The Kukie bot teaches you how to build a startup

Whether you’re bootstrapping a passion project or in search of seed funding from venture capitalists, chances are your startup needs help and guidance, and the chatbot Kukie wants to talk you through how to launch a fast-growing business in a short time.

Using a combination of natural language, carousels, and buttons, Kukie connects people to 300 startup resources in 40 categories, like Angel.co syndicates and services that help you find a cofounder. People who chat with Kukie can learn how to design a logo, make a pitch deck, launch a product, and how to build an app or chatbot.

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Chat is a powerful way to guide step-by-step guided processes. Get stuck along the way or find yourself in need? Talk to Kukie.

“Bots have the power to lead the users to do an action much stronger than a website or an app,” cocreator Aditya Ahluwalia told VentureBeat via email. Chatbots like Kukie, Ahluwalia went on to say, “have the power to reshape DIY” instruction.

Kukie was made by Rishabh Bose and Ahluwalia, a pair of startup founders in New Delhi, India. Together the two created HappyBatua, a business-to-consumer (B2C) grocery platform, the location-based recommendation app DIKY (Do I Know You), and Sentiments, a Tinder-style feedback tool.

Ahluwalia has been involved with half a dozen startup projects in the past five years. One of the biggest lessons Ahluwalia learned building startups is enshrined in the bot, he said.

“Keep your product easy to understand, intuitive, instant gratification based, good looking, and most importantly useful, and it’s bound to work,” he said.

The single biggest difference between Kukie and past projects, he said, is the speed with which a bot can be deployed, and just how how easy it is to create a bot.

Kukie went from idea to minimally viable product in one week and was able to train artificial intelligence and test the bot with chatbot and startup-centered Facebook groups and WhatsApp communities in two weeks. Since the bot went live on June 28, at least 2,500 Facebook Messenger users have chatted with Kukie.

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“All you need to have is sound knowledge on the theme of your bot and how to structure information well in a conversation as this is the new user experience,” Ahluwalia said. “Proof of this is Kukie, which was built without any line of code and was able to get so much love from the community,” he said.

A new version of Kukie that is better able to hold a conversation and collects startup resource suggestions is due out in the coming weeks, Ahluwalia said.