[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":247},["Reactive",2],{"tag-woot-journals":3,"featurePages":14,"tagPosts-woot-journals":15},{"slug":4,"id":5,"name":6,"description":7,"feature_image":8,"visibility":9,"og_image":8,"og_title":8,"og_description":8,"twitter_image":8,"twitter_title":8,"twitter_description":8,"meta_title":10,"meta_description":11,"codeinjection_head":8,"codeinjection_foot":8,"canonical_url":12,"accent_color":8,"url":13},"woot-journals","6308cfe5730b190d1c2d7f46","Woot Journals","Building Chatwoot is exciting for all of us. So, whenever we figure out something new, achieve a milestone, improve our processes, or do something nice behind-the-scenes, we like to write all about it.",null,"public","Woot Journals | Everything we do behind-the-scenes at Chatwoot","Whenever we figure out something new, achieve a milestone, improve our processes, or do something nice behind-the-scenes, we like to write all about it.","https://www.chatwoot.com/tags/woot-journals","https://www-internal-blog.chatwoot.com/tag/woot-journals/",[],[16,49,77,103,123,143,164,186,206,226],{"id":17,"uuid":18,"title":19,"slug":20,"html":21,"comment_id":17,"feature_image":22,"featured":23,"visibility":9,"created_at":24,"updated_at":25,"published_at":26,"custom_excerpt":27,"codeinjection_head":8,"codeinjection_foot":8,"custom_template":8,"canonical_url":28,"authors":29,"tags":36,"primary_author":42,"primary_tag":43,"url":44,"excerpt":27,"reading_time":45,"access":46,"comments":23,"og_image":8,"og_title":8,"og_description":8,"twitter_image":8,"twitter_title":8,"twitter_description":8,"meta_title":47,"meta_description":48,"email_subject":8,"frontmatter":8,"feature_image_alt":8,"feature_image_caption":8},"64639015730b190d1c2d9d1a","6921a7f9-8d5a-498e-aee1-dc60a020a44d","[Founders’ guide] Principles for writing UX copy","principles-for-ux-copy","\u003Cp>Content is at the frontline of all products, interacting with the users at all times. It aids them in navigating the product, solving their problems, and achieving their goals. It almost feels like a crime not to put enough attention to it.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>We are a tiny team at Chatwoot, navigating through a lot of seen and unseen challenges, trying to make sense of how the product and marketing should be. That is why whenever we hit a standstill, we like to learn about the associated subject as much as we can and take our own stand.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Naturally, in the initial months of Chatwoot, the major focus had been on creating a great product. We didn’t really have any processes around writing UX copy. It was mostly based on the instincts of the team member creating a specific feature or page within the product.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>So, when we finally decided to revisit the product copy in 2023, we were overwhelmed. There was a lot to be looked at, and there weren’t a lot of patterns to be found in terms of writing style, product sentiment, or even grammar. We had some repairs to do.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>We started looking at some of our favorite SaaS products and searched for patterns. Surprisingly, though, many of such products did not have any patterns. However, this exercise helped us understand the subject and design our own set of principles for writing UX copy. As we continue revisiting our own UX copy, we share our learnings here\u003Cstrong> \u003C/strong>and hope that it helps you find a direction if you are in the same boat as we are. :)\u003C/p>\u003Ch2 id=\"first-things-first-defining-the-brand-voice\">First things first: Defining the brand voice\u003C/h2>\u003Cp>The concept of brand voice can be paralleled with a specific human’s voice. It has character, simplicity, and, most importantly, uniqueness. If you can understand \u003Cem>how\u003C/em> your brand is perceived by those outside the organization, especially customers, it will be extremely useful for you to define a brand voice. If you are not sure about how your brand is perceived, you can start by asking yourself three basic questions, as listed below.\u003C/p>\u003Col>\u003Cli>\u003Cstrong>Is our business doing something new and unique; is it a fresh take on something that already exists? Or is it another competitor in an already optimized industry? \u003C/strong>\u003Cbr>\u003Cem>This could determine if your brand’s language could sound positive and fresh or standardized.\u003C/em>\u003Cbr>\u003C/li>\u003Cli>\u003Cstrong>Which industry and type of audience are we catering to?\u003C/strong> \u003Cbr>\u003Cem>This could determine who your brand is talking to. Is it male teenagers, is it expecting mothers, is it working professionals or sportsmen?\u003C/em>\u003Cbr>\u003C/li>\u003Cli>\u003Cstrong>How do we want to appear? Professional and conscientious, or friendly and vibrant?\u003C/strong> \u003Cbr>\u003Cem>This could determine the general \u003Cu>tone\u003C/u> of the brand’s language.\u003C/em>\u003C/li>\u003C/ol>\u003Cp>Getting the answers to these questions will help you understand your brand’s personality. If you are struggling with these questions, you can conduct surveys or interviews with your customers. Once you have the answers, you’ll be able to understand what you want your brand to sound like.\u003C/p>\u003Ch2 id=\"principles-to-help-think-in-the-right-direction\">Principles to help think in the right direction\u003C/h2>\u003Cp>Your copy is going to be unique, just like your brand. However, here are a few principles, that we have designed for Chatwoot, that should help bring some sanity into the process of UX copywriting.\u003C/p>\u003Ch3 id=\"understand-the-user-mindset-%E2%80%93-at-every-little-step\">Understand the user mindset – at every little step\u003C/h3>\u003Cp>Always put yourself in the users' shoes and think about the specific point/mindset/problem they would be at when interacting with a specific page of your product. And offer a solution. E.g., If someone enters a wrong password, we give an error that their password was wrong, but it is also important to offer a solution like “Forgot password?” or “Try again”.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Try to sit with your team and do this exercise for every aspect of the product. The results may just blow your mind. 🤯\u003C/p>\u003Ch3 id=\"understand-the-purpose-of-placeholders\">Understand the purpose of placeholders\u003C/h3>\u003Cp>The placeholders (in form fields) have to be helpful. They must act like an example or a \u003Cstrong>nudge for your users to think in the right direction\u003C/strong>. Some things would still be standard, like name, email, etc. So, one of the three things can be done here:\u003C/p>\u003Col>\u003Cli>Skip the placeholder altogether if the field name/label is suggestive enough, as GitHub does it.\u003C/li>\u003C/ol>\u003Cfigure class=\"kg-card kg-image-card\">\u003Cimg src=\"https://www-internal-blog.chatwoot.com/content/images/2023/05/github-sign-in-page.png\" class=\"kg-image\" alt=\"github sign in page example\" loading=\"lazy\" width=\"808\" height=\"1098\" srcset=\"https://www-internal-blog.chatwoot.com/content/images/size/w600/2023/05/github-sign-in-page.png 600w, https://www-internal-blog.chatwoot.com/content/images/2023/05/github-sign-in-page.png 808w\" sizes=\"(min-width: 720px) 720px\">\u003C/figure>\u003Cp>2. If you do decide to write the placeholder, either give an example or give a helping hand. Try to hold the user’s hand during the process. For e.g., We have a 'personal message signature' setting available in Chatwoot, enabling which attaches an email signature with every email the agent sends through Chatwoot. The placeholder in this setting could give ideas to the user on how to write the signature. Something like: \u003Cem>\"Take a deep breath and start crafting your email signature here. You can include your title, social media links, contact deets, and, maybe, a touch of humor?”\u003C/em>\u003C/p>\u003Cp>3. Merge the placeholder and the field name, as Google does it.\u003C/p>\u003Cfigure class=\"kg-card kg-image-card\">\u003Cimg src=\"https://www-internal-blog.chatwoot.com/content/images/2023/05/google-sign-in-page.png\" class=\"kg-image\" alt=\"google sign in page example\" loading=\"lazy\" width=\"1424\" height=\"992\" srcset=\"https://www-internal-blog.chatwoot.com/content/images/size/w600/2023/05/google-sign-in-page.png 600w, https://www-internal-blog.chatwoot.com/content/images/size/w1000/2023/05/google-sign-in-page.png 1000w, https://www-internal-blog.chatwoot.com/content/images/2023/05/google-sign-in-page.png 1424w\" sizes=\"(min-width: 720px) 720px\">\u003C/figure>\u003Ch3 id=\"what-to-punctuate-and-when-to-ditch-it\">What to punctuate and when to ditch it?\u003C/h3>\u003Cp>Punctuation is good to maintain throughout. It shows sincerity and professionalism. It is a win-win for users who care about it and those who don’t. The possible exceptions here would be:\u003C/p>\u003Cul>\u003Cli>Headings and subheadings unless they turn out to be a really long sentence and demand a sentence structure for better understanding.\u003C/li>\u003Cli>Things that require you to wait for something or look forward to something, like loading messages. These can generally be affixed with “…”. For e.g., \"\u003Cem>Fetching messages...\u003C/em>\"\u003C/li>\u003C/ul>\u003Ch3 id=\"title-vs-sentence-case\">Title vs. sentence case\u003C/h3>\u003Cp>Both the title and sentence cases are important in their own ways. It's important to determine in what capacity do you need them to act. Here's our take:\u003C/p>\u003Cp>The title case is for establishing authority on the things that are indeed authoritative, \u003Cu>according to your brand\u003C/u>. Use it for the things that must demand attention – like a core feature. In Chatwoot, we are going to use the title case for settings pages of our core features, such as \"\u003Ca href=\"https://www.chatwoot.com/features/canned-responses?ref=www-internal-blog.chatwoot.com\">Canned Responses\u003C/a>\", \"Custom Attributes\", etc.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Other than that, sentence cases are great for UX as they are easier for the eyes to read. So, you can consider making them a standard everywhere.\u003C/p>\u003Ch3 id=\"humanize-the-writing\">Humanize the writing\u003C/h3>\u003Cp>This one’s a no-brainer. Here are a few points to remember:\u003C/p>\u003Cul>\u003Cli>Avoid jargon unless you have a specialized audience at the other end of the screen. It’s best to have relatable words. If jargon means the name of a feature, explain it in a sidebar/help text and link it with an explanatory doc if possible.\u003C/li>\u003Cli>Concise is good. Lacking character is not. You could write “Fetching results…” or you could write “Just a minute…laughing at your email address.” One of those stays longer with the user and makes them smile. Of course, keep the message consistent with the \u003Cem>personality \u003C/em>of your brand as determined in the first step. \u003C/li>\u003Cli>Avoid negative connotations. Sound positive. Build positive associations with your brand and keep the users positive and forward-looking always for a pleasant experience. E.g., It’s better to write, “\u003Cem>Let’s start by adding your first inbox.\u003C/em>” than “\u003Cem>You don’t have any inboxes.\u003C/em>”\u003C/li>\u003C/ul>\u003Ch3 id=\"keep-important-words-on-top\">Keep important words on top\u003C/h3>\u003Cp>This is because everyone is in a hurry and has short attention spans. When is the last time you read everything? You probably just scanned through the information. While scanning, we tend to subconsciously focus more on the first couple of words of every sentence. \u003C/p>\u003Cp>So before writing your product copy, we recommend laying out the most important takeaways first. Then, design your paragraphs keeping those important points on top and towards the starting of the subsequent sentences.\u003C/p>\u003Ch3 id=\"design-thoughtful-ctas\">Design thoughtful CTAs\u003C/h3>\u003Cp>CTAs are extremely important to inspire action. The best way to write and design any CTA is to make sure you catch the nerve of the customer. Other than that, here are some best practices:\u003C/p>\u003Cul>\u003Cli>The CTA should be easily distinguishable from the rest of the copy. It shouldn’t require effort on the user’s end to find it and take the required action.\u003C/li>\u003Cli>Use action verbs. “Create”, “Download”, “Sign up” are some basic examples.\u003C/li>\u003Cli>You can A/B test with an \u003Cem>\u003Cstrong>\u003Cstrong>\u003Cstrong>\u003Cstrong>\u003Cstrong>\u003Cstrong>\u003Cstrong>\u003Cstrong>extended version\u003C/strong>\u003C/strong>\u003C/strong>\u003C/strong>\u003C/strong>\u003C/strong>\u003C/strong>\u003C/strong>\u003C/em> of the CTA. For e.g., “\u003Cem>Sign up and start your free trial\u003C/em>” vs “\u003Cem>Sign up\u003C/em>”.\u003C/li>\u003C/ul>\u003Ch3 id=\"casual-is-nice-d\">Casual is nice! :D\u003C/h3>\u003Cp>If you can add a touch of friendly humor to your copy, go for it (unless it goes against your brand identity)! Just don’t overkill it by forcing it or using it for every piece of content. Let it appear only at a few places. Here are a couple of examples from our copy:\u003C/p>\u003Cul>\u003Cli>\u003Ccode>Filter delete error\u003C/code>: “Oops, looks like we can't save nothing! Please add at least one filter to save it.”\u003C/li>\u003Cli>\u003Ccode>emoji error message\u003C/code>: “Hmm, it seems we couldn't find any emoji that match your search. Perhaps try another keyword?”\u003C/li>\u003Cli>\u003Ccode>SEARCH_404\u003C/code>: “We couldn't find any labels that match your search. It's like searching for a unicorn, so try something else?”\u003C/li>\u003C/ul>\u003Ch3 id=\"write-with-clarity\">Write with clarity\u003C/h3>\u003Cp>Here are some good practices to structure your writing for maximum clarity:\u003C/p>\u003Cul>\u003Cli>Be straightforward. Write in simple language that everyone can understand.\u003C/li>\u003Cli>Use short sentences and paragraphs.\u003C/li>\u003Cli>Use active voice instead of passive voice.\u003C/li>\u003C/ul>\u003Ch3 id=\"consistency-really-is-the-key\">Consistency really is the key\u003C/h3>\u003Cp>Here are some points to keep in mind with regards to consistency:\u003C/p>\u003Cul>\u003Cli>Keep the language consistent throughout the product. This is important for building trust with users.\u003C/li>\u003Cli>Use the same terminology and phrasing across the product.\u003C/li>\u003Cli>Keep the copy consistent with the brand identity.\u003C/li>\u003C/ul>\u003Cp>That’s it, folks! These are the principles we are trying actively and consistently incorporate in our ongoing exercise to improving UX copy. As we learn new things, we will be sure to share them with you. Does your team have any principles you swear by? Let us know. ✉️\u003C/p>","https://www-internal-blog.chatwoot.com/content/images/2023/05/copywriting-guide.png",false,"2023-05-16T14:15:49.000+00:00","2023-05-24T09:35:42.000+00:00","2023-05-16T16:02:59.000+00:00","Writing content for a digital product means helping customers throughout their journey. This directly impacts retention, sales, and branding. We offer insights into how we are developing our principles and improving our product's copywriting game.","https://www.chatwoot.com/blog/principles-for-ux-copy",[30],{"id":31,"name":32,"slug":33,"profile_image":34,"cover_image":8,"bio":8,"website":8,"location":8,"facebook":8,"twitter":8,"meta_title":8,"meta_description":8,"url":35},"625d2cb84b8f26503f72dd28","Hricha Shandily","hricha","https://www-internal-blog.chatwoot.com/content/images/2023/03/Sticker-2.png","https://www-internal-blog.chatwoot.com/author/hricha/",[37,41],{"id":38,"name":39,"slug":39,"description":8,"feature_image":8,"visibility":9,"og_image":8,"og_title":8,"og_description":8,"twitter_image":8,"twitter_title":8,"twitter_description":8,"meta_title":8,"meta_description":8,"codeinjection_head":8,"codeinjection_foot":8,"canonical_url":8,"accent_color":8,"url":40},"6118da864b8f26503f72d530","blog","https://www-internal-blog.chatwoot.com/tag/blog/",{"id":5,"name":6,"slug":4,"description":7,"feature_image":8,"visibility":9,"og_image":8,"og_title":8,"og_description":8,"twitter_image":8,"twitter_title":8,"twitter_description":8,"meta_title":10,"meta_description":11,"codeinjection_head":8,"codeinjection_foot":8,"canonical_url":12,"accent_color":8,"url":13},{"id":31,"name":32,"slug":33,"profile_image":34,"cover_image":8,"bio":8,"website":8,"location":8,"facebook":8,"twitter":8,"meta_title":8,"meta_description":8,"url":35},{"id":38,"name":39,"slug":39,"description":8,"feature_image":8,"visibility":9,"og_image":8,"og_title":8,"og_description":8,"twitter_image":8,"twitter_title":8,"twitter_description":8,"meta_title":8,"meta_description":8,"codeinjection_head":8,"codeinjection_foot":8,"canonical_url":8,"accent_color":8,"url":40},"https://www-internal-blog.chatwoot.com/principles-for-ux-copy/",6,true,"[Founders’ guide] Principles for writing UX copy – Chatwoot","Writing content for a digital product means helping customers throughout their journey. This directly impacts retention, sales, and branding.",{"id":50,"uuid":51,"title":52,"slug":53,"html":54,"comment_id":50,"feature_image":55,"featured":23,"visibility":9,"created_at":56,"updated_at":57,"published_at":58,"custom_excerpt":59,"codeinjection_head":8,"codeinjection_foot":8,"custom_template":8,"canonical_url":60,"authors":61,"tags":68,"primary_author":71,"primary_tag":72,"url":73,"excerpt":59,"reading_time":74,"access":46,"comments":23,"og_image":8,"og_title":8,"og_description":8,"twitter_image":8,"twitter_title":8,"twitter_description":8,"meta_title":52,"meta_description":75,"email_subject":8,"frontmatter":8,"feature_image_alt":76,"feature_image_caption":8},"63ff45dc730b190d1c2d98bf","c52d705f-0fdc-41b6-9197-51f38802070c","Chatwoot is now SOC 2 Type II compliant","soc-2-type-ii-compliance","\u003Cp>We are thrilled to announce that Chatwoot is now SOC 2 Type II compliant. This is a result of over half a year of rigorous work and is a significant milestone for us. This is also a testament to our commitment to providing the highest level of security and compliance to our customers.\u003C/p>\u003Ch2 id=\"what-is-soc-2\">What is SOC 2? \u003C/h2>\u003Cp>SOC 2 is a widely recognized auditing standard developed by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA). It is designed to ensure that service providers have appropriate controls and processes in place to protect customer data and maintain the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of systems and information.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>There are two types of SOC 2.\u003C/p>\u003Ch3 id=\"soc-2-type-i\">SOC 2 Type I\u003C/h3>\u003Cp>These reports are designed to provide an overview of the design and implementation of controls the company have in place.\u003C/p>\u003Ch3 id=\"soc-2-type-ii\">SOC 2 Type II \u003C/h3>\u003Cp>These reports provide a more comprehensive evaluation of the effectiveness of controls over a period of time (usually 6-12 months). An external auditor will verify that these controls are followed during the audit period.\u003C/p>\u003Chr>\u003Cp>We decided to go for Type II because we take the security and privacy of our customers' data very seriously. This compliance involved rigorous testing and validation of our security controls and processes by an independent auditor. It also included a review of our policies and procedures, as well as an assessment of our physical, network, and application security.\u003C/p>\u003Ch2 id=\"what-does-this-mean-for-our-customers\">What does this mean for our customers?\u003C/h2>\u003Cp>With SOC 2 compliance, our customers can be assured that we are taking all necessary steps to protect their data and meet their compliance requirements. We understand that security and compliance are critical components of our customers' trust, and we are committed to maintaining the highest standards in these areas.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>This report also gives the following insights into how we deliver our products and services.\u003C/p>\u003Cul>\u003Cli>\u003Cstrong>Secure personnel\u003C/strong>: All employments in Chatwoot are in accordance with local laws and industry best practices. All personnel go through required background checks, confidentiality agreements and training programs. \u003C/li>\u003Cli>\u003Cstrong>Secure development\u003C/strong>: All product development in Chatwoot follows the appropriate secure development lifecycle principles.\u003C/li>\u003Cli>\u003Cstrong>Secure testing\u003C/strong>: Chatwoot has designated security and vulnerability testing programs for its production and internet-facing systems.\u003C/li>\u003Cli>\u003Cstrong>Cloud security\u003C/strong>: Chatwoot implements the cloud security requisites as per  SOC 2 standards.  \u003C/li>\u003Cli>\u003Cstrong>Compliance\u003C/strong>:  Chatwoot Inc is committed to providing secure products and services.\u003C/li>\u003C/ul>\u003Chr>\u003Cp>At Chatwoot, we believe that trust is earned through transparency and accountability, and we will continue to invest in our security and compliance programs to maintain the trust of our customers. We are excited to continue serving our customers with the same level of excellence that they expect from us.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Thank you for your continued trust in Chatwoot. \u003C/p>","https://www-internal-blog.chatwoot.com/content/images/2023/03/chatwoot-is-soc2-type2-compliant--1-.png","2023-03-01T12:32:28.000+00:00","2023-03-10T05:15:31.000+00:00","2023-03-03T13:04:02.000+00:00","SOC 2 is a widely recognized auditing standard developed by the AICPA. Our audit report ensures the security, processing, integrity, & confidentiality of user data. With Chatwoot, your data is in safe hands.","https://www.chatwoot.com/blog/soc-2-type-ii-compliance",[62],{"id":63,"name":64,"slug":65,"profile_image":66,"cover_image":8,"bio":8,"website":8,"location":8,"facebook":8,"twitter":8,"meta_title":8,"meta_description":8,"url":67},"60892745c8912c22b3f2073b","Sojan V Jose","sojanjose","https://www-internal-blog.chatwoot.com/content/images/2021/08/sojan-official.jpg","https://www-internal-blog.chatwoot.com/author/sojanjose/",[69,70],{"id":38,"name":39,"slug":39,"description":8,"feature_image":8,"visibility":9,"og_image":8,"og_title":8,"og_description":8,"twitter_image":8,"twitter_title":8,"twitter_description":8,"meta_title":8,"meta_description":8,"codeinjection_head":8,"codeinjection_foot":8,"canonical_url":8,"accent_color":8,"url":40},{"id":5,"name":6,"slug":4,"description":7,"feature_image":8,"visibility":9,"og_image":8,"og_title":8,"og_description":8,"twitter_image":8,"twitter_title":8,"twitter_description":8,"meta_title":10,"meta_description":11,"codeinjection_head":8,"codeinjection_foot":8,"canonical_url":12,"accent_color":8,"url":13},{"id":63,"name":64,"slug":65,"profile_image":66,"cover_image":8,"bio":8,"website":8,"location":8,"facebook":8,"twitter":8,"meta_title":8,"meta_description":8,"url":67},{"id":38,"name":39,"slug":39,"description":8,"feature_image":8,"visibility":9,"og_image":8,"og_title":8,"og_description":8,"twitter_image":8,"twitter_title":8,"twitter_description":8,"meta_title":8,"meta_description":8,"codeinjection_head":8,"codeinjection_foot":8,"canonical_url":8,"accent_color":8,"url":40},"https://www-internal-blog.chatwoot.com/soc-2-type-ii-compliance/",2,"Our audit report ensures the security, processing, integrity, & confidentiality of user data. With Chatwoot, your data is in safe hands.","announcment of soc2 compliance for chatwoot",{"id":78,"uuid":79,"title":80,"slug":81,"html":82,"comment_id":78,"feature_image":83,"featured":23,"visibility":9,"created_at":84,"updated_at":85,"published_at":86,"custom_excerpt":87,"codeinjection_head":8,"codeinjection_foot":8,"custom_template":8,"canonical_url":88,"authors":89,"tags":96,"primary_author":99,"primary_tag":100,"url":101,"excerpt":87,"reading_time":102,"access":46,"comments":23,"og_image":8,"og_title":8,"og_description":8,"twitter_image":8,"twitter_title":8,"twitter_description":8,"meta_title":80,"meta_description":8,"email_subject":8,"frontmatter":8,"feature_image_alt":8,"feature_image_caption":8},"61bff84d4b8f26503f72db7b","c4490692-1ed2-40b1-a9e4-e9eda6c4f2c9","Learnings from building a community around Chatwoot","building-a-community-around-a-product","\u003Cp>Building a community around a product is hard. It takes a good amount of effort to create a group of people enthusiastic about what you are building. Being opensource simplifies the process. However, continuing the progress without burnout is a balance. Here are some of the learning from building a community around \u003Ca href=\"https://twitter.com/chatwootapp?ref=www-internal-blog.chatwoot.com\">@chatwootapp\u003C/a>. \u003C/p>\u003Ch3 id=\"etiquette\">Etiquette\u003C/h3>\u003Cp>\u003Cbr>\u003Cstrong>Ground rules:\u003C/strong> Every product community should have some ground rules. It keeps the conversation sane. Adopting a code of conduct would help you when some abusive actors are in the group—whether or not to kick the person would be more straightforward.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>We adopted Contributor Covenant 4.0 for our contributors/community. You can read more about it \u003Ca href=\"https://www.contributor-covenant.org/version/1/4/code-of-conduct/?ref=www-internal-blog.chatwoot.com\">here\u003C/a>.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>\u003Cstrong>Be polite and build a genuine interest in people's problems:\u003C/strong> When people ask questions, provide feedback, or make changes, it is essential to give feedback as they are making an effort to fit the product in their use cases. They might be using it from a different angle that you have not thought of before. Having an open mind on product usage would help uncover hidden secrets. If you spend time understanding the pain and resonate with the situation, people would appreciate it, bringing positive energy to the group.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>\u003Cstrong>Work in threads:\u003C/strong> If you are using Slack / Discord, try to work on threads. Direct replies are often chaotic. If not, you would spend most of the time finding the needle in the haystack.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>\u003Cstrong>Use public channels only: \u003C/strong>We use \u003Ca href=\"https://github.com/chatwoot/chatwoot?ref=www-internal-blog.chatwoot.com\">Github\u003C/a> & \u003Ca href=\"https://discord.gg/cJXdrwS?ref=www-internal-blog.chatwoot.com\">Discord\u003C/a> at Chatwoot. Github is less intrusive as it doesn't allow you to send a personal message to a person, and it works asynchronously. For Discord, it is not the case. As it is chat-based, people expect to get immediate responses. I would suggest discouraging the people on DMs. Instead, ask them to move to a public channel.\u003C/p>\u003Ch3 id=\"managing-the-time-and-the-community\">Managing the time and the community\u003C/h3>\u003Cp>\u003C/p>\u003Cp>\u003Cstrong>Schedule time to work with the community:\u003C/strong> Instead of spending all day active in the community, try spending dedicated time with the community. This will give you focused time for community engagement and an uninterrupted time for the rest of your work. \u003Cbr>\u003Cbr>You don't have to be available every hour you are working. If your \"zone\" happens to be in the morning, you can disable the notifications in the morning and spend 1-2 hours every evening to make sure that you didn't miss anything.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>\u003Cstrong>Your goal is not to solve the problem immediately:\u003C/strong> If you are trying to solve a problem immediately, you might get lost in that, and the work you have been doing before will become pending. \u003Cbr>\u003Cbr>As humans, this situation would put you in a bad spot where you regret the time spent and would tend to overwork. The easiest way to solve this is to make sure that you have captured the problem in a Github[bug tracker] issue and leave the problem for a later time. \u003Cbr>\u003Cbr>If something takes more than 10 minutes of your time, then it is always better to start with an issue, collect your thoughts and record it properly. Send the issue link to the community member to acknowledge that their voice is heard. Even if the problem has a very small fix, I would suggest creating the issues first instead of fixing them, as the cost of a context switch might not be worth it.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>\u003Cstrong>Learn to say no: \u003C/strong>If you are an open-source project, you might see a lot of requests to help in custom work which might not even help the actual project. Sometimes people might push your boundaries. It is essential to understand that you are not obliged to work on it unless you wish to and it is perfectly fine to say no.\u003C/p>\u003Ch3 id=\"growing-the-community\">Growing the community\u003C/h3>\u003Cp>\u003C/p>\u003Cp>\u003Cstrong>Build promoters inside the community\u003C/strong>: It doesn't have to be you or your team who always reply to a question—building a group of people who is just as passionate as you would help in the long term. Help people to be product experts. \u003C/p>\u003Cp>\u003Cstrong>Reward the community members:\u003C/strong> Build a reward structure for the users' effort into the community. This doesn't need to be monetary or goodies. You can start with assigning specific badges for active users. Gamification can bring exponential outcomes. \u003C/p>\u003Cp>A good example for this is the \u003Ca href=\"https://productexperts.withgoogle.com/how-it-works?ref=www-internal-blog.chatwoot.com\">Google Product Experts\u003C/a> program encouraging people to answer user questions in the Google Help Communities\u003C/p>\u003Cfigure class=\"kg-card kg-image-card\">\u003Cimg src=\"https://www-internal-blog.chatwoot.com/content/images/2021/12/Screenshot-2021-12-19-at-7.54.29-PM.png\" class=\"kg-image\" alt loading=\"lazy\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1234\" srcset=\"https://www-internal-blog.chatwoot.com/content/images/size/w600/2021/12/Screenshot-2021-12-19-at-7.54.29-PM.png 600w, https://www-internal-blog.chatwoot.com/content/images/size/w1000/2021/12/Screenshot-2021-12-19-at-7.54.29-PM.png 1000w, https://www-internal-blog.chatwoot.com/content/images/size/w1600/2021/12/Screenshot-2021-12-19-at-7.54.29-PM.png 1600w, https://www-internal-blog.chatwoot.com/content/images/2021/12/Screenshot-2021-12-19-at-7.54.29-PM.png 2152w\" sizes=\"(min-width: 720px) 720px\">\u003C/figure>\u003Cp>Google Experts categorize their community contributors to Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum & Diamond incentivizing the effort from the members.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>A community can be a powerful weapon in building and growing your product. Hope these learning help you in building yours. \u003C/p>\u003Cp>Checkout our community at \u003Ca href=\"https://github.com/chatwoot/chatwoot?ref=www-internal-blog.chatwoot.com\">Github\u003C/a> & \u003Ca href=\"https://discord.gg/cJXdrwS?ref=www-internal-blog.chatwoot.com\">Discord\u003C/a>. If you have any thoughts or suggestions, please comment below or feel free to reach out to me.\u003C/p>","https://www-internal-blog.chatwoot.com/content/images/2021/12/undraw_Community_re_cyrm-1.png","2021-12-20T03:28:13.000+00:00","2022-09-20T09:17:05.000+00:00","2021-12-20T03:45:19.000+00:00","Building a community around a product is hard. It takes a good amount of effort to create an active group of enthusiastic people about what you are building. Being open source simplifies the process. However, continuing the progress without burnout is a balance. ","https://www.chatwoot.com/blog/building-a-community-around-a-product",[90],{"id":91,"name":92,"slug":93,"profile_image":94,"cover_image":8,"bio":8,"website":8,"location":8,"facebook":8,"twitter":8,"meta_title":8,"meta_description":8,"url":95},"1","Pranav Raj S","pranav","https://www-internal-blog.chatwoot.com/content/images/2023/08/2246121.jpeg","https://www-internal-blog.chatwoot.com/author/pranav/",[97,98],{"id":38,"name":39,"slug":39,"description":8,"feature_image":8,"visibility":9,"og_image":8,"og_title":8,"og_description":8,"twitter_image":8,"twitter_title":8,"twitter_description":8,"meta_title":8,"meta_description":8,"codeinjection_head":8,"codeinjection_foot":8,"canonical_url":8,"accent_color":8,"url":40},{"id":5,"name":6,"slug":4,"description":7,"feature_image":8,"visibility":9,"og_image":8,"og_title":8,"og_description":8,"twitter_image":8,"twitter_title":8,"twitter_description":8,"meta_title":10,"meta_description":11,"codeinjection_head":8,"codeinjection_foot":8,"canonical_url":12,"accent_color":8,"url":13},{"id":91,"name":92,"slug":93,"profile_image":94,"cover_image":8,"bio":8,"website":8,"location":8,"facebook":8,"twitter":8,"meta_title":8,"meta_description":8,"url":95},{"id":38,"name":39,"slug":39,"description":8,"feature_image":8,"visibility":9,"og_image":8,"og_title":8,"og_description":8,"twitter_image":8,"twitter_title":8,"twitter_description":8,"meta_title":8,"meta_description":8,"codeinjection_head":8,"codeinjection_foot":8,"canonical_url":8,"accent_color":8,"url":40},"https://www-internal-blog.chatwoot.com/building-a-community-around-a-product/",3,{"id":104,"uuid":105,"title":106,"slug":107,"html":108,"comment_id":104,"feature_image":109,"featured":23,"visibility":9,"created_at":110,"updated_at":111,"published_at":112,"custom_excerpt":113,"codeinjection_head":8,"codeinjection_foot":8,"custom_template":8,"canonical_url":114,"authors":115,"tags":117,"primary_author":120,"primary_tag":121,"url":122,"excerpt":113,"reading_time":102,"access":46,"comments":23,"og_image":8,"og_title":8,"og_description":8,"twitter_image":8,"twitter_title":8,"twitter_description":8,"meta_title":8,"meta_description":8,"email_subject":8,"frontmatter":8,"feature_image_alt":8,"feature_image_caption":8},"610cd41cb9956c0555c7f78e","378a4622-d030-4cfe-a78e-8d9fbab88201","Woot Journals: 2020 - The year in review","2020-year-in-review","\u003Cp>A blog about the progress we made in 2020.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>2020 was an overwhelming year for everyone globally due to a global pandemic, concerns over political unrest and racial injustice, climate change etc. Amidst all that, we have seen many heroic responses that gave us hope and helped us think positively.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>At Chatwoot, we have seen a surge in interest in the usage from developers and a wide variety of companies. Let us take a look back at what have done so far and what we think about the future of Chatwoot.\u003C/p>\u003Ch2 id=\"the-project\">The project\u003C/h2>\u003Cp>Our \u003Ca href=\"https://github.com/chatwoot/chatwoot?ref=www-internal-blog.chatwoot.com\">Github repository\u003C/a> has seen tremendous growth in 2020.\u003C/p>\u003Cul>\u003Cli>Stars went from ~2k to ~6.7k.\u003C/li>\u003Cli>The number of contributors has grown from \u003Cstrong>~30\u003C/strong> in Jan to \u003Cstrong>100+\u003C/strong> in December.\u003C/li>\u003Cli>Our application supports more than 25 different regional languages.\u003C/li>\u003Cli>We had more than 600 commits in the project last year.\u003C/li>\u003Cli>We released our mobile application on \u003Ca href=\"https://apps.apple.com/ug/app/chatwoot/id1495796682?ref=www-internal-blog.chatwoot.com\">iOS\u003C/a> and \u003Ca href=\"https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.chatwoot.app&hl=en&gl=US&ref=www-internal-blog.chatwoot.com\">Android\u003C/a>. Thanks to \u003Ca href=\"https://github.com/muhsin-k?ref=www-internal-blog.chatwoot.com\">Muhsin\u003C/a>, who took the complete ownership of the app and showed an extraordinary work.\u003C/li>\u003C/ul>\u003Ch2 id=\"the-product\">The product\u003C/h2>\u003Cp>At the beginning of the year, we were supporting only two customer conversation channels. Now we support seven different customer conversation channels including Website Live Chat, Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, SMS, Email and an API channel allowing developers to build custom workflows on top of Chatwoot. We now have a mini CRM which will enable you to see the profile of the people you are talking to and delight them with contextual support.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>We had releases every month. Here is a small recap on what we have released so far.\u003C/p>\u003Cfigure class=\"kg-card kg-embed-card\">\u003Ciframe scrolling=\"no\" marginheight=\"0\" marginwidth=\"0\" type=\"text/html\" src=\"https://www.youtube.com/embed/cPwhnp9S1Bs?autoplay=0&fs=0&iv_load_policy=3&showinfo=1&rel=0&cc_load_policy=0&start=0&end=0&origin=https://youtubeembedcode.com\" width=\"100%\" height=\"443\" frameborder=\"0\">\u003C/iframe>\u003C/figure>\u003Cp>This is how the design of widget evolved over time.\u003C/p>\u003Cfigure class=\"kg-card kg-image-card\">\u003Cimg src=\"https://www-internal-blog.chatwoot.com/content/images/2022/09/chatwoot_widget_design.png\" class=\"kg-image\" alt loading=\"lazy\" width=\"2000\" height=\"678\" srcset=\"https://www-internal-blog.chatwoot.com/content/images/size/w600/2022/09/chatwoot_widget_design.png 600w, https://www-internal-blog.chatwoot.com/content/images/size/w1000/2022/09/chatwoot_widget_design.png 1000w, https://www-internal-blog.chatwoot.com/content/images/size/w1600/2022/09/chatwoot_widget_design.png 1600w, https://www-internal-blog.chatwoot.com/content/images/2022/09/chatwoot_widget_design.png 2139w\" sizes=\"(min-width: 720px) 720px\">\u003C/figure>\u003Ch2 id=\"the-team-remote-work\">The team & remote work\u003C/h2>\u003Cp>Many countries were under complete lockdown for months, and it was necessary to figure out an alternate path for business continuance. Remote work became a necessity rather than a nice to have. We saw large companies announcing fully remote work, accelerators running cohorts remotely, newsroom running from their news reader's house providing flexibility and freedom to the people.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>It was a glad thing that our team embraced the concept of working remotely even before pandemic hit us. Our team has been working with various industry leaders remotely for more than three years. Moving on to completely remote work was not a new thing for us. Our team has not met in the last seven months due to travel restrictions in place. Still, we were able to get good progress in the product and the community.\u003C/p>\u003Ch2 id=\"the-future\">The future\u003C/h2>\u003Cp>With previous experience in the customer experience industry, our team has been talking to many people to understand what Chatwoot can do better to make their life easier. Here are a couple of observations we had:\u003C/p>\u003Cul>\u003Cli>\u003Cstrong>Privacy Concerns:\u003C/strong> With the introduction of data privacy regulations like GDPR & CCPA, the companies are concerned about sharing their customer data with third-party solutions. The need for self-hosted tools is on the rise.\u003C/li>\u003Cli>\u003Cstrong>Multiple tools, fragmented data:\u003C/strong> A surprising aspect we found during our interviews about the tools companies is that they all use more than one tool to interact with their customers. Most companies have a live chat tool, an email campaign tool, a social media tool etc. The customer data is fragmented.\u003C/li>\u003Cli>\u003Cstrong>Unexpected price hikes:\u003C/strong> There is no control over the companies' pricing of third-party tools. If it is related to their customer data, it is tough for them to migrate to other software.\u003C/li>\u003C/ul>\u003Cp>With Chatwoot, we can solve this problem by placing ourselves as a self-hosted customer data hub allowing companies to hang out without their customers from one place. We have a long way to go. With the team working full time on Chatwoot and the features planned for the next releases, the future of Chatwoot looks bright and exciting. We have a couple more exciting news to share with you. We will do that in the next couple of posts. Stay tuned!\u003C/p>","https://www-internal-blog.chatwoot.com/content/images/2021/08/long_way_to_go.png","2021-08-06T06:18:04.000+00:00","2022-09-05T17:28:29.000+00:00","2020-12-30T06:18:00.000+00:00","A blog about the progress we made in 2020. 2020 was an overwhelming year for everyone globally due to a global pandemic, concerns over political unrest and racial injustice, climate change etc…","https://www.chatwoot.com/blog/2020-year-in-review",[116],{"id":91,"name":92,"slug":93,"profile_image":94,"cover_image":8,"bio":8,"website":8,"location":8,"facebook":8,"twitter":8,"meta_title":8,"meta_description":8,"url":95},[118,119],{"id":38,"name":39,"slug":39,"description":8,"feature_image":8,"visibility":9,"og_image":8,"og_title":8,"og_description":8,"twitter_image":8,"twitter_title":8,"twitter_description":8,"meta_title":8,"meta_description":8,"codeinjection_head":8,"codeinjection_foot":8,"canonical_url":8,"accent_color":8,"url":40},{"id":5,"name":6,"slug":4,"description":7,"feature_image":8,"visibility":9,"og_image":8,"og_title":8,"og_description":8,"twitter_image":8,"twitter_title":8,"twitter_description":8,"meta_title":10,"meta_description":11,"codeinjection_head":8,"codeinjection_foot":8,"canonical_url":12,"accent_color":8,"url":13},{"id":91,"name":92,"slug":93,"profile_image":94,"cover_image":8,"bio":8,"website":8,"location":8,"facebook":8,"twitter":8,"meta_title":8,"meta_description":8,"url":95},{"id":38,"name":39,"slug":39,"description":8,"feature_image":8,"visibility":9,"og_image":8,"og_title":8,"og_description":8,"twitter_image":8,"twitter_title":8,"twitter_description":8,"meta_title":8,"meta_description":8,"codeinjection_head":8,"codeinjection_foot":8,"canonical_url":8,"accent_color":8,"url":40},"https://www-internal-blog.chatwoot.com/2020-year-in-review/",{"id":124,"uuid":125,"title":126,"slug":127,"html":128,"comment_id":124,"feature_image":129,"featured":23,"visibility":9,"created_at":130,"updated_at":131,"published_at":132,"custom_excerpt":133,"codeinjection_head":8,"codeinjection_foot":8,"custom_template":8,"canonical_url":134,"authors":135,"tags":137,"primary_author":140,"primary_tag":141,"url":142,"excerpt":133,"reading_time":74,"access":46,"comments":23,"og_image":8,"og_title":8,"og_description":8,"twitter_image":8,"twitter_title":8,"twitter_description":8,"meta_title":8,"meta_description":8,"email_subject":8,"frontmatter":8,"feature_image_alt":8,"feature_image_caption":8},"610cd3cdb9956c0555c7f781","06396b75-19d5-471b-bdbc-e90b2dd6bcbe","Woot Journals: How to decide pricing plans for an open-source product?","how-to-decide-pricing-plans-for-your-opensource-product","\u003Cp>\u003Cem>A blog about how Chatwoot pricing has evolved over time\u003C/em>\u003C/p>\u003Cblockquote>TLDR: Start selling services, identify the value you provide and decide pricing plans based on it.\u003C/blockquote>\u003Cp>In this blog post, let me describe how we make our pricing decisions at Chatwoot. This post should be more relatable for open-source products, rather than opensource libraries or frameworks.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Most of the people whom I talked to described to me a \u003Cstrong>value-based pricing framework\u003C/strong> which didn't make much sense to us, at that time.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Yes, SaaS businesses need to identify the value it provides to the user and price it correctly. But, how do you know what features or services are helpful, and how it improves the customer's businesses during your early stages?\u003C/p>\u003Cp>You don't! There is not enough information about how people are using your product and what they like about it. Alternatively, you can take a look at the competitors and see how their pricing plan works. This decision becomes even more complicated when you have an opensource product.\u003C/p>\u003Ch2 id=\"the-chatwoot-pricing-story\">The Chatwoot pricing story\u003C/h2>\u003Cp>When we started Chatwoot, We had two types of paid offerings in mind.\u003C/p>\u003Col>\u003Cli>\u003Cstrong>Chatwoot Cloud:\u003C/strong> A SaaS version where customers would pay for the features Chatwoot provides.\u003C/li>\u003Cli>\u003Cstrong>On-premise Plans:\u003C/strong> Support plans for On-Premise Chatwoot installations, which gives the users more flexibility and control over the data.\u003C/li>\u003C/ol>\u003Cp>Seeing the introduction of data privacy regulations like GDPR and CCPA, we started with on-premise plans initially. We decided to adopt an effort based pricing model. We were not charging for the features, but were charging for the support we offer. It was a comfortable option to start with. So we started selling the support plans for installation and upgrades.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>We estimated a 30-60 minutes worth of manual effort every month for a client with the automation we had in place. We started with a base plan of $20 per month. It was an experiment to see whether people were willing to pay us, and it did work. People started buying our support plans. Later, we figured the effort put vs margin we get is pretty slim, so we updated the pricing plan to $49 per month.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Soon, people started asking for customizations, custom integrations, branding etc. We introduced a new plan with $299 per month, which would provide additional customizations and priority features requests. This offering worked for a couple of customers. Later, when we looked at the effort we put into these custom installations vs the value people were receiving, the margin seemed unbalanced. It made us reevaluate our pricing plans. We reworked our pricing plans to introduce three different plans at $299, $499 and $999+ per month, which is what we have in place now.\u003C/p>\u003Ch2 id=\"what-we-learned\">What we learned ?\u003C/h2>\u003Cp>All these times, we have never asked our existing customers to pay more. They continue to be in the same plan they signed up. The revisions applied to new customers only.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>This approach has given us enough time and space to understand what people like and what they don't. It also gave us insights on how people use our product. There is less churn compared to conventional SaaS business where people close the account the moment they start experiencing problems.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>As more companies are planning open-source as their GTM strategy and the market starting to become more aware of on-premise support services, it has become relatively easier to sell these support plans. To price a product, you need to identify the value you provide. And to get there, you need customer adoption with a feedback loop. A support based pricing model fits well for this.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>We are still learning new lessons and fine-tuning these pricing models. And we will continue sharing as we chug along 😃.\u003C/p>","https://www-internal-blog.chatwoot.com/content/images/2021/08/confused-about-pricing.png","2021-08-06T06:16:45.000+00:00","2022-08-26T13:57:57.000+00:00","2020-09-12T06:17:00.000+00:00","A blog about how Chatwoot pricing has evolved over time\nTLDR: Start selling services, identify the value you provide and decide pricing plans based on it.\nIn this blog post, let me describe how we make our pricing...","https://www.chatwoot.com/blog/how-to-decide-pricing-plans-for-your-opensource-product",[136],{"id":91,"name":92,"slug":93,"profile_image":94,"cover_image":8,"bio":8,"website":8,"location":8,"facebook":8,"twitter":8,"meta_title":8,"meta_description":8,"url":95},[138,139],{"id":38,"name":39,"slug":39,"description":8,"feature_image":8,"visibility":9,"og_image":8,"og_title":8,"og_description":8,"twitter_image":8,"twitter_title":8,"twitter_description":8,"meta_title":8,"meta_description":8,"codeinjection_head":8,"codeinjection_foot":8,"canonical_url":8,"accent_color":8,"url":40},{"id":5,"name":6,"slug":4,"description":7,"feature_image":8,"visibility":9,"og_image":8,"og_title":8,"og_description":8,"twitter_image":8,"twitter_title":8,"twitter_description":8,"meta_title":10,"meta_description":11,"codeinjection_head":8,"codeinjection_foot":8,"canonical_url":12,"accent_color":8,"url":13},{"id":91,"name":92,"slug":93,"profile_image":94,"cover_image":8,"bio":8,"website":8,"location":8,"facebook":8,"twitter":8,"meta_title":8,"meta_description":8,"url":95},{"id":38,"name":39,"slug":39,"description":8,"feature_image":8,"visibility":9,"og_image":8,"og_title":8,"og_description":8,"twitter_image":8,"twitter_title":8,"twitter_description":8,"meta_title":8,"meta_description":8,"codeinjection_head":8,"codeinjection_foot":8,"canonical_url":8,"accent_color":8,"url":40},"https://www-internal-blog.chatwoot.com/how-to-decide-pricing-plans-for-your-opensource-product/",{"id":144,"uuid":145,"title":146,"slug":147,"html":148,"comment_id":144,"feature_image":149,"featured":23,"visibility":9,"created_at":150,"updated_at":151,"published_at":152,"custom_excerpt":153,"codeinjection_head":8,"codeinjection_foot":8,"custom_template":8,"canonical_url":154,"authors":155,"tags":157,"primary_author":160,"primary_tag":161,"url":162,"excerpt":153,"reading_time":163,"access":46,"comments":23,"og_image":8,"og_title":8,"og_description":8,"twitter_image":8,"twitter_title":8,"twitter_description":8,"meta_title":8,"meta_description":8,"email_subject":8,"frontmatter":8,"feature_image_alt":8,"feature_image_caption":8},"610cd36db9956c0555c7f773","0fdb7a08-bb7a-43fa-ba25-801b7e1e9abf","Woot Journals:  One year since open-sourcing Chatwoot","woot-journals-one-year-since-open-sourcing-chatwoot","\u003Cp>\u003Cem>Looking into the one year of open-sourcing Chatwoot.\u003C/em>\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Chatwoot is now one of the most popular open-source live chat software on Github. If you haven’t been following the story so far, here is the story, in a nutshell, to get you started.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Chatwoot started as a commercial project in 2016 and strived to help businesses provide exceptional customer support through Facebook messenger. The product inspiration came through the customer pain points which we observed while working in this space as a part of our previous gigs. Nevertheless, the project didn't culminate into a viable business and we shut shop in 2017.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>With the amount of sweat we put into the project, Chatwoot still stayed alive in our hearts. In 2019, as an impromptu decision, we ended up open-sourcing the project as a part of the #hacktoberfest. The story took a different twist then and Chatwoot went on to be a top post on Hackernews. Ever since then, the project has been growing at an incredible pace with almost 5k stars on Github currently.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Today marks a year since the initial commit for Chatwoot’s resurrection as an open-source project and so let's take a step back to look at Chatwoot's journey in the last year.\u003C/p>\u003Ch2 id=\"the-decision-to-go-open-source\">The Decision to go open-source\u003C/h2>\u003Cblockquote>How do you start a popular open-source project?\u003C/blockquote>\u003Cp>Over the last year, we might have told our story countless times. However, often, the larger story fails to capture the minute moments and the thought processes behind deciding to go open-source. Many a time, we have felt that the Chatwoot story as an answer to the question \u003Ccode>How did you decide to go open-source?\u003C/code>  leaves the questioner unsatisfied. That said, in all honesty, there was never a grand scheme behind the decision.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>In the second quarter of 2019, the core Chatwoot team was back together prototyping yet another SaaS product. It was in one of our regular sync-up calls that \u003Ca href=\"https://twitter.com/pranavrajs?ref=www-internal-blog.chatwoot.com\">@pranavrajs\u003C/a> floated the idea of making Chatwoot open-source. The idea didn’t attract any criticism, but there wasn’t too much enthusiasm in the air either, thanks to our Imposter Syndrome.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Our experience in open-source till that point was limited to being consumers. Being ardent fans of the code quality in open source projects like Vue.js and ruby on rails, we had our insecurities exposing the project to the whole world.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>With zilch expectations, we went through it like just another day in our lives and decided to commit the codebase to GitHub. We would leave it there while the team continued working on our next big thing, we had thought! ;).\u003C/p>\u003Ch2 id=\"ignition-ready-set-go\">Ignition: Ready Set Go\u003C/h2>\u003Cp>In August 2019, as unprepared as we were, Chatwoot codebase was brought out as a public repo. Our expectation of an uneventful day, quickly turned around, thanks to the spammers who got hold of an SES key from an old commit. The incident ended in raking up quite a surprise in the form of AWS billing alerts. We did act swiftly to mitigate the issue, but as far as the business plan behind open source goes, This is the story.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>October saw the repo getting some attention thanks to #hacktoberfest, which re-kindled the whole team's interest in Chatwoot. It even resulted in the team deciding to put on-hold the then on-going project and give Chatwoot our full attention for the next 2 months. We did the much-needed maintenance chores over the repo and ended up shipping the website live chat feature that we lacked in. The absence of other communication channels, especially website live chat, was one of our prime hypotheses behind the earlier failure of Chatwoot. Having been able to ship that feature in 2 weeks, amidst the newfound enthusiasm, is something the team is still extremely proud of.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>The ultimate unexpected kickstart, however, came in December in the form of \u003Ca href=\"https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21559197&ref=www-internal-blog.chatwoot.com\">Hackernews\u003C/a>, which we attribute as the start of Chatwoot as a serious open-source business.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>After Hacktoberfest, we saw the attention on our GitHub repo reducing despite the team shipping new updates. In all helplessness,  \u003Ca href=\"https://twitter.com/pranavrajs?ref=www-internal-blog.chatwoot.com\">@pranavrajs\u003C/a> gave it a final go on ShowHN one night and to our joy, we were received with much love from the community, a wonderful surprise for the whole team, and a sleepless night for \u003Ca href=\"https://twitter.com/pranavrajs?ref=www-internal-blog.chatwoot.com\">@pranavrajs\u003C/a>, replying to comments. Chatwoot hasn’t stopped growing ever since.\u003C/p>\u003Ch2 id=\"almost-a-year-later\">Almost a year later\u003C/h2>\u003Cblockquote>The work that the Chatwoot community does, matters!\u003C/blockquote>\u003Cp>Despite the adversities since the beginning of 2020, the Chatwoot community continues to generate moments that have carried us through these tough times. Working in isolation from a remote corner of the world, you might fail to see the impact you are creating, but testimonies like the following make us realize why we matter as a community.\u003C/p>\u003Cblockquote>\"I’m so glad I found your software. It’s a tremendous help for startups like me who, because of the global pandemic, had to shift from a physical store to online selling through social media. You guys will save my store as well as the jobs of my employees as we are now about to be efficient in addressing our customers’ inquiries. Again, I’m grateful. \"\u003C/blockquote>\u003Cp>We are what we are today, not just because of the core team but also because of our 70+ contributors to the codebase, the community members who have been helping us ship in multiple languages and businesses that have opted to go with Chatwoot.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Over the last 6 months, Chatwoot has outgrown itself from being a Facebook only chat-solution. We have also seen the community leveraging Chatwoot as a messaging platform for their conversational business need. From specific sectors like healthcare, banking, etc for their data privacy requirements to bot companies looking for a conversational frontend, we continue to see endlessly expanding use cases than we ever imagined for Chatwoot.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>With the flexibility of opensource, we continue to see the community tweak Chatwoot into even powerful solutions. We have been receiving some wonderful \u003Ca href=\"https://satchel.com/live-chat/?ref=www-internal-blog.chatwoot.com\">reviews\u003C/a> for our cloud version too as we continue to learn from all the comments from the community and work on our future versions.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>We might have been relatively quiet on our blog for the last couple of months. If it ever seems like we've slowed down a bit, you can rest assured that it's only because our team is working hard on some exciting features. As always, stay tuned for all the cool updates coming your way, real soon!\u003C/p>","https://www-internal-blog.chatwoot.com/content/images/2021/08/one-year-since-open-sourcing-chatwoot.png","2021-08-06T06:15:09.000+00:00","2022-08-26T13:58:11.000+00:00","2020-08-15T06:15:00.000+00:00","Looking into the one year of open-sourcing Chatwoot. Chatwoot is now one of the most popular open-source live chat software on Github. If you haven’t been following the story so far, here is the story…","https://www.chatwoot.com/blog/woot-journals-one-year-since-open-sourcing-chatwoot",[156],{"id":63,"name":64,"slug":65,"profile_image":66,"cover_image":8,"bio":8,"website":8,"location":8,"facebook":8,"twitter":8,"meta_title":8,"meta_description":8,"url":67},[158,159],{"id":38,"name":39,"slug":39,"description":8,"feature_image":8,"visibility":9,"og_image":8,"og_title":8,"og_description":8,"twitter_image":8,"twitter_title":8,"twitter_description":8,"meta_title":8,"meta_description":8,"codeinjection_head":8,"codeinjection_foot":8,"canonical_url":8,"accent_color":8,"url":40},{"id":5,"name":6,"slug":4,"description":7,"feature_image":8,"visibility":9,"og_image":8,"og_title":8,"og_description":8,"twitter_image":8,"twitter_title":8,"twitter_description":8,"meta_title":10,"meta_description":11,"codeinjection_head":8,"codeinjection_foot":8,"canonical_url":12,"accent_color":8,"url":13},{"id":63,"name":64,"slug":65,"profile_image":66,"cover_image":8,"bio":8,"website":8,"location":8,"facebook":8,"twitter":8,"meta_title":8,"meta_description":8,"url":67},{"id":38,"name":39,"slug":39,"description":8,"feature_image":8,"visibility":9,"og_image":8,"og_title":8,"og_description":8,"twitter_image":8,"twitter_title":8,"twitter_description":8,"meta_title":8,"meta_description":8,"codeinjection_head":8,"codeinjection_foot":8,"canonical_url":8,"accent_color":8,"url":40},"https://www-internal-blog.chatwoot.com/woot-journals-one-year-since-open-sourcing-chatwoot/",4,{"id":165,"uuid":166,"title":167,"slug":168,"html":169,"comment_id":165,"feature_image":170,"featured":23,"visibility":9,"created_at":171,"updated_at":172,"published_at":173,"custom_excerpt":174,"codeinjection_head":8,"codeinjection_foot":8,"custom_template":8,"canonical_url":175,"authors":176,"tags":178,"primary_author":181,"primary_tag":182,"url":183,"excerpt":174,"reading_time":163,"access":46,"comments":23,"og_image":8,"og_title":8,"og_description":8,"twitter_image":8,"twitter_title":8,"twitter_description":8,"meta_title":184,"meta_description":8,"email_subject":8,"frontmatter":8,"feature_image_alt":185,"feature_image_caption":8},"610cd2f8b9956c0555c7f763","dc5e7991-9e9f-4ca6-a8fa-8ff2c277b5ad","It's a bot story","its-a-bot-story","\u003Cp>\u003Cem>Building conversational bots into Chatwoot. \u003C/em>\u003C/p>\u003Ch1 id=\"it%E2%80%99s-a-bot-story\">It’s a bot story\u003C/h1>\u003Cp>Since the initial development days of Chatwoot, we have constantly asked ourselves how the platform should handle chatbots. Right from building a complete end to end solution for chatbots to just leaving it entirely open to the developers, with Chatwoot being the API platform alone, we have thought through numerous ideas over this.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Amid this, after open sourcing the project, we also saw the same question being increasingly posted to us by the community as well. To enter a space of clarity here, over the easter weekend, we decided to discuss the idea of chatbots in our product all-hands meeting. Here's what came out of it -\u003C/p>\u003Ch2 id=\"our-vision\">Our vision\u003C/h2>\u003Cp>We have always believed in chatbots being crucial in customer support - our faith only reinforced by a lot of companies releasing metrics about how bots reduced more than 30% of their customer enqueries with out the need for an agent intervention. Back in 2017 however, in the early days of Chatwoot, most of the bots available were very dumb. The state of the art implementations then relied on state machines and on an NLP platform like wit.ai. Nobody had it really figured out on how to go about chatbots. While the bots were wonderful for the 30% of time when it worked, when it didn’t, they proved to be nothing less than a nightmare for customers.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Our thoughts on the solution we wanted to build back then was a customer support platform where bots and agents could work together seamlessly. Essentially, instead of bots vs agents, both units co-existing peacefully and working in tandem to solve a query. Consequently, in the year 2017, since we didn’t have enough engineering capacity, we went ahead to built the agent platform, where most of our expertise lay. The idea was to bring in the bot platform later, which happened to not kickstart at that time. We believed back then that the world was still years away from having that one super AI the could solve it all and looking back at it now, the vision still seems to holds true.\u003C/p>\u003Ch2 id=\"bots-in-chatwoot\">Bots in Chatwoot\u003C/h2>\u003Cfigure class=\"kg-card kg-image-card\">\u003Cimg src=\"https://i.imgur.com/iedeIMj.png\" class=\"kg-image\" alt loading=\"lazy\">\u003C/figure>\u003Cp>Compared to 2016, chatbots have evolved tremendously from being conditionally scripted to ones that can retain context and sentiments across a whole conversation. We also have multiple closed source and open source tools with the likes of dialogueflow, microsoft bot framework, rasa etc available at our disposition to build them. Although the super smart customer support bot still seems to be a far away dream, most customer support platforms in the market like intercom, freshchat and drift, to name a few, offer some form of chatbot implementation in their suite. Along the same lines, in the pursuit of building a complete customer support solution, our team as well is working towards having similar bot capabilities built into Chatwoot.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Staying true to our product philosophy, our aim, as always, is to give our users utmost freedom in terms of their choice of options when it comes to bots. As opposed to trying to launch this as a mammoth feature, we will be addressing this in smaller iterations over our next few releases and will be listening to all your feedback. Besides that, we are also eager to have vendors developing their own solutions on top of Chatwoot. Idealy, we would love Chatwoot to remain as the best option for the next chatbot start up, over which they are able build a solution with out having to worry about developing a chat interface or conversation management capabilities.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>With that, as our first iteration over chatbots, Chatwoot 1.3.0 was released earlier this month constituting,  \u003Ccode>Agent Bot APIs\u003C/code>.\u003C/p>\u003Ch2 id=\"agent-bot-apis\">Agent Bot APIs?\u003C/h2>\u003Cblockquote>Agent Bot APIs will let you easily integrate any Bot platform into Chatwoot.\u003C/blockquote>\u003Cp>Agent Bots, in essence, are virtual agents that you could add to your Chatwoot inbox along with your support agents. In any agent bot connected inbox, the bot will first receive the message from the customer before it appears to the agents in their inbox. The bot decides whether it has the confidence to continue the conversation and tries to resolve it. In case it can’t, it then routes the conversation back to an agent and continues to provide assistance to agents while they try to resolve the conversation.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>The \u003Ccode>1.3.0\u003C/code> release supplies necessary APIs for the above functionality to work, over which developers can have their solutions. This is particularly focused at vendors and enthusiasts who don’t mind getting their hands dirty. We also hope to get the agent bots platform turn into a marketplace where developers can build custom bot implementations quickly. In our upcoming releases, we look to continue our work over Agent Bots with further integrations and UI options.\u003C/p>\u003Ch2 id=\"implementing-an-agent-bot-in-chatwoot-with-rasa\">Implementing an Agent Bot in Chatwoot with Rasa\u003C/h2>\u003Cp>Among all the solutions we have explored for building conversational AI into Chatwoot, the one that stands at the top of our list is Rasa. We have been closely following them since their inception, also since their story is extremely relatable to us. Furthermore, being a compteley open source solution, they would be our top recommendation, if you are to ever build a chatbot of your own.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Soon after the release of agent bot API’s, our team tried to hack together an integration with rasa platform. Here's a screen cast to run you through the process-\u003C/p>\u003Cp>\u003Cbr>\u003C/p>\u003Cfigure class=\"kg-card kg-embed-card\">\u003Ciframe src=\"https://www.youtube.com/embed/KE4nKgepO_k\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen width=\"100%\" height=\"512px\" frameborder=\"0\">\u003C/iframe>\u003C/figure>\u003Cp>You can explore the demo project by following this \u003Ca href=\"https://github.com/Chatwoot/rasa-agent-bot-demo?ref=www-internal-blog.chatwoot.com\">link\u003C/a>. We hope to see the exciting ideas you will come up by building on top of the Chatwoot \u003Ca href=\"https://www.chatwoot.com/developers/api/?ref=www-internal-blog.chatwoot.com#tag/AgentBot\">agent bot apis\u003C/a>. As always, do keep sharing your feedback and suggestions as we continue building our chatbot story 🤖.\u003C/p>","https://www-internal-blog.chatwoot.com/content/images/2021/08/its-a-bot-story.png","2021-08-06T06:13:12.000+00:00","2022-09-20T09:29:43.000+00:00","2020-04-19T06:14:00.000+00:00","Building conversational bots into Chatwoot. It’s a bot story Since the initial development days of Chatwoot, we have constantly asked ourselves how the platform should handle chatbots. Right…","https://www.chatwoot.com/blog/its-a-bot-story",[177],{"id":63,"name":64,"slug":65,"profile_image":66,"cover_image":8,"bio":8,"website":8,"location":8,"facebook":8,"twitter":8,"meta_title":8,"meta_description":8,"url":67},[179,180],{"id":38,"name":39,"slug":39,"description":8,"feature_image":8,"visibility":9,"og_image":8,"og_title":8,"og_description":8,"twitter_image":8,"twitter_title":8,"twitter_description":8,"meta_title":8,"meta_description":8,"codeinjection_head":8,"codeinjection_foot":8,"canonical_url":8,"accent_color":8,"url":40},{"id":5,"name":6,"slug":4,"description":7,"feature_image":8,"visibility":9,"og_image":8,"og_title":8,"og_description":8,"twitter_image":8,"twitter_title":8,"twitter_description":8,"meta_title":10,"meta_description":11,"codeinjection_head":8,"codeinjection_foot":8,"canonical_url":12,"accent_color":8,"url":13},{"id":63,"name":64,"slug":65,"profile_image":66,"cover_image":8,"bio":8,"website":8,"location":8,"facebook":8,"twitter":8,"meta_title":8,"meta_description":8,"url":67},{"id":38,"name":39,"slug":39,"description":8,"feature_image":8,"visibility":9,"og_image":8,"og_title":8,"og_description":8,"twitter_image":8,"twitter_title":8,"twitter_description":8,"meta_title":8,"meta_description":8,"codeinjection_head":8,"codeinjection_foot":8,"canonical_url":8,"accent_color":8,"url":40},"https://www-internal-blog.chatwoot.com/its-a-bot-story/","It’s a bot story | Building conversational bots into Chatwoot","Building conversational bots into Chatwoot.",{"id":187,"uuid":188,"title":189,"slug":190,"html":191,"comment_id":187,"feature_image":192,"featured":23,"visibility":9,"created_at":193,"updated_at":194,"published_at":195,"custom_excerpt":196,"codeinjection_head":8,"codeinjection_foot":8,"custom_template":8,"canonical_url":197,"authors":198,"tags":200,"primary_author":203,"primary_tag":204,"url":205,"excerpt":196,"reading_time":163,"access":46,"comments":23,"og_image":8,"og_title":8,"og_description":8,"twitter_image":8,"twitter_title":8,"twitter_description":8,"meta_title":8,"meta_description":8,"email_subject":8,"frontmatter":8,"feature_image_alt":8,"feature_image_caption":8},"610cd27ab9956c0555c7f753","7a3f9fa6-65d4-49ae-affe-ea9ba8203304","A new decade and the road ahead","new-decade-and-the-road-ahead","\u003Cp>\u003Cem>Welcoming a new decade with some exciting news from Chatwoot.\u003C/em>\u003C/p>\u003Cp>It’s 2020 and the decade has begun with the world around us in turmoil. With rising political uncertainties across the globe and a warming planet that’s presenting us with new challenges, we all need to buckle up. However, the way communities have come together in these difficult times serve as the much-needed reassurance that it’s surely not the end of the road and that not all hope is lost.  We will persist and thrive together as a community, like always.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>With half of our team traveling through south-east Asia right in the midst of the Corona outbreak,  this post has been in draft for way longer than it should have been. Nevertheless, now everyone’s back home, settled and are happy to share with the community some exciting news in the midst of this.\u003C/p>\u003Ch2 id=\"premium-support-plans\">Premium support plans\u003C/h2>\u003Cp>Ever since the start of the journey, we have been asking ourselves the question of whether we should focus more on a hosted solution or on making our self-hosted solution more accessible. On the hosted front, there are a ton of products out there that offer similar functionality and features like Intercom, Freshchat, Zendesk Chat etc. In contrast to these players, we stand tall by being open source and providing users the flexibility to have on-premise installations, with 100% data in your control. Drawing from this, to focus more on making the setup of self-hosted Chatwoot easier,  we are introducing two premium support options:\u003C/p>\u003Cblockquote>The support plus plan is targeted at SMBs who want to use Chatwoot for their support ( available at an Early bird pricing : $20/month). The installation of Chatwoot on your Heroku account will be assisted by our engineers who will also take care of updates whenever a newer version is released, as long as you continue with the plan.\u003C/blockquote>\u003Cblockquote>On the other hand, the enterprise support plan is focused at businesses that would want priority support via email/calls. The base plan starts at 299$/month and pricing is customized based on your requirements.\u003C/blockquote>\u003Cp>The above being said, all this doesn’t mean that we have stopped working on the hosted version. We are still working out the niggles with our early bird testers before we widely open it to the public. Do shoot us an email at \u003Ccode>sales@chatwoot.com\u003C/code>, if you don’t mind checking out  bleeding edge software.\u003C/p>\u003Ch2 id=\"chatwoot-goes-mobile\">Chatwoot goes mobile\u003C/h2>\u003Cblockquote>Early previews of Chatwoot mobile apps & Mobile SDKs\u003C/blockquote>\u003Cfigure class=\"kg-card kg-image-card\">\u003Cimg src=\"https://i.imgur.com/ktqPN0j.png\" class=\"kg-image\" alt loading=\"lazy\">\u003C/figure>\u003Cp>Providing support on the go is key for all small business owners. We had this realization right at the start and that’s probably why we had an iOS and Android app for Chatwoot under development all this while. Now, We are pretty close to giving an early preview, so do watch out for our updates in the upcoming weeks. You can also check the progress on our \u003Ca href=\"https://github.com/chatwoot/chatwoot-mobile-app?ref=www-internal-blog.chatwoot.com\">git repo\u003C/a>. We are also building out our \u003Ca href=\"https://github.com/chatwoot/android-sdk?ref=www-internal-blog.chatwoot.com\">Mobile SDKs\u003C/a> starting with android.\u003C/p>\u003Ch2 id=\"twitter-integration-twitty-gem\">Twitter Integration & Twitty Gem\u003C/h2>\u003Cp>\u003Cbr>\u003C/p>\u003Cfigure class=\"kg-card kg-embed-card\">\u003Ciframe scrolling=\"no\" marginheight=\"0\" marginwidth=\"0\" type=\"text/html\" src=\"https://www.youtube.com/embed/RwNzvRvGP8o?autoplay=0&fs=0&iv_load_policy=3&showinfo=1&rel=0&cc_load_policy=0&start=0&end=0&origin=https://youtubeembedcode.com\" width=\"100%\" height=\"443\" frameborder=\"0\">\u003C/iframe>\u003C/figure>\u003Cblockquote>Finally the Twitter channel is available on Chatwoot.\u003C/blockquote>\u003Cp>At the IndiaOS conference, we received multiple requests to build a Twitter inbox into Chatwoot. Building a Twitter integration has always been in the back of our mind. Since Facebook & Twitter alone constitute the majority of the support tickets received via social media, the integration made perfect sense.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Over the course of the last month, we have actively worked towards releasing this integration. As we worked with Twitter API, looking at the available gems, we felt a lack of support for some of the use cases we wished to solve. This, in turn, has pushed us to release \u003Ca href=\"https://github.com/chatwoot/twitty?ref=www-internal-blog.chatwoot.com\">\u003Ccode>Twitty\u003C/code>\u003C/a>, yet another open-source gem to support the Twitter business APIs. More on this will be shared in a separate article that explains our architecture decisions behind Twitty.\u003C/p>\u003Ch2 id=\"other-january-milestones\">Other January Milestones\u003C/h2>\u003Cblockquote>1.1.0 the best Chatwoot release we ever made 🍎😉\u003C/blockquote>\u003Cp>In January, we shipped a bunch of features in our best ever release, 1.1.0. This includes agent online status in the chat widget, conversation continuity through email, storage support for GCS, Azure, among others. Do try and give us a shout out with your thoughts.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>We also made our first appearance in a conference, sharing the Chatwoot story at the IndiaOS event in Bangalore.  We are also looking forward to sharing the story and meeting our community in various forums over the coming months.\u003C/p>\u003Ch2 id=\"and-the-road-ahead\">And The road ahead\u003C/h2>\u003Cp>Start of this year is pretty exciting as we are starting to see Chatwoot installations being used in production. We also have few partners who are building their product offerings on top of Chatwoot. The product feedback and the bug reports from these users, have been of immense value. We have been working hard to address the bugs identified and incorporate the changes requested into our product pipeline.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>All this progress did make us think about the direction which we are headed. And we have arrived at a conclusion. Rather than competing over feature comparison pages, we will be sticking to our strengths. Over the course of next few months, the journey will be all about building a minimum viable software offering, which offers strong data privacy attributes and complete control for the people who are using it. As always super thrilled to share this journey with you all.\u003C/p>","https://www-internal-blog.chatwoot.com/content/images/2021/08/new-decade-2020.png","2021-08-06T06:11:06.000+00:00","2022-08-26T13:58:27.000+00:00","2020-02-19T06:11:00.000+00:00","Welcoming a new decade with some exciting news from Chatwoot. It’s 2020 and the decade has begun with the world around us in turmoil. With rising political uncertainties across the globe and a warming planet that…","https://www.chatwoot.com/blog/new-decade-and-the-road-ahead",[199],{"id":63,"name":64,"slug":65,"profile_image":66,"cover_image":8,"bio":8,"website":8,"location":8,"facebook":8,"twitter":8,"meta_title":8,"meta_description":8,"url":67},[201,202],{"id":38,"name":39,"slug":39,"description":8,"feature_image":8,"visibility":9,"og_image":8,"og_title":8,"og_description":8,"twitter_image":8,"twitter_title":8,"twitter_description":8,"meta_title":8,"meta_description":8,"codeinjection_head":8,"codeinjection_foot":8,"canonical_url":8,"accent_color":8,"url":40},{"id":5,"name":6,"slug":4,"description":7,"feature_image":8,"visibility":9,"og_image":8,"og_title":8,"og_description":8,"twitter_image":8,"twitter_title":8,"twitter_description":8,"meta_title":10,"meta_description":11,"codeinjection_head":8,"codeinjection_foot":8,"canonical_url":12,"accent_color":8,"url":13},{"id":63,"name":64,"slug":65,"profile_image":66,"cover_image":8,"bio":8,"website":8,"location":8,"facebook":8,"twitter":8,"meta_title":8,"meta_description":8,"url":67},{"id":38,"name":39,"slug":39,"description":8,"feature_image":8,"visibility":9,"og_image":8,"og_title":8,"og_description":8,"twitter_image":8,"twitter_title":8,"twitter_description":8,"meta_title":8,"meta_description":8,"codeinjection_head":8,"codeinjection_foot":8,"canonical_url":8,"accent_color":8,"url":40},"https://www-internal-blog.chatwoot.com/new-decade-and-the-road-ahead/",{"id":207,"uuid":208,"title":209,"slug":210,"html":211,"comment_id":207,"feature_image":212,"featured":23,"visibility":9,"created_at":213,"updated_at":214,"published_at":215,"custom_excerpt":216,"codeinjection_head":8,"codeinjection_foot":8,"custom_template":8,"canonical_url":217,"authors":218,"tags":220,"primary_author":223,"primary_tag":224,"url":225,"excerpt":216,"reading_time":74,"access":46,"comments":23,"og_image":8,"og_title":8,"og_description":8,"twitter_image":8,"twitter_title":8,"twitter_description":8,"meta_title":8,"meta_description":8,"email_subject":8,"frontmatter":8,"feature_image_alt":8,"feature_image_caption":8},"610cd10cb9956c0555c7f72e","950f2329-8158-400a-8de5-01f632eb31b0","Red pill or Blue pill? Answering an acquisition offer","answering-an-acquistion-offer","\u003Cp>\u003Cem>Thoughts on the acquisition offer for Chatwoot from a prominent player in Helpdesk SaaS.\u003C/em>\u003C/p>\u003Cp>For those not familiar with the analogy here, the red pill, together with it's opposite, the blue pill, is a popular cultural meme derived from a \u003Ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQ1_IbFFbzA&ref=www-internal-blog.chatwoot.com\">scene in the 1999 film The Matrix\u003C/a>. It’s a metaphor symbolizing a choice between the “red pill”, representing a life of harsh knowledge and brutal truth of reality contrary to the “blue pill”, a life of luxurious security and tranquil happiness.\u003C/p>\u003Ch2 id=\"the-backstory\">The Backstory\u003C/h2>\u003Cblockquote>\"Saw you guys on HackerNews, how would the word ‘exit’ sound next to your resume?\"\u003C/blockquote>\u003Cp>The last two weeks had been pretty busy for us - juggling between managing our inboxes with a ton of exploratory emails from VC firms and receiving user feedback. Amidst all the interesting emails, the one titled \u003Ccode>“Selling Chatwoot?”\u003C/code>, particularly caught our attention. Besides the candid title, the email, we noticed, had also been sent directly from the inbox of a CEO we admired. Soon enough, we ended up getting on call over the thread.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>The idea for them was straightforward. They wanted to acquire us since Chatwoot is highly complementary to their product offering. They also believed that the acquisition could accelerate the company's engineering efforts.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>We put the question out for the whole team to discuss: \u003Ccode>The red pill or the blue pill?\u003C/code>\u003C/p>\u003Ch2 id=\"the-choice\">The Choice\u003C/h2>\u003Cblockquote>We want to keep building this for the long term.\u003C/blockquote>\u003Cp>We wanted the decision on this to be unanimous. After one whole year of being in the dark and another, spent building this software, guess it would have been easy for the team to go for the glimmer of the limelight.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>It was indeed a happy moment when the whole team was together on the idea that we weren’t going to take the easy exit. The reasoning was simple, we as a team believed, we were still only scratching the surface and didn’t have the slightest idea on where this could go.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Most importantly, we didn’t want to spend the rest of our lives wondering \u003Ccode>what it could've been\u003C/code>.\u003C/p>\u003Ch2 id=\"the-road-ahead\">The Road Ahead\u003C/h2>\u003Cblockquote>So the red pill all the way. Now what?\u003C/blockquote>\u003Cp>Reiterating from the last post, we are striving for continued progress, together with our wonderful community. Over the last few weeks, we have seen interest from projects wanting to build on top of Chatwoot - We have been rooting for the success of these projects, working closely with them. On the other hand, we are also gearing up to release some fresh updates in the upcoming weeks including \u003Ccode>email collection forms\u003C/code>, \u003Ccode>mobile apps\u003C/code> and a \u003Ccode>hosted version\u003C/code>. Exciting times await!\u003C/p>\u003Cp>As I meditate on the events from the past week, the optimist in me believes that this could well be our “\u003Ca href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Facebook?ref=www-internal-blog.chatwoot.com#Sales_negotiations\">facebook’s no to yahoo acquisition offer\u003C/a>” moment while the realist in me can't help but think if this would become another story that's forgotten.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Either way, ain’t it fun watching it all unfold as we steer through this journey together?\u003C/p>","https://www-internal-blog.chatwoot.com/content/images/2021/08/red-pill-blue-pill.png","2021-08-06T06:05:00.000+00:00","2022-08-26T13:58:39.000+00:00","2019-12-15T06:05:00.000+00:00","Thoughts on the acquisition offer for Chatwoot from a prominent player in Helpdesk SaaS. For those not familiar with the analogy here, the red pill, together with it's opposite, the blue pill, is a popular cultural meme derived from a…","https://www.chatwoot.com/blog/answering-an-acquistion-offer",[219],{"id":63,"name":64,"slug":65,"profile_image":66,"cover_image":8,"bio":8,"website":8,"location":8,"facebook":8,"twitter":8,"meta_title":8,"meta_description":8,"url":67},[221,222],{"id":38,"name":39,"slug":39,"description":8,"feature_image":8,"visibility":9,"og_image":8,"og_title":8,"og_description":8,"twitter_image":8,"twitter_title":8,"twitter_description":8,"meta_title":8,"meta_description":8,"codeinjection_head":8,"codeinjection_foot":8,"canonical_url":8,"accent_color":8,"url":40},{"id":5,"name":6,"slug":4,"description":7,"feature_image":8,"visibility":9,"og_image":8,"og_title":8,"og_description":8,"twitter_image":8,"twitter_title":8,"twitter_description":8,"meta_title":10,"meta_description":11,"codeinjection_head":8,"codeinjection_foot":8,"canonical_url":12,"accent_color":8,"url":13},{"id":63,"name":64,"slug":65,"profile_image":66,"cover_image":8,"bio":8,"website":8,"location":8,"facebook":8,"twitter":8,"meta_title":8,"meta_description":8,"url":67},{"id":38,"name":39,"slug":39,"description":8,"feature_image":8,"visibility":9,"og_image":8,"og_title":8,"og_description":8,"twitter_image":8,"twitter_title":8,"twitter_description":8,"meta_title":8,"meta_description":8,"codeinjection_head":8,"codeinjection_foot":8,"canonical_url":8,"accent_color":8,"url":40},"https://www-internal-blog.chatwoot.com/answering-an-acquistion-offer/",{"id":227,"uuid":228,"title":229,"slug":230,"html":231,"comment_id":227,"feature_image":232,"featured":23,"visibility":9,"created_at":233,"updated_at":234,"published_at":235,"custom_excerpt":236,"codeinjection_head":8,"codeinjection_foot":8,"custom_template":8,"canonical_url":237,"authors":238,"tags":240,"primary_author":243,"primary_tag":244,"url":245,"excerpt":236,"reading_time":74,"access":46,"comments":23,"og_image":8,"og_title":8,"og_description":8,"twitter_image":8,"twitter_title":8,"twitter_description":8,"meta_title":246,"meta_description":8,"email_subject":8,"frontmatter":8,"feature_image_alt":8,"feature_image_caption":8},"610cd1bfb9956c0555c7f742","6a5764c9-93a2-4530-a219-669dc6d78671","Building in the open","building-in-the-open","\u003Cp>\u003Cbr>The story of a failed startup that turned into a trending open-source project. \u003Cbr>\u003Cbr>We released Chatwoot on \u003Ca href=\"https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21559139&ref=www-internal-blog.chatwoot.com\">Hackernews\u003C/a> and remained in the top 15 for over a day. A dream start for our small team right? But what happened over the last few days surely wasn’t an overnight success. Over the coming weeks, we will be sharing our journey so far,  where we are headed and everything in the middle.\u003Cbr>\u003C/p>\u003Ch3 id=\"in-a-nutshell\">In a nutshell\u003C/h3>\u003Cblockquote>Chatwoot is a customer support tool for instant messaging channels which can help businesses to provide exceptional customer support.\u003C/blockquote>\u003Cp>This was Chatwoot’s tagline when we first released it in 2017. At the time, Chatwoot was a Rails application in a private repo, built by 4 friends - all software engineers, with no prior marketing or sales experience. We hacked on the product during our free time, integrated different channels, talked to multiple prospects, but never made a single cent. And, like most startups, Chatwoot failed. We closed shop.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Fast forward 2019. We decided, instead of letting the code rust in a private repo, why not make the project open source?\u003Cbr>\u003C/p>\u003Cp>The decision was made during the \u003Ca href=\"https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/?ref=www-internal-blog.chatwoot.com\">#hacktoberfest 2019\u003C/a> and we were in for a pleasant surprise. Chatwoot attracted contributions from over 30 countries around the world. It became a trending project on HN, with our \u003Ca href=\"https://github.com/chatwoot/chatwoot?ref=www-internal-blog.chatwoot.com\">git repo\u003C/a> gaining over 1000+ stars in 2 days and best of all, got a lot of love from the community.\u003Cbr>\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Now, a failed project is back on track and the prospects are looking great. Our team is back to actively working on the project. We are building it in the open and getting a lot of ideas and contributions from the community.\u003C/p>\u003Ch3 id=\"what%E2%80%99s-next\">What’s next\u003Cbr>\u003C/h3>\u003Cp>It’s still early days for Chatwoot, but what's transpired over the last couple of weeks has made us feel more responsible towards this project and the community that showed us this love.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>\u003Cbr>We will be pledging more time to Chatwoot. We will be working with the community to build an open alternative to software behemoth who sells overpriced bloated software. While doing this we might fail or succeed, but guaranteed that we will do it together.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>\u003Cbr>And for sure we will have a story to share.\u003Cbr>\u003C/p>","https://www-internal-blog.chatwoot.com/content/images/2021/08/camping.png","2021-08-06T06:07:59.000+00:00","2022-09-20T09:31:59.000+00:00","2019-11-28T06:09:00.000+00:00","The story of a failed startup that turned into a trending open-source project. We released Chatwoot on Hackernews and remained in the top 15 for over a day. A dream start for our small team, right?","https://www.chatwoot.com/blog/building-in-the-open",[239],{"id":63,"name":64,"slug":65,"profile_image":66,"cover_image":8,"bio":8,"website":8,"location":8,"facebook":8,"twitter":8,"meta_title":8,"meta_description":8,"url":67},[241,242],{"id":38,"name":39,"slug":39,"description":8,"feature_image":8,"visibility":9,"og_image":8,"og_title":8,"og_description":8,"twitter_image":8,"twitter_title":8,"twitter_description":8,"meta_title":8,"meta_description":8,"codeinjection_head":8,"codeinjection_foot":8,"canonical_url":8,"accent_color":8,"url":40},{"id":5,"name":6,"slug":4,"description":7,"feature_image":8,"visibility":9,"og_image":8,"og_title":8,"og_description":8,"twitter_image":8,"twitter_title":8,"twitter_description":8,"meta_title":10,"meta_description":11,"codeinjection_head":8,"codeinjection_foot":8,"canonical_url":12,"accent_color":8,"url":13},{"id":63,"name":64,"slug":65,"profile_image":66,"cover_image":8,"bio":8,"website":8,"location":8,"facebook":8,"twitter":8,"meta_title":8,"meta_description":8,"url":67},{"id":38,"name":39,"slug":39,"description":8,"feature_image":8,"visibility":9,"og_image":8,"og_title":8,"og_description":8,"twitter_image":8,"twitter_title":8,"twitter_description":8,"meta_title":8,"meta_description":8,"codeinjection_head":8,"codeinjection_foot":8,"canonical_url":8,"accent_color":8,"url":40},"https://www-internal-blog.chatwoot.com/building-in-the-open/","Building in the open | Chatwoot",1775212113069]