Launch MVP

The mobile team appeared in March 2019. There were three: Product Designer, Backend and iOS developers. Our team took the name Godzillaz and started developing iOS mobile app.

ManyChat users use 3 types of communication

1. The business talks with the customer through automation (chat bots). Automation takes the burden off people and reduces business costs.

2. When automation fails, will connect a person from the business and continues to solve the customer problem by Live Chat.

3. Another way of communication is broadcast. The business sends a message to all customers or to a specific segment.

The idea was to deliver maximum value to our users. Their value is the happiness of their customer.

Learning from research

• 77% of customers refuse to buy if they cannot get clarifying information;

• 20% of customers drop off because of a long LiveChat response

• 37 sec is average waiting time for a response in LiveChat

If the automation does not work, then the business have to answer the customer as quickly as possible. Our goal was to give the opportunity stay in touch with customers using Live Chat at anytime and anywhere.

The good idea to start. Early research confirmed it. Almost half of the users of ManyChat wanted LiveChat in the mobile app as a basic feature. Also, during the quantitative research, we have collected a base of beta testers for iOS and Android apps.

The development process was divided into two milestones.

MVP and beta testing. Thanks for testing, we got a feature request to mute notifications. Live Chat agents which have several pages, want to reduce notification noise from some pages. In another case, the business owner doesn't answer to customers but want to observe. We added it.

Next milestone. Preparing to release the iOS app on the Conversation 2019. Conversation is the biggest event by ManyChat for marketers and businesses who use messenger marketing.

CEO ManyChat, Mike Yang gave a keynote with an update of the product and release the mobile app. For several days of the event, the app was installed by about a thousand users. And we have got a bunch of feedback, feature requests, and thanks from users personally.

After the launch, we focused on refining core features and generating hypotheses to help improve retention. Our mantra was:

Quick Action

I researched the analytics data and noticed:

• The users pause automation, add tags, and subscribe to sequences more often than other actions in the dialog with the customer;

• 2.9% of users pause automation but 10.7% increase the time of pause

• The pause automation was starting by tap the button in the customer profile, too. And then tapping again to increase the time of pause on 30 minutes (up to 24 hours).

I confirmed this issue in user interviews and got user story: As a user I want to simplify access to frequently actions. We have added a menu with the most frequent actions and designed every user flow.

As a result the average time to add a tag decrease in 2,6 times, the average time to set the necessary time of pause automation decrease in 6,2 times.

Snippets

One of our key metrics became user response time. This led to the idea of introducing Snippets – quick replies.

Snippets help businesses maintain a consistent tone of voice and respond to frequently asked questions faster and more accurately.

We also made sure that snippets could be easily created and shared among Live Chat agents within the same company.

User Acquisition Channel

Let me zoom out from low-level decisions for a moment. Once we had addressed the core user needs, a new question arose: how should we continue growing the app?

ManyChat had several key user segments:

• 60% SMBs – limited marketing knowledge, unwilling to spend money, low retention

• 30% E-commerce – marketing-savvy, eager to adopt tools, willing to invest for growth, with significantly better revenue retention

• 10% Other

ManyChat is a powerful tool but it requires time and expertise to fully leverage.

We formed a hypothesis: The mobile app could act as an acquisition channel for SMBs by offering a low entry barrier — and later guide them into the full product experience

We added login first, then registration, and eventually onboarding for new users.

We went through dozens of iterations to improve the product and eventually started generating revenue.