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 [email protected]
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.
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 =)