For this edition, we caught up with Ish Jindal (@jindalish), co-founder of TARS Chatbots. TARS is one of the most popular chatbot builders in the world with 9,000+ bot creators and 15,000 chatbots created using their platform. At 99signals, we designed our very own content marketing chatbot a few months back using TARS.

We’d like to thank Ish for taking the time out of his busy schedule to answer our questions.

Q: Can you share your journey so far? What led a graduate in civil engineering towards conversational interfaces and bots?

Yes, you are right – I graduated in Civil Engineering but have never really worked in that domain. I have always been excited about building a product and then creating business around it. I started off working on side projects since I was in freshman year and I believe that is what led to this journey.

After graduation, I worked for a year in consulting firm, quit that to work on an experiential travel startup called Padhaaro. Back at Padhaaro, we were essentially connecting inbound travellers with locals who were offering tours and experiences. What we saw was these people were interacting a lot on WhatsApp asking questions about what to do in the city, what to buy etc. which felt trivial since every traveller was asking the same set of questions. And we wanted to build something which could automate these conversations.

It started from there and then with Tars, we have been able to democratise this experience of automated conversations between businesses and users to a large customer base now. Specifically automating structures conversations thereby replacing forms.

So yes, this is a bit about the journey. Tough to put it together in a few lines.

Q: What kind of problems does TARS solve for businesses?

Our customers use chatbots to solve a variety of different business problems from lead generation and qualification to booking meetings/appointments to customer support automation and a lot more. But we have found that the most popular use case of our chatbots is by far lead generation. When you replace a simple lead generation form with a chatbot, conversion rates go up significantly (3x-4x).

This phenomenon is a validation of our initial vision with the product. When we started Tars, we wanted to solve the problem of increasingly arduous web forms. For the last few months, we have been focusing on a  specific subset of this use case: AdWords Landing pages.

A few of our customers have been using chatbots as landing pages for their PPC/SEM campaigns, and have been seeing phenomenal results (60% drop in cost per lead, 3x conversion rates). We think this segment is truly promising and can add real value to businesses the world over.

Here is a real testament of how the customer experience changes with conversations rather than clicks:

Q: It’s a common notion that chatbots are mainly used for customer facing experiences like navigation, customer support and more. Can bots be used for automating internal aspects of a business?

Absolutely. One of our customers, Pazmental, has effectively used chatbots to structure their internal data. The company provides at-home nursing and hospice services for senior citizens. Before using Tars, their caregivers would manually write their observations about each patient in a notebook and then enter their observations into a computer at the Pazmental offices. The system was a mess. It was time consuming, and since the data was unstructured, the company found it difficult to track and report specific patient health metrics.

To solve this problem they created a chatbot, which asks caregivers a structured set of questions they can answer on their phones at the end of each patient visit. The data is automatically entered into Pazmental’s systems on the backend, and since caregivers provide their observations in a structured manner Pazmental can track patient health and provide weekly insights to the patient’s family.

Q: There are several case studies listed on the TARS blog. What has been the most interesting case study till date?

Sure. Let me share something very recent.

Last week we published a case study about FastCashStrips (FCS), a US-based company which buys and resells extra glucose-testing strips from diabetes patients. Other than the fact that I learned about a new industry, I found the usage of chatbots in that case to be interesting.

Usually when talking about software, there is a tendency to think in terms of discrete use cases. A chatbot is either a lead generation chatbot or a customer support chatbot. FCS, however, broke through this paradigm. They recognised that different aspects of a business often feed into one another.

In this case, they found that individuals were far less likely to appraise their testing strips when they did not have full information about the process. As a result, instead of completing transactions they would send a contact request. The company had a traditional FAQ page but let’s be real, who actually reads those.

To solve the problem, FCS created a chatbot that served as both a lead generation tool and an FAQ page. Prospects who are ready to complete a transaction are redirected directly to the page where they can get a quote for their strips, while uncertain prospects can ask the bot a question, before being redirected to the quote page. The results have been amazing – conversion rate has gone up 2x from 7% to 13.8%. 

Prospects who interact with the bot are twice as likely to complete a transaction than their non-conversational counterparts.

Q: TARS is already changing the way businesses function. Where do you see TARS five years from now?

Following up from my answer to the first question, we really think that our chatbots have great potential in the realm of PPC/SEM campaigns.

We have been running experiments with a few digital agencies and we have been seeing consistent 2-3x increases in conversion rate. We truly believe that conversations will be the future of PPC/SEM campaigns and we want to be a part of it.

Q: It’s a popular phrase that ‘AI is the future of digital marketing.’ Can you share your views on the subject?

Look there is no denying that AI will be a huge part of the way businesses interact with prospective customers. The technology has great potential and with companies like Google leading the charge, it is inevitable that AI will be a big part of marketing in the future. That being said, I would caution businesses against thinking of AI as the ultimate solution to all problems.

In the context of chabots for example, I believe that the true value lies not in the AI which underlies the software but the UI of the software. Think back to DoNotPay, the conversational agent which helped squash over 175,000 traffic tickets for aggrieved citizens in the US and UK. When most in the media spoke about it, they billed it as a complex AI lawyer system that would argue with the government on behalf of aggrieved citizens.

In reality, however, the bot asked for the same information that would have otherwise been filled into a boring government form, in a more conversational interface. No AI involved, just some UI magic.

Q: TARS is offering the standard monthly plan at $99 per month. Is this sufficient for new business owners and agencies to automate various aspects of their business? 

It really depends on how many conversations you expect your bot to have.

If you are an SME who is just starting out and gets a handful of leads everyday, then the standard plan will work just fine for you.

If you are an agency with multiple clients or a bigger company however, we would highly recommend a higher plan, purely for the API integration feature. This feature will let you integrate your bot with your preferred software tools and help you build really dynamic and powerful conversations.

Q: What new products and features can we expect from TARS in the near future?

The very next thing we will be working on is adding more integrations with External Apps. Both to send the conversation data collected from the bots, and to fetch data from these apps, and use it in the Bot conversation.

As a company, we are completely focused on the idea of Automated Conversations. We believe that there are tons of innovative things can be done in this space. Therefore, we envision the application of ML and AI to build features that can make the conversation more effective towards the goal of the Automated Conversation.

Q: TARS took customer engagement to the next level with the introduction of bots that can speak with different accents. Do you really believe that AI can consume all of human consciousness and eliminate human effort in future?

No. Everyone has an opinion on this topic, and my opinion is on the optimistic side.

I think AI will definitely take over a lot of human effort and free us to do something else. I’m not sure about what that something else would look like though. But I believe it will be something better. 

Q: If you could only give one incredibly valuable advice to upcoming business owners, what would it be?

Be patient and trust the process. Things take time to materialise.

To learn more about TARS and to build your own chatbots, visit their website.

If you liked this interview, please share it on Twitter using the link below or share on other social channels using the social share bar on the left. 

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Hello there, inbound marketers! Welcome to the very first interview in the 99signals Interview Series. This interview series will feature stories and business advice from successful bloggers, marketers, and entrepreneurs.

For this interview, we had the privilege of inviting Pardeep Goyal, founder of CashOverflow.

Pardeep is a self-confessed finance geek, content marketing expert, and a growth consultant for early-stage startups. He worked with an IT company for 7 years as the Tech lead before quitting to co-found two startups – SchoolGennie and PocketScience.

After not finding success with his first two startups, he founded CashOverflow in May 2015 to help people generate passive income and achieve financial freedom.

Since its launch in May 2015, CashOverflow has grown organically and currently has a traffic of 200,000 visitors per month.

A big thanks to Pardeep for taking the time to answer our questions.

Tell us a bit about your blog, CashOverflow.

CashOverflow is a personal finance blog focused on two things — financial independence & financial freedom. These two terms may sound similar, but there is a subtle difference between both.

Financial independence is having income from multiple sources so that you don’t depend on your salary. First you have to come out of the slavery of 9-to-5 job.   

Financial freedom is about building enough wealth so that you no longer stress about money and care about things in life that are beyond money.

We don’t talk about having 5 crores in your bank and retire rich. We talk about enjoying your life today when you are young and passionate. You can enjoy rich life even with your regular income.

With that focus, CashOverflow provides practical insights on saving money, investing money in Indian stocks, and earning passive money.

My vision is to help people in establishing a second source of income — and then hold their hands to manage their money & business whether they are earning through Freelancing, Consulting, Blogging or Startup.

If you land on my website, you will either learn something to save money or earn passive income.

Can you share the story behind CashOverflow? How did it all start?

Though I failed at my initial startup attempts, it was clear to me that I had to start an online business given my love for entrepreneurship and the freedom it would entail.

To figure out what I really wanted to start, I did the following exercise:

Step 1: Wrote down my ideas.

Step 2: Wrote down my primary & secondary side skills.

Step 3: Wrote down my core interests including the areas that I am passionate about.

Step 4: Recalled when I helped someone the last time and made him happy.

Post this exercise, I realized that personal finance is one area I was really passionate about. From financial news, financial products, using credit cards to save money, money saving hacks on shopping & travel, investment related philosophies, income tax laws, and so forth.

This combined with my growing love for content marketing made CashOverflow a no brainer for me.

That’s how I started CashOverflow in May, 2015 as a hobby project and worked on it part time almost for a year. I slowly got a hang of it and started loving it but I was not making any money from CashOverflow.

I am working full time on CashOverflow from September 2016.

I published my annual income report for my readers and will keep publishing income report every year.

So, without worrying about money and failure, I went ahead to build CashOverflow as my full time business.

What is your content creation process? And how do you generate traffic to your site?

My content creation process involves a short-term and a long-term strategy.

The short-term strategy is focused on creating viral content and the long-term strategy involves improving SEO of existing articles to increase search traffic to the blog.

I’ve always focused on quality rather than quantity. I published only 18 articles in the first year. But people loved whatever I published.

The short-term strategy became successful as the articles I wrote became viral and brought in the necessary traffic to CashOverflow.

Similarly, for the long-term strategy, I performed keyword research and made a list of topics that people were searching for and wrote content on the same.

But, content creation alone doesn’t help in bringing your targeted traffic, no matter how good your content is. Therefore, once I published the content on CashOverflow the next task was Content Distribution which again involved two strategies.

• Link building
• Article Promotion

So, for quality link building, I reached out to hundreds of people in my industry including different media publications and niche websites.

Through this strategy, I was able to publish 100s of articles (guest posting) on these platforms and they gave backlinks to my website. Some of the big names are:

• Entrepreneur.com
• Huffington Post
• YourStory
• Inc42

CashOverflow’s authority increased because the quality of these publications/websites was very high and my content started to rank well in the search results.

That’s how I grew my traffic further.

Along with link building, whenever I published a new article on CashOverflow, I reached out to people on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Email to promote the same extensively.

Lastly, I measured my website’s traffic consistently via Google Analytics and improved my content strategy to optimise for SEO traffic.

I relied heavily on SEO because that was a natural fit to what I was doing on CashOverflow.

What is the biggest roadblock you’ve faced in your blogging career?

I started premium newsletters (weekly insightful email) to help 1000 people in starting & growing an online business. The biggest challenge is making them committed to their own work. People expect the results (money) as soon as they start a website or blog.

To make them committed, I started giving them assignments and asked to fill up their progress in Google form. I removed the members from the Newsletters when they failed to submit their progress continuously for two months.

I have shared the details in this article — My Experience & Learnings of Running paid Email Newsletters for 9 Months (Highly recommended for anyone who is running a content-based online business.)

It worked both ways, I lost a few really good members who could not fill up the forms because of some personal issues, and some who thanked me for pushing them to jump the wall every month.

I stopped enrolling new members into premium newsletters because now I have filtered out a passionate and committed group of about 250 members out of more than 500 people who joined till date. I will keep working with them in the future.

Most people start blogging because they think it’s an easy platform to earn passive income. But only a few of them end up doing this with passion.  What are your thoughts on blogging for money vs blogging for passion?

The first thing is that you should start blogging to learn content marketing. Money will come when you start getting organic traffic on your website.

The second thing is that you should run your blog like a business.

Below are 5 building blocks of any business and I applied the same on my blog.

• A profitable Idea
• Capital (Money from your own pocket or from an investor)
• A Team (You can not execute everything yourself)
• A product that can solve at least one problem of your customer
• Customer who are willing to pay for your product or service

I was able to understand the common pitfalls of business during my failed attempt of startups. I got success on my blogging business by applying the same knowledge.

I suggest new comers to try out things and grow by doing mistakes. You don’t have to worry about technical things because WordPress blogs are very easy to maintain.  

What’s your plan for 2018 and beyond?

I want to run a liberal digital marketing agency (we picked a name UnMarketing Media) where we will keep everything transparent with the team and clients. We will pick only those clients who believe in publishing quality content.

We will not provide traditional marketing services that is focused on hard selling products but we will provide unmarketing services that engage your customers with your content.

The client will be able to see our costs & resources that are going into the project and our team will be able to see the the value distribution in the team. It sounds like Euphoria and it’s difficult to execute without a passionate & honest team. We will go as we find the right people and grow very slowly in the process.   

What’s your favorite marketing book? Can you name a few marketing blogs that helped you in your blogging journey?

I have read a lot of books & blogs on marketing. I published a list of my favorite marketing books on StartupKarma.

I loved Traction and Hooked for startup marketing. Everyone should read a couple of books on human psychology to get better at marketing. Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, is a must to read book.

My favorite blog list keeps on changing as I learn & grow. In the starting days of my blogging I learned a lot from Buffer, Groove and OkDork blogs.

I recommend Banklinko for SEO and CopyHackers for content writing.

These days, I don’t read blogs but I learn by observing what bloggers and marketers are doing.  

What are your top tips for writing a successful blog post?

I have learned a fraction of writing successful blog posts. My best articles came out when I kept my reader in mind and tried to solve his problems through my content.

That is the first & most important thing in a successful blog post. Later comes the structure, storytelling and flow of the content. Once you learn the art of structure and storytelling then you can easily repurpose your content for creating multiple type of articles by looking at the stats of your website.

Improve the formatting by keeping short sentences and short paragraphs. Add more visuals and data to backup your claims. There should be a mixture of images and videos in your content to have more engaging blog posts.

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