Table Colombia Challenge

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Websites where created for content, buy we have been using them to run businessess for many years now. Nevertheless, we are still getting less than 5% conversion rates on average and more than 265 billion calls to call centers, at a cost of 1.3 Trillion USD. Chatbots are emerging as a solution for automating customer service from these websites, but they are still very expensive and take a lot of time to develop, thus leaving them out of reach for the vast majority of businesses.

Ibang has created Botzy, a code free platform for creating need-specific chatbots, thus making then readily available for every business. We have begun with e-commerce chatbots, and will evolve to other needs, such as real state, appointments, travel, help desks.

The global market is 1.3 trillion dollars, the aproximate cost of serving calls the 265 billion calls originating from websites. Of the total number of calls, we estimate that 60% can be automated by chatbots, leaving us with a $780,000 USD market. The main risk is the velocity in the adoption of the technology, where milenials and newer generations are more prone to adopt it than older generations.

We have two types of competitors:

1. Chatbot developing frameworks. These are frameworks for developing chatbots that are created by large brands, such as Microsoft Bot Framework (global), IBM Watson (global) and Google Dialogflow (global). These frameworks enable the development of bots but still require quite a lot of technical knowledge and coding in order to get them working.
2. Code free platforms: These are code free platforms for creating chatbots such as Chatfuel (global), Manychat (global), Cari.ai (Colombia), chatbot.com (global). These platforms enable creating general sector chatbots, and thus still require some coding in order to make them work.

Botzy´s main competitive advantage is that it specializes in niche chatbots, providing a 360 solution to the specific need, such as e-commerce. This greatly reduces the amount of coding required, thus making the chatbots readily available for all businesses.

We began by developing on demand chatbots for great corporations in Colombia, such as Corona, Celsia, BNP Paribas, Argos, Summa. Through this experience we learned the difficulties that make developing chatbots an expensive and time consuming process. We then started developing Botzy, slowly adapting it to accommodate our real customer´s needs.

Botzy is a SaaS web solution, where a monthly suscription is payed by our customers according to number of conversations and funcionalitly used. Sucription plans start at 49 USD/ month.

Our go to market strategy has three main channels:

1. Plugin for websites. We create Botzy plugins that work with platforms such as Vtex, Shopify, Magento, etc, which are platforms for creating e-commerce stores. Clients of these platforms can easily activate our plugin to complement their e-commerce store.
2. Agencies: We visualice partnership with marketing agencies. We consider agencies being the natural implementors of Botzy, as they already have the clients for which they build e-commerce stores, and thus selling the corresponding chatbot for customer service to their website becomes a natural way to increase their portfolio.
3. Direct: These are customers that love to self build their own solutions and thus will come through online advertising and guide themselves with online tutorials in order to create their own chatbot.

Our key performance indicators are number of active chatbots, and number of sessions (conversations).

Ibang is owned by three founders:

1. Julio Botero: 32.5% - Administrative Engineer. 9 years of experience in Grupo Éxito as Marketing Director. 4 years ago he successfully founded Juju SAS - a company dedicated to incentive plans.
2. Juan Carlos Aristizabal: 37.5% - Electronic Engineer. 10 years ago he successfully founded Doctus - a company dedicated to custom development of software solutions for great enterprises in Colombia.
3. Carolina Correa: 30% - Administrative Engineer, MBA and Master in Internet Business. 10 years of experience in Corona: Digital Transformation Leader for the whole group and in multiple projects.

We project sales of 1.5 million dollars for 2020, 6 million dollars for 2021, and 15 million dollars for 2022.

Our main milestones are:

1. Reaching our first 100 live chatbots in Botzy
2. Incresing our sales and technical team
3. Raising funds to scale our business.

We strongly believe that we want to make customer service better for everyone. On one side, we seek to improve hte lives of people that currently serve customer service. We believe that when automating the response of the same things over and over again, we will free up the agent´s time so that they can exploit their full potential on more live fullfilling tasks. On the other side, we believe that with automated customer service, people will have more pain free experiences in their day to day lives (who likes to call a call center?).