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Trext – Software that engages large groups in interactive texting

trext.me

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Re: Trext – Software that engages large groups in interactive texting

#61

Post by varunkho »

austenallred wrote: post #25

Forgive me if I'm hyper-critical about the marketing. The first thing anyone sees about your company is: "Texting for education, health, advertising, and much more. Start the conversation." What does that even mean? I want to understand what your product does, and more importantly how it can help me. "education health, advertising and much more" are completely random use cases, and are confusing and distracting. This…

"a consultant hired to build an in-house CRM wouldn't pitch "Our CRM is going to be easy to use", they'd pitch "Your sales team will close more deals in less time when using our tool."

Sadly, we product people often get hung up on the feature set of our product. No matter how many times we repeat "Features do not sell software. Benefits sell software.", we often revert to implementation details when pressed for why customers should care about our apps. And when we start thinking in terms of benefits, we pick bad, non-specific, frilly benefits, like "Easy to use" and "Sleekly designed." Does anyone ever try to sell software as being hard to use and clunky?" "

- patio11

Re: Trext – Software that engages large groups in interactive texting

#63

Post by leoedin »

samstave wrote: post #56
austenallred wrote: post #25

Forgive me if I'm hyper-critical about the marketing. The first thing anyone sees about your company is: "Texting for education, health, advertising, and much more. Start the conversation." What does that even mean? I want to understand what your product does, and more importantly how it can help me. "education health, advertising and much more" are completely random use cases, and are confusing and distracting. This…

> ...a lot won't even scroll down past that line. It really sucks that this is being reinforced. I read the tag line and was like "ok" -- but then I watched the demo movie of setting up the ITTT text tree and thought it was pretty bad ass. People need to stop being lazy and actually expend a small amount of effort to understand something. Its a sad state that everyone expects every single piece of information spoon f…

Why should I (or anyone else) spend 5 minutes (or about 1/50 of my free time today) figuring out what someone's product does? I don't care about every web app. Most of them are entirely useless to me. The likelihood is, this one is as well.

Is it really, actually, sad that everyone who clicks a link on Hacker News doesn't spend 5 minutes watching a video to figure out what a web app even does? I think we should celebrate the fact that most people live busy lives doing things that matter to them.

If you force your potential customers to do research to figure out what you do you're going to lose most of the people who may actually use your service but couldn't figure out what you do in the 20 seconds they devoted to your site. It's the lowest of the low hanging fruit.

Re: Trext – Software that engages large groups in interactive texting

#64

Post by zekenie »

zbush wrote: post #62

What's the name for this style of background? I've been looking for how to do it, but I have no idea what to even search for. I'm undecided as to whether it's nice or distracting and want to play with it a bit.

Do you mean the one behind the video of the screen? Its just the corner of a photo we shot. Its a little out of focus. Not sure what its called.

Re: Trext – Software that engages large groups in interactive texting

#65

Post by zekenie »

jmhnilbog wrote: post #60
zekenie wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very interesting. We already track "errors" (responses that don't have connections) and we could make a real time error corrector. Let's say you have a yes/no question and someone says "nah." If you didn't want them to recieve a text saying "the options were yes and no," we could maybe make it so you could click on the node you wanted it to go to... But, I'm not sure if there's much demand for this type of feature in…

Right, mine is a pretty specific use case. However, if a thesaurus lookup can figure out that nah is close enough to no that it should just normalize the response to no, that's a win for the user. (Scraping urban dictionary to act like a thesaurus would be a decent way to decipher txt spk and euphemisms as well.) Yes/No questions could be special cased to accept more oddball responses off the bat..'for sure', 'totall…

Agreed. I'm not a natural language expert by any means, but from the research I did a little while ago, it seemed like the thesaurus apis matched "yes" to "affirmative" and not to "yeah." Maybe I haven't found a good one?

Re: Trext – Software that engages large groups in interactive texting

#66

Post by zbush »

zekenie wrote: post #64
zbush wrote: post #62

What's the name for this style of background? I've been looking for how to do it, but I have no idea what to even search for. I'm undecided as to whether it's nice or distracting and want to play with it a bit.

Do you mean the one behind the video of the screen? Its just the corner of a photo we shot. Its a little out of focus. Not sure what its called.

Sorry, I worded that awfully the first time around. What I meant is the section under "Why Trext" that slowly reveals a different part of the laptop.

Thanks and good luck! :)

Re: Trext – Software that engages large groups in interactive texting

#67

Post by zekenie »

zbush wrote: post #66
zekenie wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you mean the one behind the video of the screen? Its just the corner of a photo we shot. Its a little out of focus. Not sure what its called.

Sorry, I worded that awfully the first time around. What I meant is the section under "Why Trext" that slowly reveals a different part of the laptop. Thanks and good luck! :)

Ahh... I don't know what that's called either. Sorry

Re: Trext – Software that engages large groups in interactive texting

#68

Post by zekenie »

makerops wrote: post #28
joshdance wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1. Is your product for education, or health or advertising? Those are very different markets. Maybe pick one of those and highlight it. Or provide a use case for each if you really want to be in all 3 markets.

I don't even know if you have to highlight a market right off the bat? Automate Your Text Conversations, appeals to a ton of niches (including people with significant others who text them every night at the same time, asking the same questions!). Maybe develop several landing pages, and gear each text conversation at that niche?

That's what we're going to try.

Re: Trext – Software that engages large groups in interactive texting

#69

Post by BWStearns »

hackerkira wrote: post #33
BWStearns wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My issue with pricing isn't the lower plan really, 60 doesn't seem so much, but the 10,000 text max plan seems to be too low for a lot of useful applications of this software. If I want to reach a 10,000 person incoming freshman class at a university then I would need to buy multiple plans just to serve them a multi-question conversation. The other thing is that you could provide higher priced (i.e. well over 1k plan…

That's a great idea. We're giving a first month free for the $60 plan but subsidizing it could get people hooked. Do you think we should offer a much larger plan (hypothetically would 100,000 texts for 4k/month be plausible?)

I don't know your cost structure/margins, so I really can't give a specific set of numbers in good faith. In my relatively limited experience in polling/interviewing large numbers of people (a couple projects) I have gotten the impression that my example of engaging 1000-2000ppl/month is unusual. The tools we used seem to have been geared towards 1-2000/day or more (inferred/back of envelope). This makes me think there may be a market for you guys in the much higher volume brackets which might let you subsidize the lower end and draw folks in. First month free definitely cool idea though. I will definitely find a way to use this if possible.
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