Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Launch HN: Boostly (YC S22) – SMS marketing for restaurants

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 70 posts

Re: Launch HN: Boostly (YC S22) – SMS marketing for restaurants

#21

Post by shaneliammurphy »

zbjornson wrote: post #15
stevekemp wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I went to visit a doctor recently, and booked the appointment online. As a result of that I received: - An SMS confirming my appointment. - An SMS the day before reminding me of the appointment. - An SMS the morning of the appointment inviting me to checkin. - An SMS after I left asking me about my experience on a scale of 1-5. That's four SMSs relating to one appointment/visit. The moment I read this post I could ju…

Medical appointment reminders and other medical communications have a special cutout in the TCPA, including reduced consent requirements. They annoy me too though; they're redundant with my calendar reminders. The feedback SMS might not be included in the exception either. https://blog.curogram.com/what-are-tcpa-and-traced-act-and-h...

You're correct. The TCPA's opt-in requirements are specific to ongoing marketing related texts and treat "transactional" texts differently.

Re: Launch HN: Boostly (YC S22) – SMS marketing for restaurants

#22

Post by mikeylikey »

throwoutway wrote: post #2

My first reaction was “Geez. Please no” but I’m glad you are scrupulous about opt-in. But you also need to make it easy to opt-out and seriously-no more than one text per week from your platform. Just group 2-3 offers in one text because inevitably you’ll be spamming 1-2 texts a day if I sign up for 10 places.

haha. Same. (Mikey here, technical founder )

It's not uncommon for new restaurant customers to see quick results and want to start texting more than once a week. Fortunately, we

a) know the short-sightedness in that b) have a white glove experience where we have tight control over what gets texted and how frequently. The system automation is literally constrained to a weekly texting pace

Love the grouped offer suggestion. As a consumer that's more in line with my personal preferences. I think eventually this would be a nice feature in an effort to give the consumer power to customize their notification preferences.

Re: Launch HN: Boostly (YC S22) – SMS marketing for restaurants

#24

Post by [deleted] »

shaneliammurphy wrote: post #8
cjbconnor wrote: post #3

Unfortunately, this sort of thing is a big turn-off for me. The thing that keeps me coming back to a restaurant is the quality of the food, not their marketing. What I've experienced is that as the quality of the food goes down, the number of marketing notifications goes up. I've gotten an email from chipotle every 2-3 days for the last month, but the last time I went there the food was terrible. Also, your privacy p…

I hear you on the importance of food quality. If you don't have good food or service, no amount of marketing is going to save you. I also think that there is a fine line that you don't want to cross when it comes to the number of marketing messages that you send to customers. Every 2-3 days would annoy me personally as a consumer too. Anything more than once per week is way too much for such a direct channel Since th…

[deleted]

Re: Launch HN: Boostly (YC S22) – SMS marketing for restaurants

#25

Post by fasteo »

stevekemp wrote: post #9
cjbconnor wrote: post #3

Unfortunately, this sort of thing is a big turn-off for me. The thing that keeps me coming back to a restaurant is the quality of the food, not their marketing. What I've experienced is that as the quality of the food goes down, the number of marketing notifications goes up. I've gotten an email from chipotle every 2-3 days for the last month, but the last time I went there the food was terrible. Also, your privacy p…

I went to visit a doctor recently, and booked the appointment online. As a result of that I received: - An SMS confirming my appointment. - An SMS the day before reminding me of the appointment. - An SMS the morning of the appointment inviting me to checkin. - An SMS after I left asking me about my experience on a scale of 1-5. That's four SMSs relating to one appointment/visit. The moment I read this post I could ju…

For a reason. Patient no-show is a huge cost for doctors; it can get as high as 50% in some cases.

They will do anything to fight this. And I am mostly at their side in this particular issue.

Re: Launch HN: Boostly (YC S22) – SMS marketing for restaurants

#26

Post by bierjunge »

Can you please explain why are you faking the signup popups? They repeat every few minutes with the same names and cities (e.g. I saw the popup for "Sg from Hamden, Conneticut signed up for Boostly" at least 3 times now). This looks very sketchy to me.

And a second, more technical question. Why are you loading "font-awesome.min.css" (Cloudflare) and the IBM Plex font (font.google.com) every time you show the popup?

Re: Launch HN: Boostly (YC S22) – SMS marketing for restaurants

#27

Post by tlogan »

The biggest problem when running restaurants is staffing. The biggest. When owner fixes that (you have good chefs, waiters, bartenders, etc.) quality improves and customers just come back.

I know a few friends running and owning restaurants. Nobody would have time to work with anything related to sms marketing.

But let’s see if this will work: I saw a couple companies come and go doing this.

Re: Launch HN: Boostly (YC S22) – SMS marketing for restaurants

#28

Post by smt88 »

Consider this:

No consumer wants these messages. I understand why restaurants need them and why they are profitable, but actually recipients will be irritated (even though they "opted in").

My concern is that these will turn SMS, one of the last (mostly) clean communication channels, into another cesspit like email and the web have become.

I'm not asking what you're doing to prevent that because you can't build this into a successful company without moving the needle in that direction.

I just want you to question why you're doing this and whether your business is creating a world you actually want to live in. To me and everyone who isn't profiting from it, it's pollution of our personal lives.

(Unrelated: I started a company years ago with restaurants as customers. They are by far the worst people I've ever had as clients, if you could even sell to them. It's basically impossible to build a profitable software business with restaurants as customers -- even "Big Delivery" is unprofitable).

Re: Launch HN: Boostly (YC S22) – SMS marketing for restaurants

#29

Post by TylerE »

stevekemp wrote: post #9
cjbconnor wrote: post #3

Unfortunately, this sort of thing is a big turn-off for me. The thing that keeps me coming back to a restaurant is the quality of the food, not their marketing. What I've experienced is that as the quality of the food goes down, the number of marketing notifications goes up. I've gotten an email from chipotle every 2-3 days for the last month, but the last time I went there the food was terrible. Also, your privacy p…

I went to visit a doctor recently, and booked the appointment online. As a result of that I received: - An SMS confirming my appointment. - An SMS the day before reminding me of the appointment. - An SMS the morning of the appointment inviting me to checkin. - An SMS after I left asking me about my experience on a scale of 1-5. That's four SMSs relating to one appointment/visit. The moment I read this post I could ju…

This sort of thing can be done really well.

One specialist I've had to go to frequently has a very good system.

An SMS 3 days before as a reminder. Another the day of, which you reply to to check in.

When they're ready for you, they text back, and you go in, and the nurse meets you at the door. (Even ignoring Covid, I'd much rather wait in my car, my with choice of tunes cranked, etc).

That's all good in and of itself.

What makes it really good is that someone human actually reads those messages and dispatches them as appropriate. So whenever I've had a billing question, need a refill, have a question for my doc whatever... I just text that number, and if it's during normal business hours I usually get a response back within 5-10 minutes. (And actual response, not "You are very important to us, we will return your call within 48 hours")

Re: Launch HN: Boostly (YC S22) – SMS marketing for restaurants

#30

Post by mikeylikey »

bierjunge wrote: post #26

Can you please explain why are you faking the signup popups? They repeat every few minutes with the same names and cities (e.g. I saw the popup for "Sg from Hamden, Conneticut signed up for Boostly" at least 3 times now). This looks very sketchy to me. And a second, more technical question. Why are you loading "font-awesome.min.css" (Cloudflare) and the IBM Plex font (font.google.com) every time you show the popup?

(Technical founder here)

Pretty boring answer here: Shane (non-technical) was left to put together the website and I think he just picked a wix template that happens to do this.

We are b2b and a majority of interactions with customers take place over the phone, including signing up to be a customer. The website, up to this point, has relatively little utility compared to other company websites. We've prioritized placing technical time and energy on the actual product. We did have a designer spend an hour on making it look better than it use to though.

Post reply on HN