Redefining the classifieds field one step at a time
Bly was created for one sole purpose: being your best buddy to buy, sell, and rent around you. Today, we’re launching the first iteration of our product, which brings us one step closer to this goal.
How did we come up with this idea? In late 2015, my wife and I had to move from our apartment. We tried to sell some of our stuff on the internet so we could move easily. We listed our items on many local classifieds websites here in France; it was a total pain but we did it. After that we waited, day after day for someone to reach out to us. No one did. We couldn’t sell our items, not because they weren’t interesting (they included a high end gaming PC, nice furniture, etc.), but because almost no one could find them. So we contacted our best friend and asked him for help. We asked if he knew someone that would be interested in this or that. The result: In 3 days, we sold everything!
What we realized was that when we listed our items on classifieds sites, we were basically just inserting items in an online shared catalog and hoping that someone would browse enough pages or/and use the right keywords and be interested enough to contact us. There is no intelligence whatsoever behind the scenes and the oversaturation of most classifieds sites makes it very hard for others members to find what they want. This used to work in the past but not anymore. Classifieds services are outdated, inefficient, and time consuming, as if the internet paused in 1996.
We thought, “We are certainly not alone and we absolutely must build a friend-bot that does exactly what our friend did for us.” We started working hard on Bly a few months ago and it has been an incredible journey.
Bly is available on Messenger in the following countries : USA 🇺🇸,Canada 🇨🇦, France 🇫🇷, UK 🇬🇧, and Belgium 🇧🇪. We chose Facebook Messenger because it’s a powerful tool for people to communicate with each other, and clearly Messenger is the best messaging platform out there with an amazing and very active team behind it.
The major lesson we learned from our user tests is that people do not behave too much differently when they talk with a bot; they expect some sort of a minimum conversational capabilities, therefore you can’t just draw a conversation path and expect a user to follow it religiously, in other words you can’t expect from a user to talk linearly with your bot because it’s frustrating and unnatural, so a bot should support a minimal vocabulary in order to handle simple conversations and of course master his own domain of expertise. It’s a very challenging exercise to design a conversational interface knowing the current limitations in AI systems and messaging platforms constraints.
So how does Bly works ? People simply express themselves in a natural way to our Bot, Bly recognizes their intents, asks them to provide it with more information if necessary and helps them find/do what they wanted to do.
Today, after one month of intensives tests with a little more than 50 users across France and UK, we are ready to launch officially on Messenger.
Get to know your new best friend ! 🍻
Bly is bilingual. He speaks French and English (based on your location). When you get in touch with Bly for the first time, you can tap on the “Discover Me” button. This will show you the three mains features of Bly (offers 📢, search 🔎, notifications 🔔) along with some request examples, that show you how you can interact with Bly. This way you can instantly know what Bly can do for you and how.
It’s really like you are talking to your friend
Bly has been trained with thousands of users’ requests, and covers a large set of services between individuals and/or professionals that range from buying/selling (cars, clothes, furniture, etc.) to services (carpooling, job offers, etc.) to rentals (real-estate, cars, industrial equipment, etc.) So for instance if you want to rent out a room in your apartment, you just have to text Bly for example :
I rent out an amazing private room for $2500 on Van Ness Avenue, SF.
Bly will instantly ask you for some photos if you have any and that’s it. Instead of creating an account on some website/app, filling out a long form, and checking your emails and messages every day, you just tell Bly and he does the rest ☕, it’s so much more natural.
Intelligent Matchmaking Gone are the days when you spent hours looking for something. Bly automatically links between those offering and those interested. Now if you want to find a nice room to rent for example, you can simply tell Bly :
I’m looking for a room for no more than $2000 in NYC.
Bly will instantly search and give you the best suggestions around you or in the location 📍 you’ve specified. You can then contact the poster directly on Messenger in a secured send box (for privacy reasons 😚), and since Bly keeps learning everyday from users’ interactions, the next time you lookup for something, you will not have to specify your location again.
Be the first ! Sometimes Bly can’t find what you are looking for, but you can tell Bly to monitor the service and notify you in a human way once he finds what you were looking for.
“Notify me when you find Coldplay concert tickets.” 🎫
Bly will know that you are looking for a concert ticket, so he simply asks you for your search area and that’s it. Now when someone will be selling that concert ticket near you, you will get notified right on Messenger. Bly makes it easier for people to connect and do business around them. We hope you add Bly to your friend list 😛 Bly is still a baby and we have a lot to learn, develop, and correct, so suggestions and reviews are very welcome.