Szymon Korytnicki, software developer and entrepreneur, presents:

2018
Richard asks you official UK driving license exam questions
Messenger

Richard is my favourite chatbot. You can talk with Rick right now. I have a few special reasons to highlight Richard among other chatbots I created.

His nature fits his job very well. I enjoy conversational interfaces, but they are not solution for every problem in user experience. However, learning answers to driving license exam questions feels like a perfect case for a chatbot. Richard is your friend, always ready to ask you. He will remember your errors and repeat questions with you.

Business-wise, this chatbot emerged from collaboration with United Kingdom's Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency (DVSA). DVSA allows me to use always up to date questions database for small royalty fee. Fair deal, I enjoy open data. What is even more interesting, I want to check if pure chatbot experience will attract significant number of customers. Is it possible to turn chatbot alone into sustainable business? Time will tell.

These two issues are closely related to my previous project. I created public transport chatbot for my home town, Gdansk. It was early experiment with Messenger Platform bringing some local media presence. It was not sustainable from business point of view. Other cities were reluctant to collaborate, making open data de facto blocker and disabling horizontal growth. For me, Richard is a logical next step in my research in chatbots, user experience, business and open data.

Update, June 2019: I decided to close the project after a year. It was too difficult to drive traffic to the bot, in a very crowded market, especially to a business with so low LTV. Richard was an interesting project, engaging and built with chatblocks. It was successful in any dimension other than profitability :)

2018
Chatblocks is the declarative, React-inspired Node.js framework for Messenger chatbots
Open source Messenger

Chatbots are just another type of user interface. At least if we think about chatbots as yet-another-UI, we can simplify development in many ways. I believe that we can take good practices and developer experience from React to chatbots.

Chatblocks allows you to separate presentational layer and other server-side tasks. With this approach, learning curve for your team decreases. Chatblocks treats messages as representation of some state. It does not care about your implementation of webhooks, database integration, NLP et cetera. With its convenient React-style API, you can build your chatbots declaratively, reuse components and write code you actually like to read. It means you can build chatbots nearly as fast as in Chatfuel or Pushletter, for a fraction of the price, but with all elasticity and possibilities of the custom chatbot.

I really enjoy working on this project. It emerged from my passion for front-end development and declarative programming.
Second release is based on TypeScript. It is modern monorepo with additional utilities. Complex changes bring better IDE support and even thinner API layer.

For non-technical readers: Chatblocks is a tool which makes chatbot development fun. It enables developers to work faster, because they can express things in more convenient way. Take a look at this code sample. This is perfectly valid Chatblocks component. If you have seen a chatbot and you understand some HTML, you are able to tell what it does. Congratulations, you are now a chatbot programmer!

2017
Pushletter allows you to create your newsletter on Messenger
Sold SaaS Messenger

Pushletter is an attempt to prove that Messenger Platform ≠ chatbots. It is special software: meta-system, software creating software. Pushletter generates customizable newsletter-chatbot for your fanpage. It includes all growth tools available in Messenger ecosystem.
Think "Mailchimp for Messenger".

Pushletter was sold in November 2018.

2016
SUPP System manages legal clinic at the University of Gdansk
SaaS Legal tech Polish

Law students and teachers of my Alma Mater team up together in legal clinic called SUPP (short for Students Legal Clinic in Polish). SUPP helps the disadvantaged with their legal problems and questions for free. I joined SUPP and created online solution to allow students to collaborate online, effectively restructuring the organization.

SUPP System is a content management system (or framework) alleviating all pains related to managing centralized, paper-based organization: doing paperwork, constant chaos, lack of remote management and, as a result, slow processes. They are now all gone.
It is also huge and complex revolution in the inner workings of the clinic: it brings real-time statistics, assigning cases, instant notifications. Users quickly noticed subtle values like clarity, transparency and ability to work remotely.
It is more than merely a switch from paper to computer.

I am very proud that I managed to release this project. It is successful socialpreneurship experiment with measurable results and sprinkles of genuinely good design when it comes to the process of its adoption. , SUPP System helped with solving almost 300 cases and is the biggest project I made pro publico bono.