Growth Stage - Keynote #2 - Chat and Beyond: Five Steps to Building Digital Connections
Summary
TLDRIn this insightful presentation, Mike Cha, Lead Product Manager at Sendbird, shares a longitudinal case study of strategic product choices over four years. Starting as a chat company, Sendbird expanded its portfolio by identifying key customers, exploring unexpected verticals, and leveraging generative AI to create a smart assistant. The company's mission to 'build connections in the digital world' led to the development of voice/video calls, support software, and notifications, emphasizing the importance of adapting to market needs and technological advancements.
Takeaways
- 😀 Mike Cha, the lead product manager at Sendbird, shared insights on product development choices over the last four years.
- 🌐 Sendbird is a B2B API company that provides various types of user-to-brand connections, with a global customer base.
- 📈 The company's mission is to 'build connections in the digital world', which has guided its evolution and product expansion.
- 🔍 Sendbird started with chat and found a key customer, Reddit, which helped scale the product and introduced the importance of moderation features.
- 📱 They expanded into unexpected verticals, such as social plus payments, where chat became an integral part of user interaction.
- 📞 Sendbird later introduced voice and video calls, recognizing that building connections also involved these communication methods.
- 💡 The company identified popular features within their chat product and decoupled them into standalone products, like Sendbird Desk for customer support.
- 📣 Another feature, announcements, was transformed into Sendbird Notifications, allowing businesses to send broadcast messages to users.
- 🤖 With the rise of generative AI, Sendbird created a smart assistant that integrates with various AI engines and can be deployed as a chatbot in apps.
- 🛠️ Sendbird's approach to product development emphasizes adapting to market needs, leveraging existing technology to create new products, and maintaining a scalable infrastructure.
- ❓ The script concludes with a Q&A, addressing the risk of expanding into new verticals and emphasizing the importance of calculated risks for growth.
Q & A
What is the primary focus of Sendbird as a company?
-Sendbird is a B2B API company that focuses on providing various types of connections between users and brands through chat and other communication services.
What is the mission of Sendbird?
-Sendbird's mission is to build connections in the digital world, which has evolved to include chat, voice, video, and other forms of digital communication.
How did Sendbird initially start and what was its primary product?
-Sendbird initially started with Sendbird Chat, positioning itself as a chat company aiming to provide the best chat experience through an API and SDK.
Who is one of the key customers that helped Sendbird scale?
-Reddit is one of the key customers that helped Sendbird scale by partnering with them to provide chat services for their community.
How did Sendbird's partnership with Reddit influence the product development?
-The partnership with Reddit led Sendbird to develop moderation features to foster safe communities, highlighting the importance of operational aspects beyond superficial chat features.
What was the unexpected demand Sendbird discovered in growing their business?
-Sendbird discovered an unexpected demand from verticals that traditionally did not require chat, such as social plus payments, where chat became an integral part of user interaction.
Can you provide an example of how Sendbird expanded into new product offerings?
-Sendbird expanded into calls by developing a call SDK and APIs, allowing for one-on-one video calls, group chat calls, and other features, thus broadening their connection offerings.
What is Sendbird Desk and how does it differ from the original Sendbird Chat?
-Sendbird Desk is a lightweight support software that provides excellent chat functionality and an agent interface for ticket management, analytics, and more, focusing specifically on customer support interactions.
What is the concept behind Sendbird Notifications?
-Sendbird Notifications is a product that allows companies to send persistent, customized notifications to their users within their applications, enhancing user engagement and communication.
How does Sendbird's Smart Assistant leverage generative AI?
-Sendbird's Smart Assistant integrates with various generative AI engines, allowing users to create chatbots with predefined or dynamic data ingestion, function calling, and a low-code implementation for quick deployment.
What advice does Mike Cha give for product managers looking to expand their product offerings?
-Mike Cha advises product managers to find customers they can scale with, explore other verticals that may need their solution, relook at their mission for different technologies or mediums, identify if popular features can be standalone products, and adapt to technological changes in the world.
What is the potential risk associated with exploring other verticals for business expansion?
-The potential risk is high as it involves venturing into markets that may not have been initially targeted, but it is a calculated risk that can lead to new opportunities if the solution is applicable to those markets.
How does Sendbird ensure that its chatbots stay within the realm of predefined knowledge?
-Sendbird allows users to upload documents or enter URLs for the chatbot to ingest and learn from, ensuring that it stays within the predefined knowledge realm and does not answer outside of it.
Outlines
📢 Introduction to Sendbird and its Global Customer Base
Mike Cha, a lead product manager at Sendbird, introduces the company as a B2B API provider that offers various user-to-brand connection services beyond just chat. He highlights Sendbird's worldwide customer base, including notable names like Reddit, PayPal, and others, emphasizing the company's large user base of over 300 million monthly chat users. Mike sets the stage for a discussion on Sendbird's product decisions and growth over the past four years, aiming to provide insights for product managers at various company stages.
🚀 Scaling Through Key Customer Partnerships and Product Evolution
The summary explains Sendbird's initial focus on chat and how partnering with Reddit, a major online community platform, helped Sendbird scale by developing moderation features crucial for safe community building. It discusses Sendbird's approach to growth, emphasizing the importance of finding customers that can scale with the company and adapting the product roadmap to meet their needs, which in turn shaped the company's evolution.
🔍 Expanding Beyond Target Markets to Unconventional Verticals
This section delves into Sendbird's strategic pivot to explore demand in unexpected industry verticals, such as social plus payments, where chat became an integral part of user interaction. The company did not limit itself to its initial target market but expanded its mission to build connections in the digital world, leading to the development of voice and video call features. The summary illustrates Sendbird's willingness to innovate and adapt to market demands beyond traditional expectations.
🛠 Transforming Popular Features into Independent Products
The summary describes how Sendbird identified and decoupled popular features within their chat service, such as support interactions, and turned them into standalone products. This strategy led to the creation of Sendbird Desk, a lightweight support software, and Sendbird Chat Announcements, enhancing the company's product portfolio and catering to specific customer needs more effectively.
📬 Evolving from Chat to Comprehensive Notification Solutions
This part of the script discusses Sendbird's expansion into the notifications space with Sendbird Notifications, a product that allows for persistent, customizable in-app notifications. The summary outlines the product's capabilities, such as sending promotional, operational, or transactional messages directly within an application, and its low-code implementation, which enables quick deployment.
🤖 Embracing Generative AI with the Smart Assistant Integration
The final paragraph's summary focuses on Sendbird's entry into the generative AI space with the Smart Assistant, which allows for easy integration of various AI engines into chatbots. It details the product's features, such as document ingestion, function calling, and low-code deployment options, emphasizing Sendbird's commitment to staying at the forefront of technological innovation.
💡 Final Thoughts on Strategic Risks and Innovation
In the concluding section, Mike reflects on the strategic risks involved in exploring new verticals and the importance of calculated risks for business growth. He also addresses a question about the risks of expanding into unconventional markets, advocating for the exploration of new areas based on the company's capabilities and market needs.
Mindmap
Keywords
💡Lead Product Manager
💡B2B API Company
💡Chat SDK
💡Moderation
💡Scaling
💡Product Portfolio
💡Smart Assistant
💡Notifications SDK
💡Low-code Implementation
💡Mission Statement
💡Product Decoupling
Highlights
Mike Cha, Lead Product Manager at Sendbird, discusses the company's evolution over the last four years.
Sendbird's mission is to build connections in the digital world, which has guided their product development.
Sendbird started as a chat company, providing an API and SDK for businesses to integrate chat features.
Partnering with Reddit helped Sendbird understand the importance of moderation for fostering safe communities.
Sendbird expanded into unexpected verticals, such as social plus payments, to meet market demands.
The company developed a call SDK to provide voice and video connections, expanding beyond just chat.
Hinge, a social dating service, utilized Sendbird's voice and video features to build trust among users.
Sendbird identified popular features within their chat product and turned them into standalone products.
Sendbird Desk was created to cater to the needs of support agents and users within chat interactions.
Announcements feature allowed businesses to communicate directly with their users within the app.
Sendbird Notifications was developed to provide persistent and customizable in-app notifications.
Sendbird's approach to innovation includes looking beyond the initial target market for potential use cases.
The company's strategy involves reevaluating their mission and identifying new technologies to apply to it.
Sendbird's Smart Assistant leverages generative AI to provide chatbots integrated with various AI engines.
The Smart Assistant allows for easy deployment of chatbots with data ingestion and function calling capabilities.
Sendbird emphasizes the importance of adapting to technological changes and exploring new applications for existing products.
Mike Cha addresses the risk of expanding into new verticals and the calculated approach Sendbird takes to mitigate it.
The presentation concludes with a Q&A session where Mike discusses the company's strategy for growth and innovation.
Transcripts
[Music]
good afternoon everybody my name is Mike
cha and I am a lead product manager at
senir uh if you haven't noticed we have
a booth out there and um you know I'd
like to talk to you today
about something that is not a specific
domain but something that is a
longitudinal case study of the choices
that we made in terms of product in the
last four years and hopefully
depending on whichever stage of product
you're in that you're working at series
a series B
preed IPO already hopefully this will be
very helpful uh for your product
decisions that you will need to make
today and tomorrow and and you many
years to
come uh before that uh a lot of people
ask what is Sunbird uh well first of all
we are a B2B API company and we provide
not just chat but lots of different
types of connections between users and
Brands as well and we have customers all
over the world Indonesia we have red
doors travaloka ruang Guru and many more
we have other key customers in in the US
like PayPal we have Maya in the
Philippines we have Koopa in Korea we
have different customers that have
different use cases for how they want to
connect their
users and uh yeah currently we have 300
million plus monthly chat users
surprising because we're B2B you can't
see our logo in an application but we do
power many of the powerful Services out
there
and yeah so I want to start with the
mission of sber which is that we want to
build Connections in the digital world
now this sounds really generic right I
mean we have to come up with a mission
anyway if we're going to start a company
or if we're going to continue with the
company but I'm going to come back to
this Mission because we've evolved in
ways that we did not expect four or five
years ago where we are but we're still
sticking to this
Mission and out of the five steps I'm
going to tell you the the first step
that we took and of course these steps
can be different for you but I hope this
is a good case study for you and first
is to find customers that will help you
scale now when we first started out we
started out with sbird chat and we
claimed ourselves to be just a chat
company we want to provide the best chat
out there right just like your WhatsApp
experience you know has the other person
read your chat right is there a delivery
receipt um you know is is the person on
the other side typing typing indicators
we thought of all of these new cool
features and we added it we packaged
into an AP pi and an SDK and we said
great now let's sell it let's get some
customers and of course we got some
customers but it was really when we
found a key customer that was willing to
scale with us and that's the point that
I wanted to share here in the first
point and as an example we have Reddit
who is s bir's customer and Reddit uh as
many of you may know is one of the
biggest Community um websites out there
in the United States and and also in the
other Western countries and of course
they had communities and they had forums
but they didn't have a way for users to
chat and that's when we came in and we
partnered with Reddit and so we thought
hey we have a road map we have all of
these features that we know are great
because we talk to customers we talk to
users you know we have all these
features but here's what Reddit said
they said hey it's really important for
for us to foster a very very safe
Community now what are some things that
you have that can foster safe
communities and that's when we said oh
you know maybe we don't have something
like that and that's how we were able to
develop
moderation so any chat between any users
you can moderate through sbird by
declaring you know certain um you know
profanities you know um you know spam
domains uh image moderation and things
like that and you know Reddit really
helped us understand that chat isn't
just about the the you know superficial
out uh features out there there's a lot
of operational areas that need to uh you
know uh be worked on and so Reddit
really helped us grow and scale into the
company that is able to you know scale
millions and billions of messages per
month so great we
scaled we found Reddit
what should we do next that was one of
the big product you know concerns that
we had should we find 10 other amazing
communities out there in India and in
Korea and in Japan and get those folks
on board with us
maybe but we actually found another
solution which is that we found demand
from unexpected
verticals so during this time that we
were growing as as a series a company
there was this whole phenomenon called
social plus that started taking
over
traditional verticals that didn't really
need chat at the time started deciding
that hey chat is going to be a really
important part of our interaction with
our
users so social example plus payment
right I just need to send money to
somebody through my bank app why would I
need to talk to somebody right that was
that was the the status quo before
social plus but what
happened now we have payment apps where
you can chat with
people and an example of that is PTM in
India uh who is also our customer and
paytm decided we don't want to just
allow our users to send money sending
money and the experience of
exchanging money is is actually a social
thing right hey we had fun last night
here's my you know
$5 for for the pizza that you paid for
me thanks a lot you know these kind of
interactions became a key part of
conventional industries that didn't
require
Chad and
so when we're building product a lot of
times you know we focus on on our target
market or our Target Persona and we're
like what else can we provide for this
target Persona what else can we provide
for the ideal customer profile that we
have but what we realized was look
around the other verticals maybe we
started out as edtech maybe we started
out as you know um you know catering
towards you know small to medium
businesses or you know maybe we started
out catering to Mom and Pop shops but
other verticals may need your solution
that you're not expecting and that's
what we've experienced so then the next
question is this all right great let's
just list up all the verticals out there
and see what works let's pitch it out
there but that was actually not the
answer that we
found what we found was that we needed
to find new ways to expand upon our
mission as I mentioned our mission is to
build Connections in the digital world
and they were like well we provide chat
is that the only connection that we can
provide is that the only thing there
must be other
connections and then we
realized oh well people talk on voice
you know on the phone all the time
people are on FaceTime people are using
voice and video and that's when we
decided we already have the product sber
Chad but we decided we're going to
expand our product
portfolio by expanding into calls and
that's when we developed our call SDK
and our set of apis you know you can do
one inone video calls group chat calls
you know you can save the file on the
cloud or you know all the things that
you're doing on Google meet or Zoom you
know we provide um and so that's what we
decided you know like we were doing well
with the product we were doing well with
chat but we were like the market is
actually bigger for when we think about
it as building connections rather than
providing chat
and a great example of a customer that
we work with still today is a customer
called hinge Hing is a social dating
service in the United States they were
acquired by the match Group which owns
Tinder and hinge was already a sber chat
customer so when a person and a person
in social dating match you can start
chatting with each other right that was
already there and we were already
providing that value for this customer
but once we said hey we think that
building connections through voice and
video is also going to be really
interesting they said you know
what that is actually really interesting
because many of our users don't trust
who's on the other side right it could
it could be someone else that's
completely different from the
profile we are so interested in adding
voice and video so that users can
confirm and be feel safe in our service
so so we've been able to provide
additional trust and value to our
customer through building additional
connections between
users and
so you know we've been able to uh
provide additional value to our
customers great that's two products
already right two products three four
product managers you know let's let's
scale the crap out of it and you know
let's let's go IPO you know that that
could be could have been a decision that
we could have
made but as we started to continue to
develop additional features you know
getting additional customers based on
the experience that we've so far had we
realized
oh we have a bunch of small features in
our existing products that are really
really popular what do we do with
them and the obvious thought is well
let's sell that feature to more
customers or hey let's develop this
feature into much more fine grained much
better ux uh uh user
experience but we we then thought you
know what we're product people I think
we can do something else and what we did
was to decouple the features that were
very popular the use cases that were
very popular and we turned them into
products themselves and then that opened
up a whole new uh flood of uh Market
that you know we hadn't expected as well
I'll give you two examples around 15% of
our chat customers at one point were
using us in a specific use case which is
an interaction between a support agent
and a user so for example if you're
using traveloka and you know you have uh
support need and you talk to a an agent
right that that would be a a support
experience 15% of our customers were
using chat for that but what they were
saying was hey
it's great your chat is awesome but you
know we have our own support software we
have our own tools that we connect to it
and you know there's no way that we can
uh you know easily use sber chat while
using other wonderful support software
like Salesforce service Cloud zenes
Etc so that's where sber desk comes in
we decided oh yeah you know we can uh
sort of maybe provide one or two uh you
know uh connections to these existing
software but that's not what we did we
said all right you know what we're going
to test the market by building a
lightweight and cheap support software
that provides excellent chat right we
won't do email we won't do the other
things that that um other um you know uh
competitors are doing we'll just do
chat let's see what happens let's see
what happens to the market and that's
how we built sber desk which is
essentially sber chat which we provide
and then a agan interface where the
agent can you know take care of tickets
escalate them you know supervisor can
see them analytics all of
that and so we've had success with sber
desk as well one of those examples is
Virgin Mobile in the UAE they were
looking for a
lightweight solution that only uses
chat this was you know we had a hunch
about this Market but you know like if
you talk to many customers they'll be
like oh do you support email do you
support Omni Channel there's all these
questions but we decided let's turn this
into a product they product
people and so Virgin Mobile was able to
increase their customer satisfaction of
course they were able to get consistent
customer satisfaction but more
importantly it took them two weeks to
build because while we were exploring
sver Chad and how to provide it to
customers we figured out a way for them
to to deploy it in hours or in days if
you know if you don't want to do it in
hours and so it just took them two weeks
to build this and their agents are all
on board with cber
desk another example that I want to
share with you is a feature called
announcements
so we had customers saying hey we love
that users can talk to each other but we
sometimes want to talk to our users too
and since our users are already using
our
app like can we send a message to our
users like like like you know like on a
WhatsApp you have many channels right
you have you know a Channel with friends
you have Channel with uh you know family
with you know people that you work with
like can we send a message in those
channels and that's how we developed a
feature called sendbird chat
announcements simple
just you know type what you want to send
to um what you want to send and then
designate which channels that your users
own own and then send and then it sends
a message from the company to to the
user and this became a a you know a
popular
feature and so then we said said you
know what can we turn this into a
product and that's how we have a product
now called sendbird
notifications so sendur notifications
actually essentially what we did was we
took the sber chat code we for it and
instead of a a list of channels and you
know a chat interface we turned it into
a category of notifications you can
designate inside your
application and also we then turned what
you know our text messages or you know
the the the chat messages into uh you
know these Dynamic uh formats which you
can design and and plan and send to your
users so now we have a send Bur
notifications SDK that you can embed for
persistent
notifications to your users so it could
be anything from promotional messages
right marketing messages it could be
operational messages it could be system
maintenance messages it could even be
transactional messages that you want to
send to your users all of those can live
inside a persistent notification center
inside your
application and
so well well we already send emails to
our users right we're already sending
sms to your users well emails
are you know they have very low open
rates SMS can get
expensive well what about WhatsApp what
about line we can use those vendors and
and you know send messages to our users
true but then you know you can't
completely brand it based on you know
how you want your notifications to look
and you know where it lives and so we
are we now provide a way to to customize
engaging notifications right in the
sendur
dashboard makes we make it really easy
and also this is what we're really good
at which is that a very low code
implementation which allows you to build
this notification center inside your
application in just hours if you want to
do additional customizations maybe a bit
more than a few hours but but in just
hours
really so then you might be thinking
whoa well that sounds like marketing
automation
that sounds like what clevertap is doing
sounds like what bra is doing what are
you guys doing infiltrating this space
well we don't want to infiltrate the
space so we've partnered up with clever
Tab and we've partnered up with brace so
that your marketers can continue to use
brace continue to use clevert to plan
campaigns send push
notifications but then what happens to
those push notifications
right we are the next part where you can
keep those push push notifications in an
aligned notification center and you can
set it to disappear a day later 6 hours
later or you can leave it to be
persistent based on your use
case so all of this to say that it was
just a tiny feature in our chat product
which we've now transformed into a whole
new
product so okay uh that's a lot of
products you know uh right before that
uh use case so Porter is a company in
India that does incity Logistics and
Porter uses sver notifications to
communicate between the company and
their drivers so yeah the next and the
last step well that sounds like a whole
lot of products it sounds like you need
to hire a bunch of product managers you
know is that really uh I mean based on
the presentation so far are you going to
add another whole new product well you
know we also think that that's a lot of
products and you know we want to keep it
to a mainten maintain aable level but
the world doesn't stop when we stop
right Innovation continues to happen
externally and what happened in the last
year is that generative AI gen AI has
you know completely taken over the
interest of the tech
world and we're like this one we can't
pass we got to do something about this
what can we do we're a chat company gen
especially Tech based gen
needs someone to chat with a
chatbot well we already have
infrastructure to to chat so what we
decided to do was to create something
called the smart
assistant now it's not just a chatbot
that you can
deploy it's B
basically we will do the integration for
you with whatever
gen engine that you want to use you want
to use open AI sure we have it
integrated do you want to use Bard sure
we have it integrated do you want to use
something else do you want to have your
own private llm we can work with that
right so we provide in the sber
dashboard a super easy way basically a
no code way for you to create a bot
choose the engine that you want and then
have it be deployed as a chatbot in your
application because we already have that
part figured out
right not only that we offer data
ingestion maybe you have a a list of
policies for support uh you know for
customer support that you want the
chatbot to only answer those you don't
want it to like answer random questions
right well in our sber dashboard you can
now upload documents long PDFs you know
Long Word documents which the bot will
ingest and say ah okay you know I'll
stay within this realm and not say any
answers
outside if you don't have a document
enter your url
we'll scrape it and it'll learn and
it'll answer questions within that
realm we have functions right what if we
want our chatbot to you know uh talk
about yesterday's order or today's
weather right Dynamic data so we have
something called function calling that
um you know llms now provide which we've
again also integrated so now you can do
that on the senver dashboard click click
click really just a few
clicks and lastly a very low code
widget that we have on react but also we
have a very low code SDK that we provide
a UI kit on iOS Android react native
many other platforms so that you can
deploy your chatbot in
hours so I want to go back to s's
Mission which is to build Connections in
the digital world as you can see we
still haven't changed the mission it's
just that we didn't know 4 years ago
that connections meant chat voice and
video sver desk sver notifications and
smart assistant we didn't know that we
had no idea but we stuck to it and we
were we were able to expand our
portfolio uh up till this much and so
right now we reach now you can use curn
to reach your customers and engage your
customers and and even Provide support
find customers that you can totally
scale with to grow your original MVP
idea look for other verticals that may
need that solution that very solution
that you use to scale other verticals
might need it look for those customers
look for those use cases and then relook
at what you've built your mission and
say hey how can we provide the same
value but through a different technology
or through some different
medium
four what are the features that we have
that are really
interesting are those actually products
are we minimizing the value of the the
most popular features that we
have and lastly take a look at look at
you know how the world is changing
around you and see how these
Technologies can be applied for
you uh that is it thank you very
much and uh I believe there are some
questions or maybe one question thank
you very much Mike CH and I would like
to read the question that has been
submitted to the slid let's show the
question please okay you mentioned to
look around the verticals when searching
for expanding business value doesn't
that seem high risk and not applicable
for most
companies um that's a great question
does that seem high risk it is high risk
but is a highly calculated risk if
your persona if your you know if the the
initial Market that you're targeting is
super humongous then yeah maybe you
don't have to do that but you know there
are always competitors out there if you
can do it other companies can do it as
well and unless you have a very very
significant unfair Advantage then I
think it is very much worth the high
calculated risk to look at other
verticals that may need your solution
that uh conventionally you wouldn't have
thought so it's more of you know the
hypothesis that we have and fixing that
hypothesis to expand it into you know
other areas rather than changing the
solution that you have you know we
didn't change the solution that we had
to to provide to other verticals it was
the same solution but we just applied it
to other markets and you know some of it
worked of course I I've only talked
about success success cases today
hopefully next time I'll tell you about
our failures and there's many of them uh
I think that'll be it thanks so
much
[Music]
n
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