Success Is Not An Accident: Icon8 Chatbot Founders Reveal Their Secrets To Traction

Written by Amrit Sharma (Smokey) for BotList.

In this story, I share the unexpected lessons I uncovered while speaking to the founders of Icon8 — an AI-powered chatbot that processes more than a million photos a day!

If you’re reading this, chances are that you already know that BotList is an “app store for bots.” It recently crossed 2.3 million page views in eight short months since launch. You can easily browse and discover chatbots on various messaging platforms — and you can even see how many people have viewed a particular bot’s profile on BotList.

Most chatbots on BotList have been viewed a few hundred times, and I felt I was doing quite well promoting my own chatbot because I have over 2,000 views — but then I saw this tweet by Seth Louey, co-founder of BotList, about a new chatbot listing on BotList, Icon8.

6,700 views in two days! “Are you kidding me?” I mumbled. I was curious and played around with it. “Ah! Yet another cute photo filter chatbot,” I assumed. No wonder they have so much traffic.

Over the next few months, I watched Icon8’s page views continue to soar past 20,000 views, while most other chatbots were still hovering in the hundreds or low thousands. I had to find out for myself (and for you) what they’re doing and what we can learn from them.

The Icon8 founders, Dmitry Matskevich and Anatoly Marin, were very gracious and open to share their journey with me, the lessons they learned learned, their approach to user acquisition and how they plan to be sustainable.

What is Icon8?
Icon8 is an AI-powered chatbot that “turns selfies into pieces of art.” Snap a selfie, apply a style and share your new look with friends. Icon8 is inspired by the world’s greatest artists and designers so that you can enjoy their works too.

To be honest, despite having used the Icon8 chatbot several times myself and really liking it, I still had my reservations about this interview with Dmitry and Anatoly. I expected to hear some variation of these 3 things:
(i) We got press at launch. (probably TechCrunch)
(ii) It resonated with people and got to the front page of reddit and ProductHunt.
(iii) Cool little chatbot that people have shared with their friends.

Boy, was I wrong!!

Instead, we had a thrilling hour-long discussion about behavioral psychology, viral coefficients, their obsession with user engagement metrics, and repeating the build-measure-learn loop hundreds of times a day. The founders and team behind Icon8 are a seasoned team of entrepreneurs with experience in various other successful startups.

9 Lessons I Learned From The Icon8 Founders

1. Never compromise on the quality of your chatbot.
   Icon8 initially only launched on Telegram, because the Facebook Messenger API didn’t have a few features they needed to build a truly exceptional chatbot. For example: They couldn’t access the Facebook user’s display picture in high resolution yet. Unlike filters on instagram or twitter, Icon8 is powered by neural networks (artificial intelligence) that creates images from scratch, rather than transforming an existing image, so it’s vital for them to have as high resolution an image as possible to work with.

2. Put yourself in a position to succeed.
   When Icon8 first launched as a Telegram bot in August, they listed their chatbot on StoreBot, a directory exclusively for Telegram chatbots. But instead of waiting for users to come to them, they reached out to the StoreBot team and got Icon8 featured on their homepage. This brought in a flurry of targeted initial users.

3. Get every new user to the “ah-ha moment” ASAP.
   Similarly, Icon8 knew they had to show what their chatbot could do in as few clicks/taps and as quickly as possible. Facebook’s “ah-ha moment” for a new user is when they see their friends on the site, and Icon8’s “ah-ha moment” is when you see your photo turned into a beautiful piece of art. Icon8 does a remarkable job of getting every single user to the “ah-ha moment” right away. As soon as you start a conversation with Icon8 today, they automatically grab your display picture and transform it with one of their popular filters, so with essentially zero clicks you can see exactly what Icon8 does. Users can’t help but have an ah-ha moment immediately. Icon8 has optimized their chatbot to deliver that core product value over and over again to keep the user happy and coming back for more.

4. User retention is everything.
   It’s much easier to get an existing user to come back to your chatbot, than it is to find a new one. Obsess over this. What can you do to make users come back to your chatbot over and over again? Icon8 occasionally sends broadcast messages to their users with ‘featured filters’ and share the most captivating images across their Facebook page too.

5. User happiness.
   “Most of us spend more time meeting and interacting with people online rather than in person,” said Anatoly. “That’s a core reason why we want to look good online.” Icon8 helps you put your best foot.. er, face.. forward.

6. Variable Reward.
   Icon8 introduces new filters every other day. This variable effect brings a lot of users back to Icon8 regularly to see whether they’ll like the new designs. Every user will like some new designs and not like the others — that’s variable reward — and is a huge component of how websites, apps and even chatbots create strong user retention. That’s dopamine for you.

7. Measure. Measure. Measure.
   “We find that our best performing filters bring in 10x more new users than the other filters,” said Dmitry. “We pay close attention to which filters are being used, shared and talked about, and quickly move to replace the ones that aren’t performing well.” They run hundreds of A/B tests every day. Icon8 has a dedicated data scientist that pays close attention to these and other stats in real-time.

8. Team is everything.
   Icon8 definitely is a data-driven company, but that’s actually an understatement. They measure everything and tweak their filters accordingly. They even have a dedicated R&D person on their team for training the neural network to create these beautiful new filters that turn selfies into pieces of art.

9. Business Model.
   Their chatbot isn’t monetized right now, although they know they can introduce paid filters or special features for users that upgrade to a paid level. However, currently they’re quite content with people loving Icon8, returning to it regularly, and of course, sharing the artwork with their friends across social networks. Icon8 is run by a seasoned team of entrepreneurs and they have a clear vision to monetize the company with a B2B solution. “We’re currently in negotiations with companies for whom photos are quite important, so we can’t disclose those partnerships yet.” Icon8 can “redraw” low resolution or low quality images into beautiful ones by the AI “hallucinating” and filling in the blanks — which can be very valuable for any company that leads with large sets of photos.

Success Is Not An Accident

Icon8 has shown us that a multi-channel approach to user acquisition and an obsession with user retention is essential to your chatbot’s success. When Icon8 heard about BotList, one of the team members immediately submitted their bot to be listed on the site. Then over the next several weeks, they regularly linked their BotList profile on their Facebook posts. This drove thousands of their existing fans to visit their BotList profile, and that in turn drove a lot more traffic from BotList’s users back to Icon8.

Icon8 will have a remarkable advantage over other chatbots when BotList rolls out even more sorting features, because they have the best numbers out there. If you need more specific ideas for how to drive traffic to your chatbot from BotList, you can read a full explanation of 6 strategies that other chatbots are successfully leveraging.

Share your stories. Has BotList been an effective source to generate traffic for you? Try these strategies above and let us know. Leave a comment below with your success stories and what lessons you learned.