151–160 of 216 posts
As much as I want to applaud your progress here, as a user I want transactional stuff to stay in my email inbox. My iMessage is already starting to become overwhelming from spam and apps — I want fewer messages not more.
Sorry OP. Not all products need to succeed.
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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…
Seeing that YC will even fund something as risky as this, I'm going to go ahead and late apply. I have a feeling I shouldn't write that as the reason though ;) Seriously though, this is wild. How is this different from those click farms with a wall of phones viewing livestreams or tapping on adds or whatever?
I don't know how much they budget for overflow.
Don't let me discourage you. I'm just following my own suspicions. My company is at a $2M run rate and I'm thinking I shouldn't bother applying since I missed the window.
(Dang, care to comment?)
I still want OP to make the best of their time in YC and their runway. There are plenty of other great ideas out there rather than being a freight train hop-on.
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What about RCS/SMS is the "wrong" way of helping the customer?
It's not the "wrong" way, it's just different. iMessage works well for businesses that want to create a conversational experience in their customer service that conveys care and attention
I suspect you are actually implying something different than conversational experience or using it as a substitute for a completely different concept.
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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
As someone who has been in the messaging industry for more than a decade, it sounds naive to think that the litmus test for whether Apple will ban you is whether your traffic qualifies as spam. There is a long history of people trying to get around A2P spam filters / fees / traffic limits / onboarding / KYB requirements by running business messaging on P2P pipes, like you are doing. Some of it has been successful (se…
At least with Beeper the pitch wasn't to enable A2P but to allow real people to use iMessage alongside other platforms.
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In North America iPhone/android split is far from 50/50. I have 4 different apps running and the split is about 80/20 and has been for a decade. Internationally android is used at a higher rate - but that is decreasing as lesser economies play catch up.
Not sure what bubble you live in, but that is incorrect. Maybe in California it's 80/20. Every single statistic globally is nearly 80/20% for android. There is a few rich markets and they may be 80/20 for Apple, but realistically Android wins every single time, no matter what market you look at. China/India are like 30-40% of the world, and they are both under 20% usage. Europe - 60/40% split for android US/Canada -…
The OP has said they have fallback to SMS/RCS.
Why would I use this instead of using iMessage for Business that is the official way and is more robust and doesn’t violate ToS. If you get shut down I have to redo this setup using Apple ?
iMessage for Business is very restrictive and has a really long approval process. On top of this, it also sends gray bubbles and doesn't allow any outbound, which prevents consented outbound use cases such as form fill text back.
This is top-of-the-line corporate jargon.
Is this allowed under Apple's ToS? I recall the Beeper Mini debacle not so long ago, and fear that this may be a house built on sand.
Apple is not necessarily against programmatic messaging. In fact, they actually developed Applescript for people to do so. Beeper was using it to replace the iMessage interface when it already exists, which is why I think Apple was against it. We're doing something fundamentally different - allowing agents to interact with humans on iMessage, which is something that the current iMessage interface cannot do.
Apple might have cited a different technical reason but that would only have been to avoid antitrust regulations.
Unfortunately for you, this startup idea also allows non-sanctioned entities access to iMessage. So Apple will ban your access to.
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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.
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.