Two weeks after we launched Poncho at F8
“When I look back three months from today, I will probably be proud of some experiments that I did right and laugh about the mistakes that I made. That’s just how we bots learn.”
Two weeks ago at F8, we launched the Poncho service on Facebook Messenger. The entire Poncho team has been heads down since then, improving the stability of the infrastructure and fixing bugs. Now that we finally get to catch our breath a tiiiiiiny bit, I’d like to share some of our learnings with you.
Last two weeks were filled with ups and downs, but there was never a dull moment. Except for metrics. So let’s get that out of the way first.
This is what our daily engagement looked like in the past two weeks. After the initial spike, which happened on the second day of launch, the engagement dropped as is typical. Since then, it’s started increasing as the team rolls out more improvements. The product we launched is a beta. And the team is iterating on it hourly — improving the language matching, conversation flows and the AI. We are learning fast and furiously what interactions work for bots. What’s awesome is that the bot is server based — so unlike an app, hourly improvements are the name of the game. The chart shows that.
On average, we’re seeing sessions last as long as 3–5 minutes. A session starts when someone texts Poncho or opens one of their push notifications. We base sessions on a period of activities, and start a new session if the user hasn’t messaged Poncho for a little while.
It’s been great seeing how people interact with Poncho. We learned that our users love stickers: 30% of daily conversations involved stickers. The most popular one? The Facebook Like.
We did a little “hack” to make sure people wouldn’t be overwhelmed by getting multiple push notifications all at once. When we send our morning weather push notification, we first send a summary:
Once people open the Messenger app via the push notification, we then send two following messages that have both the written forecast and a GIF.
The Poncho on Messenger experience is enhanced also by his love of typing indicator. It feels like you are having an actual conversation with him.
Try asking Poncho “Who will win the election?”
People also wanted to “TALK” to Poncho. We saw this especially with users from abroad — we ended up receiving twice as much traffic from outside the US, which came as a bit of a surprise.
Poncho has received hundreds of audio clips since launch. As a long time WeChat user, I often see people use WeChat as a walkie talkie. So seeing that interaction with Poncho doesn’t surprise me at all. Below is my favorite clip (used with permission):
Through it all, we’re grateful that our users have continued to show an amazing amount of love for Poncho.
As one of the very few companies that launched on Facebook Messenger, we’ve learned a lot in the past two weeks. We feel very fortunate and excited to be part of this platform shift at a very early stage. And the hard work just started.
A special THANK YOU to Stephanie Chan, Greg Leuch , Christian Rocha, Sam Mandel, John Borthwick and Alex Baldwin for proofreading, giving feedback and GIFing for my first medium post. And last but not the least, kudos to my entire Poncho team! You guys are the quirkiest and bestest and I can’t imagine Poncho’s life without you.
