1987. Myles Leighton and Jennifer Ganther became friends as freshmen in high school. The friendship was natural fit as they both saw the world differently. Nothing was out of the box. There was never a box.
2017. Myles is a practical behavioral economist and product manager. Jen runs the family defense contracting business. One year prior they decided to disrupt a market or two.
On their augmented reality project, they were looking for a way to market platform access to local bars and restaurants in Austin, TX. However, Myles spent countless hours on his buoy chair in front of the computer, tediously searching websites for email addresses and phone numbers and they also took help of VPS servers for running applications on a 24/7 desktop.
“Having to go through and individually search for contact information on each one of these businesses’ website was an incredible pain.” Leighton states, “This process took up a large portion of my time that could have been easily spent having fun somewhere else. Furthermore, if I want top of the funnel info I have to pay a lead gen company a small fortune.”
Sometimes, they need to use separate servers like Hola Connect for smoothly running the process.
In the marketing world today, finding contact information of businesses can be done by three main techniques- manually, using an email scraper system, or consulting a corporate lead generation business. An email scraper system effectively “scrapes” the web for contact information based on the type of business the user is searching for. However, the outputted lists are often unreliable as they are full of typos and inaccurate results.
As for the large lead generation businesses, the results are much more accurate and relevant than the email scraper because a manual team is constantly searching for the contact information in the background. But due to this needed manpower, the cost of this service is incredibly high and only larger companies with the necessary capital are able to utilize their services.
Left with no options, Myles and Jen thought, “What about the small startups and middlemen in the business game? Why can’t there be a system that combines the lists generated by the cheaper, automated email scrapers while still offering the precision and relevancy of larger lead generation businesses?”
Thus, the idea for SugarBot was born. The duo decided to test the idea of a cutting-edge system that delivers premium contact information or leads using artificial intelligence, machine learning, and natural language processing to improve the time and money cost of this critical part of business. As it turns out, customer validation of the prototype revealed interesting findings.
Feeding SugarBot torrents of data and letting the cloud-powered artificial intelligence crunch for accuracy and relevancy, outputs come easy. It’s free to use the SugarBot platform and from there you can simple drop in terms that identify your target audience. You can create marketing lists and push them over to your CRM and you can also add more data feeds and users through webhost.
SugarBot’s chief engineer, Barrett Simms, states, Sugar Bot uses AI technology to perpetually scan various search APIs and data repositories for contact information, which is then stored in a super database. SugarBot offers a complete customer acquisition dashboard to help you find people and businesses, track your communication progress, and perfect it, and provide reporting. The AI tells you the next step so you no longer have to be a marketing expert.
Myles measured the performance of the system after Barrett and their data scientist, Hyejee Bae, tweaked it to its present patent pending state. The findings were glorious. Finally, there is high relevancy, ridiculous time savings, and a start up on a shoe string can afford to use it.
Adding some final touches from his behavioral economics repertoire, Myles leveraged a series of principles that he designed into the front and back end system to keep the user experience light, rewarding, and immersive. There is plenty of autonomy to create and execute your own strategies, you can make your work product your own, and feel very happy and rewarded along the way.
Jen adds a cherry on the top with her experience in the defense contracting world. “It is very difficult to find people and resources offshore, especially when you don’t know the language,” claims Jen. She developed a natural fitting multi-language component to the system. According to Myles and Jen, “We once used SugarBot to get us contact information for all of the coffee shops in Italy. We sent them an email thanking them for existing. Nothing like real Italian coffee.”
By combining machine learning, AI technology, and viral behavioral techniques, Sugar Bot helps marketers and businesses reach people and businesses relevant to their preferences and patterns instantly, all at an exceptionally low cost. Although in its early stages, Sugar Bot is already showing promising potential of becoming the world’s most effective customer lead acquisition platform