Show HN: Pivots and millions later, I built a lambda to start WhatsApp chats

[ramikalai]

https://compose.im/lead-router

I've been working on my startup for years to no avail. Raised VC money and burned through millions - now built a simple service that lets you add a "chat to us" button (or can hook to your forms) to launch a WhatsApp chat.

The key here is that the button can open chats with different WhatsApp numbers based on rules you can set.

These rules can be based on the website visitor's geography, language, time spent on your site or even your business's office hours.

Can also hook onto existing forms and use form fields in the rules too.

Try it out on our site by clicking the chat to us button and send over a message if you'd like to get this setup on your site.

[ttoinou]

Is Whatsapp API so hard that its worth it to pay a service instead of coding it directly with the API ?

[ramikalai → ttoinou]

We don't build on top of WhatsApp Business API - we enable sales teams to use WhatsApp personal and WhatsApp Business accounts to talk to clients. This is something that lots of businesses prefer doing for higher touch relationships.

[stevenae]

In the interest of ShowHN integrity:

"Off topic: blog posts, sign-up pages, newsletters, lists, and other reading material. Those can't be tried out, so can't be Show HNs. Make a regular submission instead."

Is there anything here that can be tried out?

[ramikalai → stevenae]

There is - it just involves us helping get you setup. We haven't built the UI side of things for self-serve so a quick setup call and we can then configure things in the backend for you directly

[sarupbanskota]

Why do you call it "a lambda"? Perhaps clearer as "WhatsApp router for your sales team"

[ramikalai → sarupbanskota]

Didn't fit in the title haha - just wanted to emphasise that its just serverless

[RadiozRadioz → ramikalai]

I don't really know why you would want to emphasize that. For people interested in the product, knowing the backend is serverless is irrelevant. For people interested in the technology, "serverless" and "lambda" convey virtually nothing.

[ramikalai → RadiozRadioz]

I wanted to emphasise as usually the product that works is the "simplest" - we made lots of pivots and wrote lots of code before we came up with this more simple solution