Poncho

» see poncho.is as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

The chatbot year was 2016, and in Turkey it showed up in the technology press and nowhere else. WhatsApp was already the default here and Messenger was a tab inside Facebook, so a bot with jokes about the American morning commute had nowhere to land. Poncho was a New York product made for a specific New York year, and that year did not travel.

It started in 2013 inside betaworks, the New York studio that incubated it, as a weather service delivered by email and text message. Kuan Huang built the first version. The forecast itself was ordinary data, bought in and reformatted. The product was the cat: an orange animal in a yellow raincoat who told you it was going to rain and then said something unrelated about pizza. People signed up for the voice, which was the correct read of what weather apps are actually for, given that nobody needs a second opinion about the sky.

When Facebook opened Messenger to bots in 2016, Poncho was one of the handful that journalists could name without checking their notes, and through 2016 and most of 2017 it was the demo everyone used to argue that conversational software had arrived. In 2017 it went on Planet of the Apps, Apple Music's show where founders pitched to Gwyneth Paltrow and will.i.am, and came away with $2 million. Sam Mandel, by then the chief executive, later told Fast Company the thing never reached critical mass and that the team had struggled to build a product that was independently compelling.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the cat in the raincoat ~

Poncho's output was written, not generated. Somebody sat down and wrote the lines, which is why the horoscopes were funny and why the bot could describe a humid Tuesday as a bad hair day without sounding like a form letter. The team called the extras "additional content", and in the farewell note the cat lists that as its own personal favorite part of the job. A weather bot whose best feature is unrelated to the weather is a hard thing to put a price on.

~ the bot wave ~

The 2016 Messenger platform produced tens of thousands of bots within a year, and almost all of them were a worse version of a web form with more typing. Poncho was the counterexample people reached for, and being the counterexample paid nothing. There was no advertising in it worth selling and no subscription anyone was going to pay for a daily joke about rain.

What the team did have was infrastructure. They had spent five years learning how a brand sends a text message that gets answered, and how to handle the mess of replies that comes back. That was the asset, and it was worth more to somebody selling a physical product than it ever was to somebody selling the forecast.

~ the goodbye letter ~

Dirty Lemon sold bottled drinks over text message, which was the whole gimmick, and on 29 May 2018 it bought Poncho and switched the forecasts off. TechCrunch's headline said bought and shuttered in the same breath. The whole team went across, Mandel stayed on as an adviser, and the cat posted a letter at poncho.is written in its own voice, announcing a new gig and signing off as Boo Boo Nasty. "Obvi there will still be weather, duh lol." Anyone who mentioned Dirty Lemon to the bot on Messenger was promised a parting gift.

That letter stayed up for the rest of 2018 and was still the last version of the site the crawlers recorded. The address itself kept changing hands after that. Today poncho.is serves a Hungarian page about online casinos, which is the usual second career for a short domain whose product is gone.

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