Fuck Starbucks, Fuck Jeff Bezos and Fuck Twilio
I was recently ask by someone here on IH-- why someone would decide to go with our sms api and not with amazons sms or Twilio. My default answer would have been, ours is easier to use. But then I would say that wouldn't I .Most people posts , my own inc
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Although the sentiment is good, that's not how business really works. People will often go with the company that has some X, whatever X may be: brand recognition, features, scalability, popularity, tooling, etc. You need to differentiate yourself from the big boys if you're going to enter their market. There are plenty of small coffee shops around me, and I prefer to go to them over Starbucks/Dunkin, because they're not Starbucks and they serve a better product and have a better atmosphere.
(Also, not sure I really approve of this post on IH. I know we all get frustrated and starting a new business is hard, but this post seems a bit excessive.)
Even though I'm pretty sure I'm the person that he was referring to, I can completely feel for him and feel like while excessive, being open and honest can be a healthy thing, especially when it opens dialog in the community.
I probably feel for him most because I currently have a competitor (also on IH) that has stolen my brand name, regularly rips off my marketing copy, and recently updated some marketing copy on his site to make some fairly slanderous remarks that are obviously directed at me / my service.
I understand being frustrated, but have been focusing all of my efforts into what matters, building a better product.
Just gotta take a deep breath sometimes :)
Focus on features, not frustration.
Don't think I was the only one, but I was a "someone" that inquired about that. Honest inquiry since the site didn't actually do much in the way of "selling" the service.
When you're choosing services that your business will rely on, larger companies provide a ton of stability. Nobody wants to build a service on top of another service just for the service to pull the plug in the middle of the night and leave them in a lurch.
Full disclosure, I drink Starbucks, but not as often as I make drip coffee at the house :P
Good for you for being honest here, glad you weren't swayed by this post. You hit the nail on the head and I always have the same thought process when choosing services.
Too many times I've had the little guy pull the plug, change directions, go down, etc. If a large brand has the same offering, I will honestly pay more because I know they've already hit the hurdles a small service hasn't even thought of yet, overcome them, and provide a solid product. That's valuable for me when I'm trying to guarantee uptime and stability myself.
For example: if you're in a foreign area and need a coffee, will you go to Starbucks and know exactly what you're going to get, or go to a mom and pop just because they're smaller? Sure, the mom and pop might be delicious but it might also be hot garbage. There's risk in that decision, just like there's risk deciding vs Twilio. Starbucks is Starbucks because they have a quality product they could replicate and scale. Which means less risk for the consumer.
To think people should use you just because you're little is not the right way to differentiate. Find your angle, do it well, and instill confidence in your users. As indie hackers we're fighting an uphill battle from day 1, and this is one of many problems you'll have to overcome OP
A) This worked in the sense that I wouldn't have known about your offering otherwise
B) I wouldn't recommend this strategy
How can I choose numbers by area code?
Can I renew billing programmatically?
Any plans for MMS support?
Shitting on others is always fun, but you have to remember that the big cos get that way for a reason. If you want to make a simplified SMS API for people who don't want to deal with the advanced features of Twilio (or the clunky AWS interface), just do that.
Thanks of the nod :) We have made textita super simplified . You don't pick a number. It's the same number for everyone and it's one way, outbound. You just buy a key, drop a few lines into your app and you can send-away .
So if your number gets marked as a spam number everybody will block SMS messages from me if I use your service?
Beat me to it @NathanHeffley
Also wanted to add, that the /lack/ of a dedicated number seems more like a shortcoming against the "evil empire" providers out there.
Could see a quick market differentiator being to give every user their /own/ number for free (perhaps a one-time setup, but nothing recurring) and then having perhaps slightly higher or on par pricing per message as other providers
Could even see having "minimums" you have to maintain to keep your number from having a monthly fee. Send 100 SMS per month, and your number is included, etc.
I can relate to your frustration and anger but I think you are looking at this the wrong way. It is actually great that Amazon or google try to get their hands in multiple pies at once.
There is a saying that goes: Jack of all trades and master of none.
If you want to compete with Twilio or Amazon you need to find something that both of those companies are doing badly and aggressively target that segment.
Amazon, for example, will usually launch services that work for 80% of the target market. The remaining 20% will either build their own thing or try to find another solution that works for them. This is your chance, you need to forget the 80% that are currently satisfied and focus on the remaining 20%.
When you find somebody who does not use Twilio, then this is your ideal customer and you want to learn as much as you can from them.
If you do the same thing as Twilio, eg sending SMS, the only way you can compete is by lowering your price.
If you target the underserved market then, you can charge a premium and get real customers that will spread the word about your service.
But this technique, albeit quite profitable only works if the underserved market is large enough to sustain your company.
I am myself at the moment trying to figure out my target market. There is a lot of competition in my field. The big players are focused on keeping the money rolling in, not upsetting the status quo, if I play my cards correctly, I can outcompete them by releasing new features more quickly.
Will it work? I am not sure. But it is worth a try.
Good luck to you.
https://tesolhub.co
I remember few days ago I built a small prototype to sync receipts between mobile/desktop, it was very minimal like 30 lines of code, I shared the thing on LinkedIn and there was a guy who commented on my post saying how's that different from Mint?
I get reactions like that lot, it doesn't necessary means people are stupid but it's just the power of marketing, I mean seriously how can you compare a business built 2 decades ago doing millions $ in revenue with a random guy with a laptop?
I agree with your sentiment. Unfortunately capitalism, the same thing that's brought our society massive progress, doesn't go hand in hand with this sentiment.
Don't get me wrong, I only want you to succeed and do great. Hence my advice would be - to use all this energy and anger that is currently directed at big businesses into your own business.
Find a small group of users who have a unique problem that needs to be solved. Even with SMS, Twilio isn't serving 100% of the users in this world who need SMS. Can you find 0.01% audience that needs something that Twilio doesn't currently offer?
I came across heymarket.com recently. They run a business over SMS but they differentiated until they found a niche to serve.
smsbump.com is an example that found a niche serving ecommerce businesses on Shopify
Use your energy to find a niche audience from your target market that has an unsolved/not well solved problem and attack it.
Any insight why do you think modern economy works this way?
twilio alternative
My online project has been running since 2003. I've switched providers across our stack many times but those switching costs are greater than the monthly charge on our credit card and the reasons for switching have never been simply because of that monthly charge.
Around 2009 we started integrated Twilio to SMS alert us to important events in the business - we are a tiny team enjoying weekends without screens but want to offer good service to our customers. Twilio delivered something I couldn't get elsewhere so I was not going to lose anything if it didn't work. But today If I were to switch to another service it would probably cost me more in development hours integrating / testing than I've paid twilio in these 10 years. And I'd be worried about outages.
I didn't sign up for SendGrid in 2009 even though I thought they could help us get better deliverability, instead I waited until they raised their series A and signed up in 2010. I already had a working mail server, so I was only going to switch if I knew they would give me more than I already had WITHOUT DISRUPTION of service.
There was one time when we went from established startup to brand new startup. That window opened up because the established startup was having growing pains which were costing us money and on top of that they were raising their pricing. The new startup we went to was blogging about their roadmap and reaching out to their customers - we felt like we were going to be better served and this came through in the emails we sent prior to switching with questions about getting started.
Thanks, that was very informative. we are still trying to figure out our game plan, we know people have other options :) I think we have the pricing right, and the ease of use, you just drop in the code and your good to go . We need to work on branding and other things we maybe blind too. That's why I am listening and talking to everyone right now to see what we need to do to win more business.
It's good that you are thinking out loud, you got some attention by doing so and even a few of us to click over and look at your site.
I am thinking most twilio customers may agree with one of the 9 tweets I made in the last 3 years: "Of all the SAAS apps we are a customer of @twilio wins the most used / least managed. Years later I only logged in to update my payment info".
I don't believe at this point getting people to switch is fruitful task. I would think about who your Ideal Customer Avatar is and what is your WHY that resonates with them. In the business I mentioned before early on we had a strong why that resonated, and we grew fast as the market evolved and our pricing and attention did we stopped growing. We were lucky to be early, because competitors who just tried to deliver the same service mostly died out.
@merrick what is your business?
I personally use "the big boys" when product continuity is important to me. If the price and product are really close I'll use the smaller company but if it is, to use your example, coffee, I hate wasting my money on something I end up not liking when going to any of the thousands of Starbucks will give me something I like and I know I'll like. (Recently went to Paris and the only thing open near-by on this Sunday was Starbucks. My "usual" was just as good there)
If your price is too high or your product is sub-par you can't blame the consumer.
Best of luck!
The price is $0.0050 per sms
I've been out of town so sorry for the late response. I wasn't commenting directly to your case but was commenting on why I use Starbucks and why others may use bigger companies vs yours.
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Twilio pay as you go SMS service is $0.0075 per message sent, your site at its cheapest says that you charge $0.035 (which is $0.05 with a 30% discount). Your service appears to be over four and a half times more expensive. Am I missing something?
Thanks for spotting this typo. I recently changed the page :)
the price is $0.0050 per sms
Nice, that's a pretty good deal then. Unfortunately I'd never be able to convince anyone I work with to use a platform with no recurring payments, and especially not a platform where you pay money to a PayPal account with a Gmail email address.
What is wrong with paypal and using an email address?
If I were to show my employer that I wanted to use a service where you paid by sending money to a PayPal account for a seemingly random email address (even [email protected] would be marginally better) they would laugh at me thinking I'm trying to scam them into sending myself company money. It looks very unprofessional to be requesting money with a personal PayPal account.
Point taken :) I have switched our payment button on paypal to use the merchant Id instead. Thanks