I was a twilio customer developer until they instituted a change that demanded to know my personal phone number in order to login to their account. They claimed this was for security, but TOTP doesn't require a phone number. After a meeting with their engineering staff, I realized that they completely screwed up their TOTP implementation and they needed the phone number as the seed. Since I wasn't going to give them my phone number, that brought our customer relationship to an end. They clearly had no idea how to spell the word privacy.
Goodbye, Twilio
221–230 of 353 posts
Re: Goodbye, Twilio
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
first of all, big admirer of you. if you feel inclined, would really love your comment on OP's observation: > Sadly, us developers are not at the center of everything anymore at Twilio. it does seem the recent messaging has de emphasized that in favor of "Customer Engagement Platform". as the originator of "Ask Your Developer" (I read your book!) that has to sting a little bit. would love to hear your thinking on how…
At this phase we have to talk both to the business and to developers. Only talking to developers isn’t savvy or smart. AWS etc do the same thing. We can have good APIs and make a compelling case to the business why they should pay for it. I agree that sometimes our engagement messaging isn’t quite right for developers. As a developer, I prefer more technical and matter of fact marketing of products. But interestingly…
"At this phase we have to talk both to the business and to developers."
How can I send my wife a grocery list, with a twiml bin, and not register a business use-case and provide a US EIN for A2P 10DLC (along with example messages and opt-out mechanisms) ?
Haha - just kidding.
I know I can't do that.
... and as long as we have you here, what, pray tell, will Twilio do with the pages and pages of use-cases and howtos for home automation, personal alerts, person to person messaging, self-reminders, email forwards - like this, for instance:
https://www.twilio.com/blog/build-adhd-lifehack-tools-python...
Will you just remove all of those ?
Because they are impossible.
There are no hobbyist uses of Twilio after July.
Re: Goodbye, Twilio
#223There 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…
To me there's just an argument for effective marketing. That new billboard can't be more effective at generating industry and brand awareness, can it? It's so forgettable. It's _mediocre_, and reads just like every other uninteresting stat point most B2B enterprise SaaS companies put out there. That's the part that I don't get, even if they are moving up market and away from a pure developer play, that kind of messag…
I think the “Ask your developer” resonates with only a small segment of the market (a fairly passionate segment).
The “Lower your aquisition costs by 66%” resonates with the CFO, who will drive past the board every day until he remembers to tell someone in passing to “investigate this twilio thing”. From there the cogs of the org start turning and 6 months later out rolls a several million dollar order for Twilio.
To everyone’s surprise the bill is 20% higher a year after release, but by that point everyone responsible for it has already been promoted.
Re: Goodbye, Twilio
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
(Former Twilion here) I’ve always described this as “selling features vs selling solutions”. As a startup grows, the buying persona changes. Startups that sell to developers do best when they’re selling features, whereas a product manager/CEO is shopping for a solution (like increasing customer engagement). A neat thing I’ve noticed is that at one point, almost every B2B company will add a “Solutions” page to their w…
[flagged]
Hey, just sharing my point of view. Appreciate hearing yours as well. Have a good Sunday!
Re: Goodbye, Twilio
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why is A2P bad and why does it make your personal telco fall apart? https://support.twilio.com/hc/en-us/articles/223133807-What-...
"Why is A2P bad and why does it make your personal telco fall apart?" A2P 10DLC requires all senders to provide company/corporate information and register their "campaigns". Which is to say, when I send a grocery list to my wife, that must be under the auspices of a business case that I have registered with twilio and the carriers and within the confines of a campaign that I have defined with example messages and an…
Can you get around it by registering a company in a country that’s not spam heaven?
I sure hope I won’t have to deal with that (in the Netherlands) just because the US has tons of spam.
Re: Goodbye, Twilio
#226Re: Goodbye, Twilio
#227Sad, unfortunate, but inevitable. Twilio still has the best startup tech demo to date in my book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VuXIgp9S7o
Re: Goodbye, Twilio
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some have more money than they can spend in a lifetime while others are homeless. This is the society we live in, created by capitalism that demands unsustainable growth.
Homeless people also exist in non-capitalist economies so I’m not certain that is evidence of anything. Scarcity is the problem, not capitalism.
Scarcity of what? Certainly not money - there seems to be enough of that, it's just not in the poor people's hands
Re: Goodbye, Twilio
#229Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your example proves my point You have a fixed amount of already acquired property You do specified labor on that You exchange your labor + property for someone else’s labor + property That’s commerce and has nothing to do with the question I’m talking about, which is: How you acquired the property in the first place is the ethical question. What’s unethical is if your a neighbor was struggling to survive and instead…
If I develop and produce a fertilizer which doubles yields for a particular crop, that's uncaptured pie. Plain and simple.
Hehe hmm I think fertilizer might drain the soil faster though right?
Re: Goodbye, Twilio
#230I’ll never take Twilio seriously after their fire the white people first layoffs. I think they’re racist and won’t do business with them ever again.