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Goodbye, Twilio

blog.miguelgrinberg.com

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Re: Goodbye, Twilio

#171

Post by sethammons »

afavour wrote: post #162
sethammons wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where does the money come from? Customers don't magically appear. Any, and I mean _any_ example you can dream of, will require something more than just the product. Price, promotion, product, and distribution. You need all four.

> Where does the money come from? You realise that businesses are successfully formed without venture capital, right? I’m not saying “create a business and ignore the entire concept of marketing”. I’m saying that you can create a small business with a tight focus and it can be a success, a great success even, without the necessity of scaling to the level VC investments usually require you to.

I agree. I misread and thought you were saying a product is enough, which is obv. not the case. You need all four things I mentioned.

Re: Goodbye, Twilio

#172

Post by sethammons »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #161
sethammons wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> making other people more rich at the cost of others Not everything is zero sum. There is a reason that when you purchase something both sides say thank you.

The world is 100% legally zero sum unless you can legally appropriate property with no money or any other type of compensation then where is this magical free pie?

Can your zero sum hypothesis explain the following amazing video from Hans Rausling, economist, on rising prosperity?

https://youtu.be/jbkSRLYSojo

Re: Goodbye, Twilio

#173

Post by paulryanrogers »

Turbots wrote: post #132
rewmie wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A startup lives and dies by the engineers. Without them there is no product. This very case documents how engineers created value only to get new arrivals whose net contribution is non-positive, to the point they effectively drive out the talent that made everything possible.

I was an engineer for 15 years and have been a tech presales for 4 years now. You couldn't be more wrong. Best engineers making the best product ever will not make a dollar without good sales people and marketing and product managers and VC and ... You need ALL of these to make a succesful company.

This has been my experience as well. Some word of mouth counterexamples exist yet are not the norm.

I think it's especially hard to appreciate sales+marketing since they seem so ephemeral while tech is concrete. Sadly there also also too many examples of marketing getting too far ahead of the product, over promising, or devaluing engineering.

Best is definitely a balance, where all sides respect others' work and can see both the effort and its benefits.

Re: Goodbye, Twilio

#175

Post by OJFord »

gamesbrainiac wrote: post #163
paxys wrote: post #97

"The company was great when it was just engineers, but then they hired account managers and sales reps and business people and marketers who ruined everything." Common refrain from developers at SaaS companies who don't realize that the party they were enjoying all these years was directly funded by VC dollars, and these other people who they hate so much in fact do critical jobs and are necessary for converting all…

I think you read a different article. Miguel is aggrieved by the fact that it is no longer a developer focused company, which was the reason for its success. Sure, you need sales, marketing and the rest of it; it does not mean that you need to forget what made you great in the first place.

I agree; to make the point clearer: you can be a company full of salesmen etc. and still be focussed on engineers as the target market.

Re: Goodbye, Twilio

#176

Post by sparrish »

cjcampbell wrote: post #69
cvalka wrote: post #31

What's a good twilio alternative? Voximplant, plivio, bandwith are not very good.

Would you be willing to share more about your experience with these companies? I have a client evaluating Twilio alternatives due to skyrocketing costs, and some of these companies are on the list.

We've used Twilio, Nexmo (now Vonage), and Plivo for years.

Twilio is still our go-to for US SMS.

Nexmo has great international deliverability but is more expensive than Plivo.

Plivo works fine when it works. When it doesn't, their support is horrible. Most times I don't even bother opening a ticket anymore. I just switch the customer to Nexmo.

I tried A2P 10DLC registration on Twilio when it first came out and our deliverability went to less than 50%. I quickly switched if off.

They're all going to start requiring A2P 10DLC registration for US SMS within a few months. It's going to be painful to get timely SMS delivered.

Re: Goodbye, Twilio

#177

Post by 29athrowaway »

cyberax wrote: post #133
29athrowaway wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Read the safety data sheet, see what precautions are needed and then ask an average residential roundup user if they care at all about following those instructions.

The precautions for glyphosate are basically "don't drink that". My dishwasher detergent has sterner warnings. Heck, Tide pods are just as dangerous. That's because the principal "danger" of glyphosate formulations comes from surfactants. Pure glyphosate by itself is pretty benign.

Then you didn't read the SDS.

Re: Goodbye, Twilio

#178

Post by alvarezbjm-hn »

eightysixfour wrote: post #118
rewmie wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A startup lives and dies by the engineers. Without them there is no product. This very case documents how engineers created value only to get new arrivals whose net contribution is non-positive, to the point they effectively drive out the talent that made everything possible.

No, a startup lives and dies by revenue or fundraising. Engineers are a means of achieving revenue for many startups, but that does not mean they live and die by their engineers. There are plenty of large companies that got there without engineering excellence.

Theranos did well for a while /s (but matches that narrative!)

Re: Goodbye, Twilio

#179

Post by mlyle »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #161
sethammons wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> making other people more rich at the cost of others Not everything is zero sum. There is a reason that when you purchase something both sides say thank you.

The world is 100% legally zero sum unless you can legally appropriate property with no money or any other type of compensation then where is this magical free pie?

If we're looking at how many pies there are in the world-- yes, that's zero sum.

But if we're considering utility-- how useful stuff is to me-- it is far from zero sum.

If I produce lots of wheat, being able to trade some of it for my neighbor's beef makes both of us richer.

Re: Goodbye, Twilio

#180

Post by callalex »

liuliu wrote: post #25
buro9 wrote: post #6

There is a certain point at which the engineering is no longer what makes a company successful, it fuels an initial growth and can sustain it longer, but then the deciding thing on whether the company survives and thrives becomes the more operational aspects, the traditional sales & marketing. With the product-market fit nailed, a solid offering out there, Twilio now occupies that later stage, and the buildboard refl…

It reflects the defensible moat in our industry (SaaS offerings in general) is no longer technology.

Early Twilio engineer here. There was never really all that much unique ground breaking technology work being done, we used open source tools running on AWS to build the core products. Our differentiators were reliability and user experience. Both of those came from how the organization was built and run. There was an obsession with uptime and DevOps, with a carefully guarded culture of collaboration and blameless postmortems when things went wrong. Empowering individual engineers and product designers to call out when things sucked really went a long way, and is really hard to scale. Initially managers and directors had very little power over the actual makers and maintainers, which lead to a lot of quality. A few years post-IPO we hit a scale where a lot of that culture began to fall apart. That’s when I made my exit/was pushed out.
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