How my life changed in a single moment
From zero to one
Missed my last story? You can catch up here.
My old friend from Gymnasium and I both wanted something else.
We couldn’t imagine ourselves working for a corporate.
Even though we had already signed contracts to start working for a corporate after our studies.
It was King’s Day in the Netherlands and we were on our way to Amsterdam. It’s the day when dutch people go crazy for a day to celebrate king Willem-Alexander’s birthday.
Sitting side by side on the train, we were scrolling through my co-founders Facebook feed when something caught our attention.
It was a video about a Facebook developer conference that had just taken place.
They introduced something revolutionary at the time:
Chatbots.
That was the early term for what many today would associate with ChatGPT.
A computer program you could chat with natural language. Just like texting a real person.
Facebook had just released an API (think of it like a connection or middleman between two apps so they can communicate and exchange data) that allowed developers to integrate their own chatbots into Facebook Messenger.
We were instantly hooked.
The idea that conversations could become the new interface for technology felt like the future.
We believed chatbots could be the next frontier in tech maybe even replace apps altogether.
We went down the rabbit hole and came across one of the first chatbot examples.
A simple news bot from CNN.
Instead of using a traditional app, users could receive news updates in a chat format, just like on WhatsApp.
We saw it as an innovative, intuitive way to connect with businesses. No more navigating websites or spending hours on hold.
Instead, you could reach out just like you would with friends: through a social messenger.
Without hesitation, we drafted ten cold emails, acting as if we already had a company and a working product.
We reached out to companies like myTaxi (now Freenow), Domino’s Pizza, Foodora (Now Just Eat Takeaway) and several others.
Three of them responded positively.
To us, that was all the market validation we needed.
We just needed a name and a logo.
We thought about bots but names like Robotica or anything with chatbots was already taken.
Since our first idea was doing something in e-commerce we put the “e” in front of the “bot”.
As chatbots work 24/7 and we were both heavy James Bond fans we thought it was cool to add it at the end.
“e-bot7”.
It was also one of the only free domains at the time.
The very next day, in a small town called Roermond we officially founded the company.
Full of excitement, we sat down to begin brainstorming and creating some logo designs.
We didn’t have any doubts we were going to be successful.
It was a mix of naivity, confidence and pure conviction.
We had no idea how the technology worked.
We had not idea how to write code.
We didn’t understand how businesses operated or if what we were doing was truly anything new.
Yet somehow, we felt like we’d discovered the holy grail.
While working on our logo and brand designs, we started reaching out to developers.
We needed to know what was possible and and how long building this would take.
But there was one problem: we didn’t know any developers.
We were both business students.
Still, we knew we had to find a way to connect with the right people.
Luckily, my co-founder was familiar with Product Hunt.
A community where people share new ideas and products every day, and others can like and comment on them.
Knowing we needed developer expertise, we created a simple one-page website called “e-botfinder”.
It didn’t do much just allowed developers who knew how to build chatbots and businesses interested in chatbots to sign up.
We launched the website on Product Hunt and something unexpected happened.
Overnight, we got more than a hundred sign-ups.
We couldn’t believe it.
In the days that followed, we scheduled call after call to fully understand the technology and get a clear sense of what was possible.
We also got a feeling of how much it actually costed to build chatbots and how much we could charge.
Even though it was the very early beginnings of chatbots and nobody really knew if the technology would take off, we managed to form a rough idea.
We launched “Chatbotnewsdaily” a Facebook page where we curated and reposted articles about the emerging technology.
We knew if we wanted to be successful, we couldn’t just build a great product.
We had to build trust.
That meant becoming thought leaders in our space.
We had to earn credibility before we could earn customers.
So we started writing, speaking, sharing our learnings or just reposting what others had learned.
We knew if people saw us as asking the right questions and pushing the industry forward, they’d come to us when it was time to buy.
All this happened within two weeks of King’s day.
We were working day and night from my shared flat.
Our friends hadn’t seen us in weeks, and we’d skipped all our university classes
Our lives had completely turned upside down.
One day, a friend from university reached out.
He had interned at an incubator in Munich and had been quietly following what we were working on.
He told us he might be onto something.
The incubator called Wayra had just opened applications for an upcoming pitch day.
It was in less than a week.
Somehow, he managed to get us a last-minute slot.
Several investors would be there. It was a big deal.
There was just one problem:
We had no idea how to pitch.
No idea what investors wanted to see.
No clue what we were even supposed to present.
So we pulled together everything we had, scraps of feedback from developers, random emails, rough screenshots, and turned it into a presentation.
We jumped on a train to Munich, pitch deck in hand, completely unprepared and all in.
We had no idea what to expect.
Neither of us had ever pitched to investors before.
We were just two university students with an idea and a presentation.
Still, we felt confident.
Looking back, that confidence was naive but also what we needed.
When we arrived at the pitch day in Munich, something unexpected happened.
Something that changed everything.
Curious what happened next? Read it here.