I built a bot and I like it.

I built a bot and I like it. It found that spam and it trashed it. I built that bot just to try it. I hope my VCs don’t mind it. … It’s not how good SaaS-drones do this. 

Yup, I built that bot and I do like it. And “no” I don’t actually think my investors will mind it. The goal was to connect customer input directly to engineers without disrupting precious flow-state.

The bot intercepts unfiltered incoming requests before they hit Okareo’s slack channels. In less than 2 hours I had a working model that read, categorized, and summarized incoming messages. Using Okareo’s synthetic data and evaluation, I was able to quickly tune cases from demo requests and pricing to product questions and real-time status concerns.  Most importantly it pulled out the trolls and sales messages attempting to piggyback my communication channels. Within a few hours, I established a shield and an orchestrator that I can trust to respect my team. I believe we can become significantly more transparent as a result. My goal is to build a customer facing business error reporting tool for Okareo. 

Tomorrow I will attach intelligent responders and routers to a subset of the messages. Perhaps over the weekend I’ll start to open more public input paths and create even more transparency. Theoretically everyone in a startup is customer facing. Certainly I’m fortunate to work with a growing team that thrives on customer contact. But none of us want real-time interaction burdened with false messages and trolls. None of us want to loose flow-state. Best of all, the bot isn’t visible. It is part of the Okareo fabric.

What comes next? Well, there are a lot of problems that I can now solve with minimal cost and effort. The bot (really just a collection of prompts) is one of about a half dozen similar task-bots that are the beginning of a business-bot fabric at Okareo. I know they work because I put them through their paces with our evaluation tools. I’m also monitoring them for behavioral inconsistencies. When Okareo sees one, I get alerted - another bot. Meanwhile, I now have access to incremental business advantages that I can’t hire into and I can't reasonably pay a SaaS product for.

In the world of finance, business, and game theory incremental advantage wins every time. Do one unit of work and have three done de minimis-ly. I think this business fabric is an incremental advantage - and it tips my DIY scale, a topic for another day.