Summary: Learn more about Messenger marketing from Mikael Yang.<br> <br> Mentioned in the episode:<br> My ManyChat Review<br> ManyChat<br> MailChimp<br> Zapier <br> Facebook<br> WhatsApp<br> ICQ<br> Internet Relay Chat (IRC)<br> <br> Also, please find the whole transcript below.<br> <br> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPBO1OBJMR4<br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> Balint Pataki: Thank you and welcome to the podcast. Thank you that you made time again and accepted my invitation. Many of us are familiar with ManyChat and your work in ManyChat but can you just give us a little bit of background where are you coming from, how did you come to bots and the idea of establishing a company in this age.<br> <br> Mikael Yang: Sure. ManyChat is a messenger marketing platform and we help small and medium business to do marketing sales and the support through Facebook Messenger. Right now we power over a hundred thousand businesses in over a hundred countries around the world and we started this in 2015 when Telegram Messenger opened up their API and that was Telegram Messenger for those listeners who don’t know, it’s a messenger that is popular in other countries solves the same problems as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger and Telegram opened up their API in July 2015 and we've created a platform for broadcasting messages to your Telegram Bot subscribers because we saw an opportunity to give people an option to communicate one to many through this channel and before that the only thing that people were doing on messenger is basically communicating one on one or in small groups so this concept of broadcasting messages to many people through messenger was still not known to anyone. We've built a platform that made it really easy to do it and grew virally and a year later when Facebook opened up their API we just knew what had to be done on that platform and we've built ManyChat for Facebook Messenger and now we are powering messenger businesses helping them to do marketing through this channel. The only reason to switch over or to add messenger to your marketing mix is because you are getting 10x engagement than through channels like email.<br> <br> Balint Pataki: I think we will talk about the engagement a bit later. What was your first Bot experience? Was it via telegram, these so to say newsletters or grant communication or was that something that made you curious?<br> <br> Mikael Yang: My first Bot experiences were in the times of ICQ and IRC wherein there would be these artificial entities, these bots that would perform some kinds of actions inside of group chat. For example, they could count your karma or they could facilitate an exchange between the groups between the participants inside the group. Also, I remember there was a Bots on the public servers of Warcraft for computing the Defense of the Ancients’ rating. You could ask that Bot what's my raring, what's that person’s rating et cetera. That would be the first encounters of Bots and if we’re talking about specifically Bots on messengers that would be telegram.<br> <br> Balint Pataki: You started with telegram, did you already see that probably you'll drag it along other platforms as well and possibly bigger platforms or you were already excited that telegram is big enough to have a huge opportunity in this space.<br> <br> Mikael Yang: I think both things are correct. We saw how all the platforms would eventually need to open up their APIs because if you want businesses to be on your platform you got to give them tools to communicate with their customers and the fastest way to do that is to open up the APIs and give the third party developers an ability to create those tools for the businesses and to market and sell those. But still, we were already excited about telegram itself because the platform had over at that point was 60 70 million users. Right now it’s over 100 million users and it was already...
