Love chatting with an agent via iMessage for the right use case - it feels very natural and human. I hacked my own together with an old laptop and BlueBubbles.
How would you compare your offering with Spectrum (https://photon.codes/)?
Launch HN: Chert (YC P26) – Twilio for iMessage
21–30 of 216 posts
Re: Launch HN: Chert (YC P26) – Twilio for iMessage
#22It's good YC is funding you because it acts as a later of protection from legal threats by apple. Hopefully if/when Apple litigate this I hope you will fight and set precedent for commercialisation of adversarial interoperability (A digital human right).
I suggest you implement Baileys also to your service so it can also be done with WhatsApp so we can accelerate the inevitable litigation.
Re: Launch HN: Chert (YC P26) – Twilio for iMessage
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is the platform risk. Apple blocked Beeper.com for the same reason.
Apple doesn't inherently prohibit programmatic messaging. In fact, they actually developed Applescript for people to do that. What they are against is spam and abuse. Therefore, as long as we stay compliant and prevent spam, Apple is not necessarily against this.
They developed AppleScript for people to do this individually, at limited scale.
Push notifications, attached to an application or website, and controllable by a user on that basis, are the solution for corporate messaging at scale.
This will get you banned. It’s not a question of if, but when. Users will hit the report spam button. Apple will shut you down.
Re: Launch HN: Chert (YC P26) – Twilio for iMessage
#24How is this any different then https://blooio.com/ https://www.sendblue.com/ https://www.lindy.ai/ etc? I will say I am the exact opposite of your market, I want absolutely nothing like this. In fact I'd prefer iMessage to allow ZERO programmatic interfacing.
While Blooio and Sendblue are more focused on B2C agents and sales, we're more focused on 2-way conversational business use cases such as customer service that require scale and stability.
Re: Launch HN: Chert (YC P26) – Twilio for iMessage
#25How does this work? Do you have an agreement with Apple to connect to their iMessage service? If you do then kudos thats a real differentiator. However if you're hosting your own mac mini farm and running bluebubbles or other such things that are not approved by Apple what is your plan to handle the case where you're sending enough traffic through Apple's services that they disable / ban / block you? If its the forme…
Apple wouldn't ban us since we're not doing anything that would qualify as spam or abuse. Even if that hypothetical event does happen, we have SMS/RCS fallback systems in place so no conversations get stopped or lost
Much of what you mention in your post seemed spammy; messaging regarding cart abandonment, etc. I aggressively label messages like that as spam, and I suspect others do too. I also suspect after blasting out messages like that, your accounts will get burned.
Re: Launch HN: Chert (YC P26) – Twilio for iMessage
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apple doesn't inherently prohibit programmatic messaging. In fact, they actually developed Applescript for people to do that. What they are against is spam and abuse. Therefore, as long as we stay compliant and prevent spam, Apple is not necessarily against this.
They developed AppleScript for people to do this individually, at limited scale. Push notifications, attached to an application or website, and controllable by a user on that basis, are the solution for corporate messaging at scale. This will get you banned. It’s not a question of if, but when. Users will hit the report spam button. Apple will shut you down.
People don't report our phone lines to be spam because the use cases that we focus on are either mostly inbound (e.g. customer service, the user is the one who texts first) or warm opt-in outbound (e.g. form-fill text back or follow ups). Businesses want a better medium to communicate with their users and users want something more conversational and native to their messaging behaviors.
Re: Launch HN: Chert (YC P26) – Twilio for iMessage
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apple wouldn't ban us since we're not doing anything that would qualify as spam or abuse. Even if that hypothetical event does happen, we have SMS/RCS fallback systems in place so no conversations get stopped or lost
Much of what you mention in your post seemed spammy; messaging regarding cart abandonment, etc. I aggressively label messages like that as spam, and I suspect others do too. I also suspect after blasting out messages like that, your accounts will get burned.
We work with our customers to make those messages consent-based and feel non-spam.
Re: Launch HN: Chert (YC P26) – Twilio for iMessage
#28> iMessage is intended for communicating with family and friends, and is not for conducting commercial activities or disseminating unwanted messages. iMessage misuse may result in service limitations.
https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/data/en/messages/
Seems pretty damn clear.
Re: Launch HN: Chert (YC P26) – Twilio for iMessage
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah I agree. Our goal behind this is not to clutter up people's iMessage inbox with more transactional messages. It's to replace the SMS/RCS conversations that people are already having with customer service and scheduling agents with something more conversational and human.
My existence couldn’t possibly be any more digital, and I can’t remember a single time I’ve had a SMS/RCS conversation with customer service or a scheduling agent. I don’t want to have one either. My message inbox is already full enough. My iMessages are for conversations with people that I actually want to talk to. The notifications are high priority because it’s with people that I want to talk to. I can’t imagine m…
That's why we're making sure that all of the use cases are non-spam and also of high importance to the user. As we've seen through our customers, an after-hour customer support agent for their apartment, as an example, could be a contact of high importance for the user and definitely not spam in their iMessage
Re: Launch HN: Chert (YC P26) – Twilio for iMessage
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
We're not encouraging spam with this. We're mainly focused on existing conversational use cases that's currently done over SMS/RCS. They can be more human and expressive when done over iMessage.
For iPhone only users, so right off the bat your product is targeting 50% ish of a companies customer base. And the non iMessage people get a worse experience?
We have SMS/RCS fallback for non-iMessage devices. Also, in the verticals that we're targeting, the iMessage usage rate is a lot higher than 50%