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Show HN: Laudspeaker – Open-source mobile push, SMS and email automation

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Re: Show HN: Laudspeaker – Open-source mobile push, SMS and email automation

#21

Post by serial_dev »

mvkel wrote: post #20

Open sourcing something like this feels like marketing more than anything else. They suffer from the same "cold start" problem that social apps do. For the project to thrive, there needs to be an existing fanbase to improve and support it. Is what makes Wordpress great the fact that it's open source? No. It's the community of builders that surround it. Would anyone realistically be willing to spin this stack up in th…

Sentry is in a similar boat, it's (almost) open source, and you need a very beefy machine to even start all the necessary services, it's not a simple set up by any means if you want a comparable experience to the real thing...

And still, people do get that done, and it is great that you have the self hosting option if you don't like their pricing (or if they ever go suddenly bankrupt, compromising your business).

Re: Show HN: Laudspeaker – Open-source mobile push, SMS and email automation

#22

Post by abe94 »

mvkel wrote: post #20

Open sourcing something like this feels like marketing more than anything else. They suffer from the same "cold start" problem that social apps do. For the project to thrive, there needs to be an existing fanbase to improve and support it. Is what makes Wordpress great the fact that it's open source? No. It's the community of builders that surround it. Would anyone realistically be willing to spin this stack up in th…

Hey, yes most companies would not want to self host, and for them there are plenty of options, but we do have companies that opt to self host. There are few reasons we have seen so far

- Operating in a regulated industry, we have customers who cannot send customer data to 3rd party services (in financial services, healthcare) and need to self host for that reason

- Existing solutions are too expensive for their business model, we have Kenyan, Brazilian and Mexican consumer focused companies from other countries spin up and use the self-hosted solution

- Cost savings and Philosophy, believe it or not there are some companies which like to self host software if possible, and have dedicated dev ops resources already maintaining software and spinning up another solution is not that much incremental work.

Beyond that there are other reasons to want to open source a solution like this. Anyone can add communication channels and integrations for example. And lastly its fun to work on an open code base!

Re: Show HN: Laudspeaker – Open-source mobile push, SMS and email automation

#23

Post by jnsie »

mvkel wrote: post #20

Open sourcing something like this feels like marketing more than anything else. They suffer from the same "cold start" problem that social apps do. For the project to thrive, there needs to be an existing fanbase to improve and support it. Is what makes Wordpress great the fact that it's open source? No. It's the community of builders that surround it. Would anyone realistically be willing to spin this stack up in th…

While I see your point (and largely feel the same way) I suppose the other side of it is pull requests. Nice to enable the community to provide supplemental software development.

Re: Show HN: Laudspeaker – Open-source mobile push, SMS and email automation

#24

Post by sgc »

This is an honest question, not a critique - because I don't know enough about this space to critique it. I am trying to understand when this is useful. It is not complete enough for a full CRM (phone calls, customer centric rather than workflow centric interface, basic replacement variables like %name%, push/pull integration with other communication suites like google workspace without jumping through hoops with custom webhooks,etc). So it can only be a partial solution, and it is quite expensive if you need to jump up a tier from the base tier. I can't see why I personally would pay for it, and I would not use it as an open-source library for a business application with that relatively viral open-source license.

Re: Show HN: Laudspeaker – Open-source mobile push, SMS and email automation

#27

Post by mcharawi »

sgc wrote: post #24

This is an honest question, not a critique - because I don't know enough about this space to critique it. I am trying to understand when this is useful. It is not complete enough for a full CRM (phone calls, customer centric rather than workflow centric interface, basic replacement variables like %name%, push/pull integration with other communication suites like google workspace without jumping through hoops with cus…

Hey, happy to clear up the confusion! The software is similar to a CRM in that we message users/customers, though we don’t track things like the stage of a sales deal.

Our software and competitors like Braze are typically used in situations where you can’t have a personal connection, but still need to message users, often when they complete specific actions in your application, or if you want to send one-off promotions for example. E-commerce brands or a banking app might use us for example.

We do support replacement variables like you mentioned and are adding integrations actively.

Re: Show HN: Laudspeaker – Open-source mobile push, SMS and email automation

#29

Post by sgc »

mcharawi wrote: post #27
sgc wrote: post #24

This is an honest question, not a critique - because I don't know enough about this space to critique it. I am trying to understand when this is useful. It is not complete enough for a full CRM (phone calls, customer centric rather than workflow centric interface, basic replacement variables like %name%, push/pull integration with other communication suites like google workspace without jumping through hoops with cus…

Hey, happy to clear up the confusion! The software is similar to a CRM in that we message users/customers, though we don’t track things like the stage of a sales deal. Our software and competitors like Braze are typically used in situations where you can’t have a personal connection, but still need to message users, often when they complete specific actions in your application, or if you want to send one-off promotio…

Replacement variables are not very discoverable in the docs (I only found them after your comment, by using the ai assistant), and the docs don't reflect the app I see in your demo account (I see no personalize button when editing a template, and I don't know what it would do if it were there). I would recommend fleshing out the docs and linking them and/or the ai assistant in the app to make features more discoverable. twilio and stripe carved their market even more with documentation and code snippets than with features. Also, having a tier or three between 1 + 2 would be absolutely essential if you ever desired to get smaller businesses to use your product.
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