My love for Dogs and Chatbots is what drove me to create @AwesomeDogBot. Its a simple bot that sends you daily picture and gifs of dogs. You can in fact have small conversations with the bot as well.
I really enjoy the DogBot posts myself, as those cute dog pictures kind of put your mind at ease with all the things that happen around us everyday. So just to make your life a little easier, its nice to get picture of a tail wagging furry creature in your Messenger. I used Manychat.com to create my bot. Its a really simple tool that helps you get going with your first bot within 5–10 minutes. The idea behind the bot was just to provide myself with a break with cute pictures of dogs, without having to go on to Facebook or Instagram to find posts from the dog page I like or Dog page that I follow. I made the bot within 10 minutes and made it public. For the first month or so, not much happened. There wasn’t much traffic and my subscribers grew at the same rate it decreased. My subscriber count hovered around the 60–80 mark and it wasn’t encouraging, but that wasn’t the purpose of the bot anyways. DogBot was meant to be fun for me. I honestly, didn’t expect too many people to subscribe or use it daily. But then something happened and don’t know what…
The numbers skyrocketed, and I don’t know why.
Within a few minutes this happened…
I did some quick Google search just to see if my bot was mentioned somewhere, and I realized my post to BotList was approved and more than 260 people had already looked at it. It was great despite the clear error in my description of the bot on BotList. Since then, the numbers have been fluctuating crazily and I am still not able to pin-point what is the reason. But I am not complaining, as more people are enjoying DogBot, which was created primarily to solve a my personal need.
More charts and the fluctuating numbers:
These numbers are way better than I had anticipated. So cheers to that!
Update: I stopped working on the bot an year back as it was getting too expensive to run the bot through ManyChat. At time I unsubscribed to ManyChat I had some 25000 subscribers to DogBot. I still get messages on the bot of people asking DogBot to come back. It is heartening to see, but most of these systems that help build bots are so expensive and creating your own platform such a time consuming activity. I would love to bring DogBot back, but I don't know how.
