Yesterday morning I found this in my mailbox:
Curious, I texted "Cloe". Here's our correspondence:
First off, great marketing. Secondly, what a delightful experience. Cloe spoke personably and did enough research to know that I'm a UofO graduate and the Ducks were playing later that night. Some people might find that creepy but I've given up on privacy.
Cloe is remincent of ChaCha, a human-powered, SMS-based search engine before smartphones were ubiquitous. Cloe is also similar to Ethan (cc @gliechtenstein) but without the friction of needing to download yet another app (although this also comes with other downsides). Cloe is an invisible app, which @kylebrussell and I have chatted about (we both still need to write about this), in which the the product itself is embedded within existing interfaces (in the case SMS/iMessage).
That said, I'm curious to learn more about Cloe and the makers' plans to turn it into a scaleable business (if that's the goal).
@gliechtenstein@kylebrussell@rrhoover Invisible apps (the evolution of thin clients) are a favorite topic of mine.
Cloe must be the sister of Jarvis (jarv.co) and Clara (claralabs.com)! I wonder what the key differentiators will ultimately be here.
Welcome, @hildebrandchase, and thanks again for the restaurant recommendations. What's your plan with Cloe and why will this work where others like ChaCha and Aardvark (sort of) failed? I'm naturally skeptical about the scaleability and business model of person-to-person Q&A. Although, Path Talk is onto something here. cc @davemorin
Reminds me of a more thought-out version of Aardvark and I like it.
Sometimes you just need the right answer, right now from a human.
As Cloe learns my specialties, I'd gladly answer real-time queries via text message to help the better whole. Nice work @hildebrandchase.
@hildebrandchase the experience looks great. I'm excited to try this out!
I'm curious as to why your product video says "Lola" instead of "Cloe" at the 32 second mark.
I noticed that the Lola query is a request to interact with a known business (wraps from Lucca's) while the Cloe queries are all asking for recommendations.
Is this a revenue stream test perhaps?
Hey everybody,
Wanted to introduce myself, I am one of the co-founders of Cloe. Hope everyone is enjoying the service, we've been absolutely swamped lately, but we're chugging along! We have a wait list at www.meetcloe.co and feel free to watch the two videos to get a better feel for what we do!
Hey Guys. Whooah! First off thanks for all the interest. We are doing our best to service as many users as possible. For those who have been redirected to the waitlist we are clearing it up quickly.
As for how Cloe will succeed where others have struggled is predicated upon our laser focus. For example, we do not prescribe to the jack of all trades king at nothing approach. We don't aim to field queries that you could find quickly through a Google search (I.e movie times, weather and sports scores) Our focus is on curated SMB recommendations. This is absolutely vital to not only scalability but also profitably. To delve into those two areas further 1. Scalability we've built out a proprietery tech algorithm that allows us to answer peoples queries effectively and efficiently (can currently handle thousands of users per day) as for 2. Profitability we have several revenue streams and were currently testing them out.
Hey Jesse,
No, I wouldn't say so. I think that you use Cloe when you need her. If you need a tailor, a burrito, a happy hour spot with 1/2 price bottles of wine or a really great place to board your dog she can help with that.
Mentally replace the searching you do on social discovery and let Cloe do the legwork
The idea behind Cloe is to offer spot on responses so that you can text and get on with your life. The market currently needs a service that offers intelligent, curated, responses in real time. the problem with what's currently out there is that many of your queries hit a wall, provide too many results and ultimately put the burden on the user to find what they are looking for.
Cloe gets to know you better the more you use the service, she does the legwork for you and she has a human component so you don't dead end......
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