exercise.

On today’s podcast, we speak with Anne-Marie Walton, who at the time of our chat is a little over halfway through her crowdfunding campaign for your side-hustle and passion business – KidsWantu.

Anne-Marie’s has over 25 years’ experience in corporate, small business and community work.

A Mum on a mission, Anne-Marie Walton has harnessed today’s technology to transform the lives of parents and carers to get quality, memorable face-to-face fun with their kids, away from a screen.

As a sole founder, self-funded, 55-year-old, non-technical women living outside of a capital city, Anne-Marie is a working example of how to take an idea and scale it to the world.

Please checkout the Crowdfunding campaign here: https://www.pozible.com/profile/anne-marie-walton

If you’re not able to pledge, please do share something on Social Media to help support, if you’re listening to my podcast then you know how important marketing is, and that even a ‘like’ on this post adds a little momentum towards the goal.

Follow her journey on Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook & Instagram.

We’ve all experienced the frustration of being on the phone to a support company because our internet, TV or PC is not working and the audio communication channel is just not working. 

Support is telling you to check the warning lights and clear the drum, yet you can’t even find the drum.

It was this frustration that drove Rama to found Blitzz. Blitzz fundamentally transform how customer service and field service teams operate by enriching them with incredibly powerful and intuitive visual and collaborative tools, it’s like what screen sharing has done for software support, but now for physical equipment. 

Blitzz fundamentally transform how customer service and field service teams operate by enriching them with incredibly powerful and intuitive visual and collaborative tools. Blitzz provide them with a smart (AI poBlitzzred), interactive AR poBlitzzred workflow automation platform to solve customer support issues 10X faster while slashing support overhead. Blitzz improve KPIs such as first time fix it rate, tech productivity & utilization & customer satisfaction apart from remote training and remote L3 to L1 support. Blitzz even empoBlitzzr the customer to reach out to the field tech and access his/her queries if needed facilitating a high touch customer-centric, personalized support. Blitzz enable call centre agents and field agents to cross-sell and upsell as Blitzzll. Blitzzlcome to the future of interactive, video & AR-based, predictive customer & field service workflows.

Check out the Blitzz Explainer Video.