How HOOD Can Reduce the Pains of Moving Home

Moving can be stressful. HOOD’s vision is to create a global marketplace and chatbot assistant to make the process of the moving home more efficient with less moving pains.

We all know the insane roller coaster of emotions involved in moving. Day one, the stress starts kicking and you feel like there’s no way to control the process. Where do I start? Where do I go? Who do I call? Panicking, you fall into a Google Black Hole searching for things things like best moving companies in my area, forwarding mail to my new address, disconnecting and reconnecting utilities. Meanwhile, you still have tons of planning and things to prepare for your move. YIKES!

Everything you need for planning a move lives in one chat.

Google is a great tool but it can also be information OVERLOAD. SO many websites, blogs and Youtubers are giving you recommendations, suggestions, and other endless information to pile onto your to-do list. This is the moment when you wish you had a personal moving advisor. Someone to spoon-feed you all the tailored information and things you need to move. Someone to do all the organizing for you rather than having to remind myself to get things done. An informative superhero who is available 24/7. This is what sparked our excitement exactly two years ago.

I can’t believe how fast time has flown by since the start of this incredible journey. In the beginning, we asked ourselves if this is another mobile and/or web app. But who wants to organize  their move on a desktop when everyone spends nearly all their time on their phones to communicate with people? And, who wants to download another yet app on his phone, only to use it maybe 3 times and forget about it? The major question was, How can we find a Global Moving Advisor that’s not just another app.  Like many startups before us, we were confronted with millions of questions.

The core idea is that HOOD can eliminate some of the moving pains and to reduce the stress associated with a move. Also, HOOD can pull from a multitude of diverse sources to provide homemovers the most personalized moving service. We want to establish a trustworthy global moving advisor.

How did the Facebook community help us improve HOOD?

In 2016, Facebook launched Chatbots in the Messenger platform. It allowed businesses to deliver automated customer support, ecommerce guidance, interesting content and interactive experiences.

So, we identified a need for improving the home moving experience and built a chatbot on Messenger. We decided to use Google’s Dialogflow first to test the market and later look into additional Artificial Intelligence (AI) services.

A year later, we launched in San Francisco and within 2 months, we achieved 5% market share. As a passionate UX strategist, it was incredible to see how well these users interacted with the chatbot and used HOOD to achieve their moving goals. This only pushed us to improve the experience for our users to exceed their expectations. With each interaction, our chatbot  became a responsive personality delivering a robust guide to the homemovers. From a typical GUI (Graphical User Interface) approach, we moved forward into the conversational UI thinking.

Assist and Search

The core objectives of HOOD are Assist and Search. Simplify, clarify, and speed up that part of the process the home mover and moving supplier.

Assist: HOOD can book, coordinate, source information on your behalf.

Search: HOOD quickly find the most suitable businesses, places and things that are relevant for homemovers and suppliers.

HOOD automatically remembers and structures important information from homemovers conversations. In the process of helping you do things, HOOD learns a lot about the homemovers–what is important in your move, which restaurants you like, and so on. When it comes to planning your move vs needing to book a mover last minute, HOOD has the ability to efficiently search and understand things about you. This enables HOOD to be a great personal moving assistant versus just a moving planner. The AI behind the logic is meant to reduce time spent planning your move so that it should shorten your effort to 2 minutes max per task.

We are deeply passionate about helping you get things done, but in the process we also want to build a truly different and personal index on the world that helps to reduce the pains of moving.

Stay tune for more updates shortly!

Peace & Out, Armin ✌

If you're looking to move, be sure to connect with HOOD.

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