Building an SMS platform, anyone wanna bounce ideas?
I’m building an SMS platform like SlickText or Mozeo. There’s not much of a business plan around this as of yet but lots of research and ideas in addition to a working demo and some payment flows, lander, contact.. etc. If anyone knows about this space or has interest in bouncing ideas around HMU!
I had an idea once to create a platform for car service center to send an sms reminder to their customer that a service is due. I know some are already using it but I'm not sure whether they built it themselves. I never actually go through with the idea.
That's a good question actually. I work for a dealership group as a ruby dev and they have a handful of service centers. The short answer in my experience as to why this hasn't been implemented is 'red tape' and a large backlog. It's def an element of the whole service dept we've spoken about before.
Can you explain more about the 'red tape'?
To get a software initiative either made or purchased in a company this large, one person has to have some serious pull to make it happen, and be very emotionally sold on the idea. So ideally it’d have to be someone higher up, as close to the executive level as possible. Then it takes lots of time to get people sold, since they need buy in from even the lower managers who will make it happen. I’m which case they have their own initiatives for the current quarter. I guess one way it could get sold to a large company is if you sold it to one of the marketing managers at the company and had them test it out at one service dept. they’d measure the results and talk about it in 100 different meetings and if I does well for whatever metrics he cares about he’ll push to expand the concept to the rest of the company. In which case they may measure the cost of building it internally vs buying it off the shelf. Another ave us might be to do a partnership with some dealer marketing agencies since they’re already in with the dealers and ya see lots of their marketing. If you can get them sold on your concept and partner with them, they can then turn around and sell it to their clients directly since that relationship exists there already. So by red tape I just mean there a lot more people involved and elements at play. It’s not like a small business where the dude that answered the phone can make a quick decision to buy in 30 seconds and act on it. But since these dealer groups are huge it may be worth the leg work.
Oh wow I see. Thank you for the explainantion
I've built a MVP for basically messaging platforms (WhatsApp, Telegram, SMS etc.) and tested it out a little before halting (due to some technical difficulties).
One of the things that some people brought up was the ability to have two way communication. Say for example we're implementing a two factor authentication with SMS, is there a way that instead of typing the auth code can I simply reply via SMS an "OK" and access will be granted. So yeah, two-way kind of things is kind of interesting.
That's just one of the things that could possibly make you unique in an otherwise (as many others have mentioned) extremely saturated market.
That's a great idea, actually. It's basically authentication without the auth code. I could offer that, for sure. I have yet to delve into integrations and I wonder just how far I can go with the existing integration services that exist. Like instead of having to go into a customer's personal website to drop some code snippets into it, they could download a widget or gem or whatever that belongs to Zapier, drop in some api keys, and boom, it's done, the widget, gem, package, whatever... will take care of the rest. Something like that.
I've worked in this space for 5 years. What ideas do you have?
What do you do in this space? I'm interested to learn more as I'm looking for a partner to consult with while I build the platform. The country I'm in, there are no SMS platforms. To make it worse, businesses like Twilio etc, don't work here either.
PM if you have a minute :)
I vaguely remember reading that you might be able to do SMS with SIP or something like it. But I wouldn't recommend toughing it out on your own, Twilio takes most of the hassle out of voip and sms/mms.
Generally I’m not trying to become a blockbuster hit. I’m thinking of targeting a single niche like club promoters or restaurants and giving them a cheaper deal to get started. I know someone personally who does lead gen with it exlusively and sells the service through cold calls and he’s bringing in $10k/mo. That being said I know there’s lots of players in the market but I know that doing things different like my buddy has can get things moving.
There’s definitely good money. Best of luck!
Thanks! What do you do in the space ?
I work for a company programming, very much like SlickText.
When the time comes, would you be happy to help out with some questions I may have? I’d be happy to work something out with you in exchange.
I see! Well I don’t currently have too many ideas or questions outside of a simple strategy to target a niche market with a small set of SMS features as a starting place for a business. I bet that I’ll have tons of questions related to the implemtnetion of it though. Especially when it comes to scaling, something I’m not yet too familiar with.
Very saturated market - any reason why you want to start this platform? ie. prev experience working on SMS tools, or, you know of some niche that you can tap-in easily.
Without a business plan you are probably going to create just "another" SMS platform. That's probably not the best way to start!
I agree there’s lots of players in the space but SMS is so diverse in its uses that I believe I can also tap into it. As far as a specific problem to solve that no one else has... I don’t have one. But what I have noticed is that the main differentiator among the biggest brands is customer service since hey all target like 100 niches. Customer service and payment plans.. so maybe I can just build the core features that are widely applicable and then focus entirely on one niche to serve, and branch out from there.
Sure email me mail@tshaun.com