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Launch HN: Chert (YC P26) – Twilio for iMessage

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Re: Launch HN: Chert (YC P26) – Twilio for iMessage

#71

Post by joenot443 »

garygao wrote: post #20
arrsingh wrote: post #13

How 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

> Apple wouldn't ban us since we're not doing anything that would qualify as spam or abuse

Hmm, I wouldn't be so certain about that. Apple can ban you for whatever they like.

Re: Launch HN: Chert (YC P26) – Twilio for iMessage

#72

Post by echelon »

garygao wrote: post #20
arrsingh wrote: post #13

How 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

Did the YC interviewers ask you about this risk?

Did they ask you about a bigger market you can move into?

There's no way this foothold will last. You're going to get massacred.

Apple WILL ban you. You're not in some capricious walled garden. You're breaking and entering, and they'll destroy you.

There is nothing of value to build here. You should take the rest of the day off, then tomorrow, pivot entirely.

The folks here are trying to save you n years of hard work and wasted effort. Please listen. You're lucky to have a YC check. Apply it somewhere else, to some other problem. Preferably not in someone else's garden, and especially not in one where they shoot to kill.

Re: Launch HN: Chert (YC P26) – Twilio for iMessage

#73

Post by zerozerotwo »

garygao wrote: post #66
zerozerotwo wrote: post #62

how is it possible to build this whole thing and not know there is a very rich first party api that does the same thing and more in iMessage https://www.apple.com/ios/business-chat/

iMessage for business has a very long and restrictive registration process, gray bubbles instead of blue bubbles, and is inbound only. We're democratizing iMessage for businesses that have good intentions on helping their customers more but can't afford to go through the long approval process.

Right gray bubbles and validated businesses for commercial and blue for people. Apple business chat is not inbound only. 100% of your features including the ability to redirect voice calls to iMessage are already offered by Apple via an api and its integrated into every major crm

Re: Launch HN: Chert (YC P26) – Twilio for iMessage

#74

Post by mh- »

garygao wrote: post #54
satvikpendem wrote: post #44

Isn't this a direct violation of Apple's terms of service? You say you aren't spammy but at a certain point you will get banned. I'm not sure how YC funded this based on the platform risk alone but I guess these days they're throwing anything and everything at the wall.

We're helping to support conversational customer support agents that can help users better during off-hours and scheduling assistants that can interact with and understand user requests better than current models over SMS/RCS. This is definitely not just spam but instead the future of conversational 2-way messaging.

I don't think anyone would be expressing the same level of concern if the conversations were only started/triggered by an inbound [to you] message.

Commingling things like cart abandonment and (actual, user-initiated) conversational messaging dramatically increases the risk that Apple takes action, from my point of view.

Re: Launch HN: Chert (YC P26) – Twilio for iMessage

#75

Post by landl0rd »

I think this is bad and antisocial and you should shut it down. I like imessage because businesses cannot easily use it. The people who are most willing to pay for what you provide will do so because they can thereby annoy me in interfaces where other spammers cannot.

More practically beeper got blocked for this reason despite not even targeting commercial messaging.

Re: Launch HN: Chert (YC P26) – Twilio for iMessage

#76

Post by afavour »

garygao wrote: post #27
wewtyflakes wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

To be clear, no matter how it is phrased I’m going to report any kind of “you left this message in your cart” message as spam.

Re: Launch HN: Chert (YC P26) – Twilio for iMessage

#77

Post by aetch »

garygao wrote: post #20
arrsingh wrote: post #13

How 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

…so you have a Mac mini farm

Re: Launch HN: Chert (YC P26) – Twilio for iMessage

#78

Post by treme »

landl0rd wrote: post #75

I think this is bad and antisocial and you should shut it down. I like imessage because businesses cannot easily use it. The people who are most willing to pay for what you provide will do so because they can thereby annoy me in interfaces where other spammers cannot. More practically beeper got blocked for this reason despite not even targeting commercial messaging.

I think they should probably ignore you and continue working on it seeing as they got accepted into YC.

Re: Launch HN: Chert (YC P26) – Twilio for iMessage

#79

Post by [deleted] »

Yannaner wrote: post #70
dgellow wrote: post #35

> the blue bubble interface, typing indicators, and reactions made agentic conversations feel more human than ones on SMS/RCS Would you mind detailing your reasoning why agents should feel humans, when they very obviously aren’t? Why should we want AI to impersonate humans?

we don't think AI should by any means to pretend to be human, and we are not trying to hide that an agent is involved. What we mean is that conversation should feel natural and low-friction for the person receiving it. These interactions: blue bubble interface, typing indicators, and reactions will make it less like an automated SMS message and more like a normal messaging flow. We are trying to make agentic communic…

[deleted]

Re: Launch HN: Chert (YC P26) – Twilio for iMessage

#80

Post by zerozerotwo »

liamcardenas wrote: post #36

A few ideas for you guys: 1. Apple already supports iMessage for Business which is intended to cover the use cases you are targeting. But the set up process is ridiculous (for example: https://help.webexconnect.io/docs/wxcc-apple-messages-for-bu... ). It would be amazing to have "Vercel/Resend for iMessage for Business" 2. If you go the send blue route, please support iMessage app payloads. Send blue doesn't support…

The official api for iMessage is far richer than this and has things like forms, quick replies, various pickers, apps you can send in addition to text and images
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