Restabot

Restabot was a side project we started working on with another friend to explore bots during the bot craze.

The problem

We started with the assumption that bots will, at some point, be as common as apps and websites. SMB's will require bot builders in the same way they require website builders today, but the existing bot builders are very techincal. Afer doing some research, we've seen that NLP engines don't work well enough just yet and even when they do, it is not necessarily faster to use conversational vs regular clickable UI.

The industry we chose to focus on was restaurants. Currently, they are handling most of their order and table reservations through the phone; customers are not downloading apps (lets face it, we all have too many as it is!) and aggregators are expansive. Our solution was an easy to use bot builder, designed for small and medium restaurants, with a powerfull dasboard/notification system to handle orders, reservations and inquiries.

The process

We had a great time exploring the tech, researching the market and managed to recruit some restaurants willing to participate in our Beta. It involved a lot of walking around Herzliya and Tel Aviv mid-summer and entering lots of information by hand at the MVP stage. We even got an interview with YC (best 11 min ever!), but eventually decided to not keep going that direction.