Hey, everyone. My name is Andrew Warner. I'm the founder of Mixergy, where I interview entrepreneurs about how they built phenomenally successful businesses. And about a year ago, in early 2016, I realized that my email list, no matter how much effort we put into it, and we hire all these experts, it just was never going to like

double in response rate. Yeah, we can keep growing it, but people are not using email that much.

So I started looking around for solutions and I said, hey, you know what? The reason it's not

working so well is because when my wife and I are messaging each other, we're using the messaging

app that comes with our phone. When Tam, Fam, our community manager at Mixergy, he was at the time the community manager, he's now risen up. When he and I were communicating, we were using Facebook Messenger. We were using all these different chat apps. No wonder, email isn't effective. Everyone's using chat apps. I said, all right, there's got to be a solution to this.

If we're all on chat, is there a way to do email marketing essentially, but via chat?

So I started looking around at bots. Bots are basically software that communicates with humans

via a chat app. And almost every single fricking bot that I saw out there was trying to reproduce an app inside a chat experience.

And they were so proud that if you wanted to buy an airline ticket, you can do it in chat.

That if you wanted to have your photo retouched, you can take a photo of yourself, chat it over to a bot on Facebook

Messenger, and have the photo return back. And I thought, that's really smart, but also stupid.

People are not thinking I need to buy an airline ticket. I better go into my messenger app to do it.

And so I hunted and I hunted and I hunted. and I went through a site called botlist.com

and I looked at every single app in there for creating a bot that allowed us to communicate with

our audience in the platform where they are, not try to reproduce apps, but reproduce email

in the more modern way that people communicate, which is chat apps, you know, like Slack, Facebook Messenger, et cetera. And I came across this one company that frankly looked too good to be true. It was called ManyChat. And I'll tell you how skeptical I was that it worked. I mean, it really worked. But I said, how did these guys get it so perfectly? I got to find out who the founder is. I said, I'm running Mixergy.

I got a lot of pull.

I'm going to find out who the founder is.

Found the founder's name. I have zero connection to him. I looked around, I said, someone in my network would. And there's a guy named Matt Ellsworth, who did. He worked at 500 startups. I said, Matt, do you know these guys?

He said, yeah.

Can you vouch for them?

He said, yeah.

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