The avid listeners of this podcast would know that I don't do interviews with people I don't actually know in person, with the exception of one business-savvy MMA fighter. As it turned out, the guest on this episode is another worthy exception. The person I'm referring to is Mikael Yang, the co-founder of ManyChat. By some fated scheduling twist, Mikael and I ended up on the same call. After an awkward start, we finally figured things out. Being a fan of the software, I was excited to have Mikael on the podcast and ask all those ManyChat questions I had tucked away. Here's a preview of our discussion. How did Manychat start? ManyChat traces its roots back to a messaging platform called Telegram, one of the first messengers to open up their APIs. Mikael and his partners thought that people would want to use the platform to broadcast marketing messages. By October 2015, ManyChat was already at 20K bots and enjoyed 50% growth on a month per month basis. In November, it was able to scale up to 30K bots. This steady growth led to the opportunity to join a startup accelerator program that helped the company scale and grow. ManyChat for Facebook Messenger was launched on April 2016. Mikael and his co-founders had to make a very hard decision to migrate to Facebook since they were already getting good traction on Telegram but they took the plunge. "And obviously if you wanna be the biggest and best marketing platform, you have to work the biggest social network." , he explained. Today there are 400K Facebook Business pages connected to ManyChat in over 100 countries worldwide, with 150 million subscribers to those pages. Why is Facebook Messenger the "future" in terms of messenger marketing? There are tw