These are all ways to reach users in places they already are so that they can discover your bot. People who already have a reason to encounter you are much more likely to use your bot once they discover you have one.

Here's what I mean:

- Processing orders through your site? Add the checkbox plugin. Users discover the bot when they go about their business on your site.

- Got a retail store, print ad, or want to post fliers around town? Messenger Codes. Users can discover your bot by seeing it in real life in those places.

- Reach a targeted audience on FB? Destination ads. Users discover via news feed.

- Got tons of users signing up for your app or site with SMS and want to expose a bot version to them, to take advantage of a better notification channel and social features? Customer matching.

- Publishing content? Put the "Send to messenger" plugin on your site. And use the share CTAs to let people spread the bot to their friends. The users discover your bot because their friend thinks what you're doing is awesome.

At this stage, "How do I get my bot discovered?" is akin to "How do I get my website discovered?".

The answer, as it is for every startup, is "Make something people want" (and put it in places people in that audience are likely to be!) If users have zero reason to come into contact with what you're doing otherwise, why would it being in the form of a bot make any difference?

That being said, we definitely want to familiarize more users with the concept and get them to try more bots! It's clear even those who are doing their darnedest to get their bot out there are running into this as an obstacle.

Yet still, the sum impact developers could have by solving a real problem in users' lives (i.e. not "I wish I had more bots to try out!"), and wielding these tools to make people with that problem come across your bot is going to be way more substantial than anything we can do on the platform level.

There plenty of real world problems whose solutions may be best expressed as bots rather than yet another app to download or website login to remember. And they come with awesome discovery opportunities built-in:

- Bot for dentists that sends appointment reminders and makes it a few taps for patients to book appointments (instead of calling and having to deal with the receptionist). Discovered via phone number matching. (Paging kalzumeus!)

- Bot for restaurants that makes it easy to order take-out and has special offers and loyalty points. Discovered via codes or me.me URLs printed on the receipt, and/or website.

- Bot for schools that make it easy for teachers to communicate with students/parents at scale, as well as collect money for field trips/supplies. Discovered via phone matching or URL sent out to students/parents, or by searching for the name of the school.

- Bot for night clubs that lets them send out their performance schedule and sell tickets all in the same place. Discovered via the nightclub's website + QR codes physically placed in the club. Or by searching for that nightclub. Or by your friends forwarding the fliers from the bot and asking "What are you doing Friday?". (Stuff forwarded from bots in Messenger automatically have a huge button linking the recipient to the bot to check it out!)

- Bot for newspapers to send out content to subscribers in a high engagement way. Discovered via website and via printed codes/URLs on the newspaper itself.

- Bot for public transit agencies to let riders look up schedule/fare info and get notifications for their routes and notification of anything that might affect their trip. Discovered via poster by the bus stop, on the bus, and on the agency's website.

- Bot for landlords to collect rent, sent invoices, and recieve maintenance requests without the user having to download some dumb app. (After moving back to SF, saw that mine has something called "Rent Cafe" I'm supposed to download. Puh-leese.). Discovered via the move-in packet and/or link in emails. I'd probably pay my rent on time if I had this.

I think you're getting the point. The total number of people who go to nightclubs, dentists, read newspapers, ride busses, and live in apartments, is many many times the number who go "Oh, I wonder what bots are out this week!"

These examples are not to say that "bots for bots sake" won't succeed and that you should only be solving boring small business problems. But these sort of problems felt by the long tail are things bots are particularly great at! They're real problems worth money, have natural built-in discovery opportunities that wouldn't work for apps/sites.

I hope this makes sense and gets people thinking!