LUNA is a full-service startup studio offering legal, accounting and education services tailored to startups and social enterprises. They’ve recently launched a bot to help startup businesses impacted by the coronavirus, and used Josef to help them in that mission.

In this interview, Ronen Heine, founder and CEO of LUNA, tells us about the bot, shares predictions about how COVID-19 will impact the way firms work, and gives tips for new builders on Josef.

Can you tell us what the Stim-bot does?

The Stim-bot allows a business owner to find out what type of government grants and stimulus packages they are eligible for, such as the JobKeeper scheme.

Why did you decide to build it?

The main reason is really simple: there is so much confusing information out there – it’s really hard to know what exact grant you’re eligible for and when you’re going to get it. So we wanted to streamline that process. 

Before launching the bot, we were fielding hundreds of questions from startups we work with about eligibility for different grants and packages.

We thought a bot would be a great way to really quickly and easily enable a business owner to answer a few questions and identify, from a range of grants and packages, what they’re actually going to be eligible for.

What have been the impacts of your bot?

We’ve had hundreds of users in the first few days. The bot has been really impactful for our clients because by speaking to our bot for 5 minutes, they can get their answer. 

At first we used it for internal client communication – something to help people in our network streamline their knowledge of what grants they are getting,  freeing up our team to provide services – but now we’re opening it to the public and it has become a bit different to what we expected to be.

Now that it’s being shared to people outside our network, we’ve got people coming to us asking for help on grants and stimulus packages who weren’t in our channels at all. The outcome has been that we are able to provide a service to people we otherwise might not have been able to. 

As new grants and packages become available, could people find them speaking to the Stim-bot?

Totally. We purposely set it up that way. By adding a couple of questions to the bot and changing the report at the end, this will enable it to give updated answers. Our team is actually updating the bot this afternoon, based upon a change that got passed into law last night. This is cool because we can communicate en masse the impact of the changes in the law. 

The bot has been built very quickly. What advice would you give to people building on Josef?

My advice is to get involved and practise. This approach to service delivery really requires you to think about the customer first and foremost and what information they would like to receive, and what they need to know. 

My other tip is that building on Josef is not: create a bot, think it’s good, and it’s going to work. You have to test it out, and you have to commit to the project, run with it, trial it again, and work out where it is the right fit for your company. 

The bot was built in response to COVID-19. Do you think coronavirus will change the way firms work? How do you see it going forward?

I hope so. What this period is doing for us is highlighting where the holes are in our business and what we need in a business. You need to have your people, your team. You need to be able to engage with clients. And that can now be done digitally.

Utilising more digital processes is going to be an outcome for firms. And Josef‘s right at the forefront of that. It provides a way for a service provider to digitally connect to a client when in the past it might have been done face to face. 

Josef and LUNA have worked together for a long time now. What is Josef to you?

We look at Josef as our outsourced tech department to interact with customers. It’s been amazing that our lawyers can essentially put a bot together and run a platform with zero coding experience. And the output looks as if it has been coded in house for Luna. 

For us, Josef is multi-faceted – we use bots not just in legal service delivery, but consulting, accounting, corporate advice and investment. We’ve got an endless list of how we see Josef fitting into our work.

If you’re interested in using Josef to respond to – and drive – change, book a demo. And, if you want to use Stim-bot to find out about the government’s stimulus packages, click here.