20+ AWESOME ideas for your next Messenger project

My experience with Messenger started over a year ago when I deployed first bot after watching F8 conference. I felt like it was quite natural transition for me - I am a front-end developer and now I would become a creator of more advanced experience. I think Facebook triggered major revolution in how people like me think about user experience. They focused many minds on conversational commerce and therefore sparked many opportunities for creative start-ups. Messenger became the new Frontier.

How to turn this barren area into arable land? When thinking about making business with Messenger, I see basically three ways:

simple project - creating basic product, revolutionary relatively to what we've seen before, but very "meh" when you are really (really!) into Messenger trends. My Pushletter.net (basically newsletter for Messenger) is such a product. It's simple, yet still revolutionary for many traditional marketers. It just works.
complex project - creating product that's revolutionary relatively both to traditional marketing and to Messenger marketing. In my opinion WeChat was such a project. They changed the way the Chinese live. Now it's time to go even further. Warning: using hashtags like AI or NLP does not make your project more complex.
auxiliary project - delivering traditional (I mean, non-Messengerish) products for growing ecosystem of Messengerish businesses. Namely: useful software, interesting articles etc.

This is the thinking framework you should use to generate opportunities. I showed you how to think, now let's see some practical implications:

Messenger marketing is not only about bots or some marketing tricks. It's whole ecosystem ranging from apps embedded in webviews, new UX and UI practices, programming paradigms to creative copywriting.

What I'm getting at is you don't have to be a marketer or programmer to make awesome projects (uhm, money) with Messenger Platform. Forget about chatbots too! This is both liberating and constraining thought: problem I recently faced is the sea of ideas for new activities.

inspirational list of random stuff that can make a difference in your current business. This list of fast-food-like ideas never ends. These ideas are just a few practical implications of aforementioned thinking framework.I spent a year with this platform and am seriously tired of seeing this article title Did you know? You can automate #something on Messenger!!! again. I feel like I should wrap up this period and move forward - thus, (and to justify my clickbait title) I would like to provide you with set of ideas. These are not AWESOME PROJECT IDEAS, but hey, you don't have to swim in dollars from day one. This is just an

SaaS ideas

making software based on single Chatfuel function or API documentation. These two are so rich that we can basically wrap one function into a project people would like to pay for. Newsletter for Messenger, solution to reply to comments, bot designer, Messenger intelligent automated chat app. Chatfuel is really cool, but as the industry develops, even a different UI can be a deciding factor for your client (think of Trello vs other kanban boards). Thousands of ideas appearing
better stats for conversational commerce. There should be also some new KPIs invented too - i.e. number of messages sent to acquire user or personalization level required to make a sale. I can conjure them up endlessly (not aimlessly, as this is good idea for some blog post). You can evangelize your "KPI" and build SaaS for this community.
some fancy chatbot, of course. Bot based on images, video, sound etc. Bot based on smell would be really cool. I miss bots that actually help me in some way and not only draw my attention to tiny screen.
chatbot extensions - reusable webviews or buttons (postbacks) for bots.
integrations with CRMs, Magento, WooCommerce, Twitter etc. I created WordPress integration for Pushletter.
and more!

Opinionated Medium articles

Debunking Messenger as a bad platform to acquire new users (this is false, but draws attention)
Endless Zero UI vs UI debate. Feel free to push any option, as they are both valid in some contexts.
Messenger vs Snapchat (UI, UX, fonts, money, copying solutions) or any other app
Exploring tiny bits of conversational commerce - for example creating Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of instant messaging age (fonts you use affects the way you think), writing about correct wording, explore ethymology or quantitative stylistics. Just pick some dust-covered books about literature and turn old knowledge into revolutionary idea.
Marketing automation in Messenger - cases, tools, ideas...
Lists of best practices
Lists of worst practices
List of successful cases
Writing about news in the Platform. Reading API for developers is enough to be few months before many influencers
In general it's really good to be title-driven. Just go to sample news website and think how the theme can relate to Messenger.

Clicking still matters.

Life

Become Messenger coach. Create a blog or newsletter (or pushletter!) on Messenger and become a self-called expert. Create Facebook group, fanpage, Twitter or Instagram profile, organize local conference.
Create software house and sell bots

Software packages

serious, scalable wrapper of Messenger Platform API. There's still no React for bots.
set of tools for Webview apps that feel native for Messenger (like SASS-compatible CSS styles; basically Bootstrap for Messenger)
webview app JavaScript framework
declarative bot framework. Be creative.
another Microsoft Bot Framework for many IM apps

Thanks for reading this article. If you always skip article body for some reason, please remember three important points:

Instant messaging is the new frontier of marketing
You can invent new products that are either simple, complex or auxiliary. I explained what I mean above.
Messenger Platform is huge thing. Stop focusing on chatbots. No matter what you do for a living, just pick some topic related to your field and enrich your business with new product or activity.