MessageCrafter

Generate personalized thank-you notes for your customers!

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The Idea ❤️ 🖊️ 💌

Isn’t it nice to get a hand written thank you note in the mail? I wanted to capture this feeling in a tool that I could provide to small business owners who spend a lot of time communicating with their customers. My idea was to use AI to incorporate a business’s brand with personalized customer information. Rather than buying a generic hallmark card, business owners can generate a personalized message for a fraction of the price. It also makes them stand out because they can create a message in seconds, and get something with a fun style instead of a bunch of data and bullet points.

The Challenge ⚠️ 🤖 🧠

Google’s Bard LLM was a key technology I used for MessageCrafter. It has amazing capabilities, but sometimes it makes errors similar to how a person would. That is why I wanted to give a human the final say, so they could double check each message for accuracy. Reading several messages is also a lot quicker than trying to creatively write a few of them. Certain types of information are also trickier to fit in certain styles of writing, so generating several outputs at once can mitigate frustration if there is a mismatch. I wanted MessageCrafter to be a delightful experience for the business owner, and the customer who is supporting them.

The Impact 🌳 💰 ⏰

There’s a meme that a rogue AI might wipe out humanity. One rebuttal is that, artificial super intelligence might save humanity by solving climate change. This application does not solve climate change, but it helps by preventing people from buying hallmark cards and saving trees. I think the “thank you card” industry could use some disruption. I hope that MessageCrafter has a big impact on small businesses who generate jobs and contribute dynamism to our society. One way that stores can stand out is with excellent customer communication and adoption of new technology. A fun way to keep in touch, share information, and confirm details - keeps everyone in the community open and engaged.

The Climb Ahead 🧗‍♂️

Current Limitations of Message-Crafter

  • Only works for US customers in USD
  • Limit of businesses under 400 customers
  • Output is limited, so does not work for very large orders
  • MessageCrafter only pull up your 100 most recent orders
  • Works for orders, and not bookings
  • Still in Closed Beta, working on testing, integrating payment for credits (with square of course,) then getting it to be an approved Square partner app

Do you want to read more? 🤓

Here are some questions you may have if you are interested in this application...

  • Is my data secure?
    • We encrypt all access tokens, have only READ not WRITE access, and never store any customer, order, or merchant data on the app or in our databases. Only non identifying data is sent to Google servers.
  • Can MessageCrafter send Emails, Texts, or DMs for me?
    • While this is certainly possible, I wanted to have humans in the loop and a person to have the final say for all messaging. This is very important to double check errors as this new AI technology evolves. Also I do not want to make a tool used to spam people with more useless information and waste time, but a tool that helps save time and make information more useful.
  • How about generating a custom image with a message, like a lot of cards have?
    • This was an idea I had as well. At the end of the day, I wanted to focus on utility and saving people’s time. Generating an image and sending it out would take a lot more compute, and data, and cost more for businesses and customers - and while it would be entertaining it does not solve a pressing problem. I am sure this could be something that could be integrated in a service in the future
  • Do I need a Square account and a Square store to use MessageCrafter?
    • Yes. Millions of people have Square businesses, and using Square to manage all of your orders makes it really easy to pull all the data needed for a message quickly and conveniently - rather than having to manually put in, or tediously import data for messages.
  • Did you build this by yourself?
    • Yes, I had this idea by talking to my friend Joe from ogclimblife.com who has a Square store. I enter a lot of hackathons because I love playing with new technology and building useful things that help people. Since I did all of the product and visual design, as well as coding and presentation, I had to limit MessageCrafter to something relatively simple but still powerful to make it function in such a short time.

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