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Goodbye, Twilio

blog.miguelgrinberg.com

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Re: Goodbye, Twilio

#41

Post by johndhi »

ryanSrich wrote: post #37
johndhi wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The campaign stuff is related to legal requirements. Ultimately the texting emailing and calling via APIs wild west is being shut down across the world by a hundred different government and regulatory organizations. Twilio surely has huge headaches in this area.

This is extremely frustrating for me. We used to use Send In Blue. If you send a campaign, and some larger percentage (10% or so) do not open within 24 hours, they automatically suspend your campaign. On the surface you might think this is a good idea, but we used this service for sending investor updates. Most of our investors don’t open non-urgent emails within 24 hours. SIB claimed it was some legal requirement. W…

Based on what you're describing they probably were being genuine. The legal requirements are tricky and often enforced by private parties and only when actually enforceable. Gmail is supposed to be a private user rather than an application sender so you're probably skirting the requirements.

Re: Goodbye, Twilio

#42

Post by wilg »

1. I could not tell you what that billboard means, despite also looking through the related blog post. Perhaps it is something only marketing teams understand, which would be an interesting failure mode.

2. I tried to sign up for Twilio Sendgrid the other day to send some emails from a Heroku app but I couldn't complete the sign up because I never received the activation email. Classic!

Re: Goodbye, Twilio

#43

Post by Waterluvian »

chopete3 wrote: post #30

>> Sadly, us developers are not at the center of everything anymore at Twilio. Once it becomes a viable business, growth and departments that support it become equally important. Devs are one of the important departments. Smart devs grow up and seize the opportunity to grow with the company. For most devs it is a rude awakening and accept the reality quickly. This thread coming to the surface means there are a lot of…

Every tech company’s goal is to grow into the thing that you, as a dev, don’t want it to become.

There will be a growing focus on security, process, reporting, testing, documentation, reliability, etc. And a shrinking focus on new feature development, prototyping, experimentation.

For many that might be something to embrace. Maybe you’re 35 now and have kids and wouldn’t mind a more boringly reliable employment. Otherwise you might want to find a new job.

But, yeah, nobody’s being wronged here. It’s just what happens. Like my kids growing up and needing me less and less.

Re: Goodbye, Twilio

#44

Post by cj »

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.

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

I feel like it was never technology, especially in SaaS.

Sure you need some initial technical chops to get a service up and running, but after MVP —> PMF, it’s all marketing, momentum, consumer trust, your brand, etc.

For every successful SaaS (take Notion for example) it’s easy to say things like they never had a real competitor, but the truth is they had a lot of competition but they were able to overcome it and build a moat initially propped up by really good usability, but now their usability could easily go to shit and they’d still do well with a traditional sales/marketing moat.

Re: Goodbye, Twilio

#45

Post by atkailash »

Animats wrote: post #12

Yeah, it's sad. They started as simply an SMS gateway. I still have a Twilio account, for my steampunk Teletype setup. It's a pure reply system - you text to a phone number, that's printed on a Teletype machine, and the sender gets an acknowledgement back. It's inbound SMS. Years ago, at Twilio's request, I demoed this at a Twilio convention. Twilio now wants me to "register my marketing campaign" and pay an addition…

[dead]

Re: Goodbye, Twilio

#46

Post by tapoxi »

tlogan wrote: post #38
johndhi wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The campaign stuff is related to legal requirements. Ultimately the texting emailing and calling via APIs wild west is being shut down across the world by a hundred different government and regulatory organizations. Twilio surely has huge headaches in this area.

I continue to receive an overwhelming amount of scam text messages and calls. These messages do not seem to originate from Twilio (probably because its high cost deterring scammers and spammers). So all these the legal requirements intended to curb spam and scams, are clearly ineffective. Even my Twilio phone number wasn't immune to incoming spam, and Twilio itself couldn't block it. I had to create a studio workflow…

These requirements (not legal, they are by the telcos) are "soft" now and become "hard" this summer. There is a huge push for all campaigns and businesses using A2P SMS to be registered by July.

Re: Goodbye, Twilio

#47

Post by rsync »

I built an entire personal telco for myself using twilio apis and twiml bins, etc.

This was encouraged by helpful “hacker” blog posts and official howtos detailing integrations with alert systems and home automation, etc.

Twilio sold itself as useful infrastructure.

All of this falls apart next month when A2P (or whatever it is) begins.

Twilio polluted its own environment so completely that nobody can exist there anymore.

(Unless you’re spamming, which is what customer engagement is)

Re: Goodbye, Twilio

#48

Post by firebirdn99 »

Working for any company is a "job", and not a "family" as many have found out in the last few years (but happens at every downturn). It's hard to draw a line, between personal and professional identities, but it's something I feel everyone should do.

Corporations simply are built to amass profits, and outcompete others. They do not care nor are they built to care about you.

Re: Goodbye, Twilio

#49

Post by rsync »

jeffiel wrote: post #36

Thank you Miguel for all of your contributions to Twilio over the past four years, and I hope your next gig is just as rewarding! For all those interested in why we acquired Segment, and are focused on the integration of data and communications -- several years ago, we came to the conclusion that the world doesn't need more communications, it needs better communications. More relevant. More effective. As a developer,…

Haha.

Yes, fighting the good fight - doing god’s own work.

Re: Goodbye, Twilio

#50

Post by cj »

coderintherye wrote: post #33

The really sad thing is the executive team / board / investors not being able to comprehend that they could vastly increase their revenue (and profit) by just providing expanded technical services to me (an existing customer). There are a ton of things I would pay Twilio for beyond SMS and WhatsApp Messaging. You don't need a MBA to figure that out, you just need someone talking to your customers and an engineering a…

Anecdotally, I think one result of the layoffs of the past couple years has been companies

1) really focusing and doubling down on existing product lines, less experiments outside core competencies

2) double down on focus on top 20% paying customers, pull back hands on support for smaller clients, focus on keeping (and upselling) existing large clients with less focus on the bottom 50th percentile

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