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Drift Developer Platform — Build bots for marketing & sales
We’re opening our doors and rolling out new tools for developers to build amazing apps and integrations for our customers. These will be the solutions that power the next wave of marketing and sales.
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Congrats @dcancel and team! Would love to explore building a 2-way Drift<-->Zendesk integration. Poking around the docs now.
@dcancel @fletchrichman would love to explore that with you too! Want me email me dan@drift.com and I'll put you in touch with the right people?
Give it a go. The sky is the limit!
Pros:The API is easy to use, the documentation is very comprehensive and the team is great.
Cons:Not that I can think of
Thanks for the review, Sofia, and for your invaluable feedback during the beta. So absolutely appreciated!
Working with the team at Drift has been a great experience. We can wait to launch our Drift integration and help our customers get product insights from their sales conversations. The API is super easy to use. Check it out!
@sofiaqt awesome. thanks for the support Sofia! Excited to see what you can do.
@dcancel @guillaumecabane as guessed... this would unveil the real potential of Drift now. Btw whr is your beared guy?
@dcancel @guillaumecabane @laxmanpapineni Matt took the week off!! Just kidding, he's too busy working on January's launch to be in videos right now :)
@dcancel @guillaumecabane @laxmanpapineni @d_j_murphy
👋 Bearded guy here.
Glad you're loving the Drift Dev Platform - the team did great work on getting it built! As Dan said, I'll be back in January with our next big release. See you then! 😆
HUGE update. This opens up to an infinite number of use cases.
Looking forward to building something on top of this w/ @plainflow.
Any thoughts about putting Bots on the Starter tier or as an additional add on? Seems like the price of entry at $250/month is going to impede adoption.
@webjoe Hey Joseph! You actually can build with Drift's APIs on ANY plan, and install up to 5 apps on the free&starter plans. Ex. the giphy integration we added today is available on free!
@webjoe hey Joe. good question. here's my honest answer: there is a TON of value in the bots - they can work 24/7, customers use them to generate six figures + in deals, and in some cases even offset what a BDR can do (which would typically cost $60-80k all in). they don't let me touch pricing but I would actually bump up the price if I could 😊 that said there's a ton you can do on Starter -- and we even have people closing deals using free. Happy to chat if you want to as well: dg@drift.com
@webjoe @drift @davegerhardt I'm totally pumped about this. Joe's got a good point. Worth listening to it at least. Same thing running through my head as well. I'm not a cheapo. You don't have to do what partners say but it's good to get into a good argument to find the merits. Feedback loop is the most valuable thing going.
@webinbound I would also love something between starter and 250. I really just want the outbound option. 250s a little steep for me currently though.
Today I'm excited to finally unveil the world's first real-time business to business conversational developer platform.
Instead of building on top of events, metadata about something that happened in the past, now you can build on top of actual conversations that are happening in real-time.
Thank you to our customers and partners for pushing us to build this.
@dcancel I upvoted, just because you guys are cool.
Will check the product out later ;)
@dcancel Just started building a slash command to send canned SQL queries to your database from Drift, e.g.
1. A customer starts a conversation in Drift and provides their email
2. You type "/seekwell info" which kicks off a canned query that you've named "info" on SeekWell
3. SeekWell returns the results of the query to Drift (not visible to customer)
Another example might be querying your database to get the last few months of payment info for that customer or their lifetime value (e.g. SELECT sum(revenue) FROM financials WHERE user_id = 2423). The person using Drift doesn't even need to know SQL, anyone on your team can use it! Drop me a note if you're interested in the beta, mike at seekwell.io
I'm really excited to see what we can build with this. I have a bunch of ideas already, and I think it'll change the way we handle customer support & sales. Both internally, and for our users.
Pros:Very easy to get started with, straightforward APIs
Cons:More detailed developer docs would be 💯
Awesome. Thanks Jake. Can't wait to hear more about your ideas & see them come to life. Totally agree we can level up this documentation with more details and examples. Coming your way.
This is a really exciting addition to the Drift product. Very excited to see what can be built to extend on site conversations.
Hate to be a party pooper but…
I think this “bot/assistant” market is just a sitting duck waiting to be seized by any of the large cloud platforms who are making huge investments in AI and machine learning for a broad spectrum of uses and will acquihire any other AI company that makes any significant advance in the field.
Everything else is just trying to emulate a human with software that won’t event pass the Turing test, which usually only gets the actual humans, non techies, on the other side of the screen to become frustrated and then infuriated thus backfiring.
Just ask yourself how many people you know actually use either Siri or Google Assistant on a regular basis, it’s highly probable that only the techies you know are the ones using any and even them limit their usage to just the most simplistic requests.
Sorry, I have been on the other side and once you get out of the predefined path, you enter into a loop of question/answer that seems you are in session with a incompetent psychoanalyst. That’s my take.
And I guess that is also Google’s, Amazon’s and Apple’s since they don’t seem to push chat bots on their online storefronts and I don’t think it has to do with budgetary concerns or constraints.
We integrate with many communication platforms, and most of their APIs have at least one of the following problems:
- wonky API structure around conversation lifecycle
- being unprepared for developer use cases and slow to iterate
We had the chance to work with the Drift team during the beta, and I can say they've threaded both these needles. The API is simple to work with, and the team is actively adapting to community requests. If you're in this space, worth joining the conversation!
Pros:Simple, well considered API backed by very responsive team.
Cons:Features and docs evolving quickly, so worth regular review.
Fantastic points here. Thank you for providing awesome beta feedback along the way. Much appreciated.
Working with Drift has been a breeze, we've had all the support necessary day & night via a shared Slack workspace to get us up and running.
Excited to be launching Hu:toma's integration https://get.hutoma.ai/integratio... imminently so you guys watch FAQs answered on autopilot and spend more time closing better qualified leads.
Pros:Really simple API, good docs, and lots of support from the Drift team!
Cons:Early stages - the platform will only grow from here
You've been an absolutely amazing partner during our beta of this, Matthew! Thanks so much. You're totally right that this is just the beginning.
Awesome work to the Drift team that have been absolutely awesome to work with, they've made building on top of their API super easy and we're looking forward to launching our FAQ & Knowledge Base automation service imminently.
Drift itself is a conversational marketing tool that fits the modern marketing stack, Drift share the same vision as Hu:toma in that filling out forms and collecting emails for followup is out of date and doesn't work.
Teams of any size can't waste time speaking to leads that will never convert and that's where Drift and Hu:toma can work their magic. Pre-qualifying leads, providing answers to FAQs in real time, and routing the best leads to the right Sales rep.
Conversation, not forms!
Thanks @anguyenrex @emilymias and the rest of the team!
To everyone else ping me if you're interested in trying out our integration. https://get.hutoma.ai/integratio...
This is awesome!
I’m super excited another amazing leading company in tech and marketing has hoped on board the developer friendly train!
So many amazing things to build and play with!
@mirshko 🙏🏽 Thanks Jeff. Love that you're excited. Let us know if you have any questions.
Interesting.
I wonder to what extent a Developer API is seen as an expected part of any enterprise product Vs if it's still a 'delighter feature' (I guess it depends on what you can/want to do with it in the context of your business)?
Either way, nice addition from Drift
@jbpdempsey from what we've seen from others, it's not the norm. But we had enough people asking for particular things behind the scenes, and this is something @eliast and @dcancel had been planning from the beginning vs building a closed platform.
I wonder, theoretically, would it be possible to collect payments using Drift chat? I would like to sell consultancy and premium analysis just using Drift Chat and my server, which generates information. If I could somehow charge costumers without ever leaving the chat, that would be awesome.
@johnyqi Hey Johny! Let's chat. Alexa at drift.com or you can always just chat into our widget on drift.com and someone will come grab me :)
I am looking to give my serious visitors the capability to call me quickly. Either twilio or other click-to-be-called tool?
CryptoPoops