New week. New team. Meet Team Jingle
Greg, Luke and Kevin are the founders of Jingle. Greg loves working on marketing and sales strategies and Luke is responsible for operations and management. Together with their ‘techie’ Kevin they make a great team which drives to excel and have fun at the same time.
Please give us a short description of your Chabot:
Jingle is a personal shopping assistant that helps you find local products in your proximity. Our service helps customers find specific products in their area, and furthermore include helpful information such as price and the availability in store. Thereby, we support customers as well as local retailers – we do not only find the concrete product but also bring customers back into local stores.
Why should someone use your Chatbot / What is the problem that you are solving?
The particular problems we are facing can be split into a customer and retailer part.
The customers on the one hand tackle the problem of not finding wanted products in their proximity and thereby often transitioning to online shops. Just think of the last time you wanted to buy something really fast. Did you know exactly which store to go to? Probably not, right?
On the other hand, retailers try to get more customers into their physical shops but often fail at effective marketing – especially in the era of the internet. Our service solves the customer related problem by providing all the needed information at one place and thereby simultaneously solving the retailers’ problem by bringing customers back into local stores.
How did you guys meet?
Greg and Luke met at the university where they shared similar interests – especially entrepreneurship. Having formulated the business model over the course of last year, we decided that it was time to find the perfect technical addition to the team. After searching for quite some time, Kevin our new Co-Founder and CTO was recommended to us through our network. And we are super happy that he joined us on our path to promote local retailers.
Why did you choose Elevate?
After a lot of brainstorming, research and validation processes we decided to solely focus on a chatbot as we love the idea of a conversational interface – the ultimate interface. We heard about Elevate being THE go-to accelerator program specialized on building exactly that. The timing could not have been better for us and after the first initial meetings, we knew Elevate was the right fit! We are very happy and proud to be part of the bot family here.
What are your expectations for the program?
Together with the chatbot gurus from Elevate we want to finish developing our MVP until the end of the program while also diving further into the chatbot community.
In the long run, of course, our goal is to create a bot that users love and use frequently!
When and how was your first experience with a Chatbot?
It was definitely NOT love at first sight. The chatbot hype in Vienna started about a year and a half ago. I was working for a start-up back then and religiously read the Buzzfeed news every evening.
One particular night I saw a post about a well-known American news company that had just deployed a bot. The bot would send me tailored news every day and claimed to learn about my interests with time. I HAD to try it. Plot twist – I absolutely hated it. It was completely unclear to me how such a large company could release such nonsense, believing they where actually creating something valuable. So my first impression – not good.
However, this experience lead to lots of research on NLP and AI technology. By the day my interest in chatbots started to grow up to the point where I got hooked and wanted to build my own.
What would you recommend to applicants interested in ELEVATE batch #2?
If you are a early stage start-up and you are looking forward to building a chatbot– Elevate is definitely the right program for you. It’s a great team, everyone is highly motivated, and it’s fun – exactly how it should be. Don’t hesitate to apply and find out yourself!
Do you have any advice for peers interested in building a Chatbot?
It should work. It should be easy to understand. And it should be fun – if you are going to build a chatbot without a character/personality, you are probably better off without a conversational interface.
Want to know more about Team Jingle? Visit them on Facebook or check out their homepage!
