We built the world's first conversational marketing platform... and now anyone can build bots or integrations for sales or marketing on it. Ask us anything.
Steve Webel, engineer, and Emily Mias, product manager will be available to talk Drift's open platform.
Drift makes it easier for people to buy from your business through real-time one-on-one conversations. When you connect Drift's conversational marketing platform to your website, you will generate more qualified leads using our bots, and book more meetings for your sales team.
Daniel J. Murphy says:
This AMA will end Jan 18, 2018 11AM EST
Comments are locked
Conversation (44)
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Hi Emily and Daniel, a question about how you all move fast. My understanding is that your product teams have a good deal of ownership as well as accoutability. In addition to being close to the customer and having small, cross-functional teams, you all organize teams around outcomes not output, yes? Biz outcomes (retention #s?, feature adoption #s?...?) & customer outcomes (NPS?), not just output (# of commits...), yes? What kinds of outcomes do you all organize around? Everyone on the team, not just the lead engineer and product manager, are focused on those outcomes and numbers? Everyone on the team is involved to some degree in some part of the discovery, ideation processes? You like working this way over the other ways you've worked in the past? Thanks!
Do you have non-public examples of API apps? What kinds of apps are people building? (plug for mine github.com/twentworth12/salesforce-lookup)
We've seen three general styles of integrations.
I've been playing with the new APIs for a couple weeks and everything is working smashingly. Well done! Would love to hear more about upcoming functionality.
two biggest pieces of feedback right now would be:
1) Give access to agents user profile as well or at least a watered down version. Currently, we can only retrieve their ID from a convo and have no context to give that agent even a name. This is helpful to know which agent was involved in the chat when sending the data to a 3rd party service.
2) Would love to give the Bot an identity. Currently, when posting a message it only just says 'Bot' with a generic robot icon. If several bots are enabled on a team could be pretty hard to keep straight for the agent and end-user.
Ya'll have done a killer job getting this up and going so quickly. Keep trucking.
Hey Tristan! This is great feedback- thanks for this. I'm scribbling some notes down. :) Keep the feedback coming. Hope you're in the slack workspace!
What influenced you to create something like this?
We knew that we needed to open Drift up as an Open Conversational platform. There’s so much power behind what we’re doing - connecting businesses to other businesses in a more human way. And marketers and sales people are using so many different tools out there to make their business run, that we have to let them plug all of those things into Drift.
I remember you guys buying the domain Drift.com recently. Congrats!
What advice would you give to someone who would want to create something similar?
I'd say keep your customers at the front of your mind at all times. It really guided us when putting together the Drift Developer Platform. We remembered we weren't just building this for developers, but for the developers being asked to build integrations to other platforms by their marketing team. It's a totally different context. And it's just so important to have people using the platform early and giving feedback on documentation.
Do you have any marketing strategies for Drift?
I can answer that one. We're focused on building a strong brand, being customer-centric so we can build quickly based on feedback and making marketing about conversations, rather than data points, once again.
Are you funded? Profitable?
Do you keep improving your services? How?
Drift ships every day. We're constantly making improvements and changes based on customer feedback. And we do one big release every month that makes Drift that much more useful to our customers, like with this release :)
Have you worked with any brands? How was it?
We worked with quite a few companies for this release, like NomNom, Frame.ai, and SupportHero. HelpDocs also built an integration within two days of us launching the dev platform.
What level of popularity would you like to reach with this platform?
How did you meet the members of your team? How do you overcome disagreements?
Two of our principles at Drift are "biase for action" and "to be humble." Keeping these in mind during disagreement is extremely helpful! It allows us to check our egos at the door, focus on the problem, and get a solution out the door. This way we keep moving quickly and allow our customers to decide if our solution was correct.
Which part of this project are you most proud of?
I'd have to say how easy it is to submit an app and get it approved in our marketplace. The community we've seen come out of building and submitting new apps is really incredible, too.
Can you explain more how did you go about building a community in the first place? Thanks in advance.
How will you handle the problems in running Drift if they come up?
We have Customer Advocates on every team that escalates and prioritizes issue, which we try to fix at rapid-fire. Part of being so customer-focused is not letting a big backlog of issues queue up, so we always make them a priority.
Who are your main competitors in the market?
Can you explain how Drift works a bit more?
Sure thing! Drift is the new way businesses buy from businesses. We connect people who want to buy to people who can sell you the thing you want to buy. Nothing's worse than going to a site and having to find the "Contact Us" area or having to fill out a form. By having chat on your site, you're able to connect to the business faster. We also do some awesome stuff with email that helps businesses be more respectful when sending emails out to potential buyers - we hate spam, and want to make the world a less spammy place. :) Let me know if you have any other questions on specifics!
Do you think that companies realize the potential of this marketing strategy?
Where do you see your platform in the future?
I definitely see us adding a public marketplace into the mix- right now all of our apps are available once you're logged into Drift. It will be awesome when you can browse through all the apps without even logging in. We also have some aggressive goals on how many apps we want in that marketplace before the end of this year. :) More APIs and flexibility on what you can build will be coming soon, too!
What tips would you give to someone who wants to create a bot on your platform?
We've added a ton of documentation to dev.drift.com that outlines how to get started. We also had some customers write some stuff for us as well! I'd say read up and just dive in. :) blog.bubbleiq.com/building-a-drift-app-part-1/
What kind of bots can I create?
How long did it take to create Drift? Was it hard?
Did you have any previous jobs related to this one?
I was a Product Manager at a few different companies before joining Drift. Drift's definitely the most customer-focused company I've ever seen, though. Every decision we make is entirely based on customer value.
What did you study? Was it related to your current work?
I studied English in college, with a focus on technical writing and IT. It definitely made me a better communicator, and everything's related to that :)