I misread that as Twitter's Dutch rival. MessageBird would be a hilarious name for a Twitter competitor.
Twilio’s Dutch rival MessageBird plans an IPO
51–60 of 79 posts
Re: Twilio’s Dutch rival MessageBird plans an IPO
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
Special terms. They already did a few million rev.
I don't know anything about the terms or whatever, but we were in the same batch. It was really funny with the whole batch practicing for Demo Day giving revenue numbers, growth rate, etc. We had in tens of thousands of dollars per month in MRR, which was on the higher end. MessageBird, as you said, came to the US already with a _well_ established business. Obviously they weren't competing for the same investors/chec…
Yeah, that was annoying as a demo day participant.. I had flagged messagebird as the one I was most interested in to put my $25K check into. And then found out they already had like $50M in revenue I think it was?! Oh well, now I guess I’ll be able to invest soon..
Re: Twilio’s Dutch rival MessageBird plans an IPO
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not desperation, that's literally sales. Twilio and MessageBird have the same customer. Someone who is using Twilio could reasonably convert faster than someone who doesn't use any api-based telephony integration. You skip the step of convincing internal teams that you should do this in the first place. At ZenPayroll we didn't just ignore people on ADP, Paychex, Intuit, etc. That would be nuts! If you're tryin…
A few good points but the market stage was wildly different. In payroll processing, there are a handful of major entrenched providers. Going (almost) directly at them is the only approach. Yes, you have to differentiate yourself but odds are there's a rip & replace coming. In 2012, outside of SMS aggregators, sending and receiving text messages was still novel. Add in automated calling and there were some options wit…
> How much have they driven down pricing across the space since they've come to the US?
Prices to the US are already super cheap. I think twilio was at or close to a penny when I first saw them. Prices elsewhere could use some lowering though, and it's a lot bigger deal if a 50 cent call becomes a 40 cent call than if a 1 cent call becomes a 0.8 cent call.
It kind of depends on what you're doing though. At my last job, I was a high volume customer, and we never went to the conventions, because everything worked / it was essentially a commodity for us; we had several vendors and directed traffic towards best results and price. I guess we would have met message bird earlier, instead of when they aquired one of our vendors.
Re: Twilio’s Dutch rival MessageBird plans an IPO
#54Is there a Twilio competitor for which per-minute rates to Belarus aren't ~ $0.50 USD? I remember purchasing "calling cards" in the 90s at convenience stores with better rates.
My home phone voip provider has calls to belarus at $0.25-$.30 (depends on destination), their terms don't allow automation though, so I won't link them. From what I recall of my time with automated voice calling, the voice api providers weren't too far above prices for my home phone, so I'm surprised there's a 20 cent premium.
Re: Twilio’s Dutch rival MessageBird plans an IPO
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seems like an inoffensive way to get your name out to devs and/or decision makers who largely think Twilio is the only option. Twilio resells commodity product (SIP/SMS) at Saas margins by offering good developer experience and - by this point - major brand recognition. It’s not a defensible business long term, they just had a huge head start, and they still compete terribly for service outside North America. This is…
SignalWire is also a Twilio competitor. Their SMS pricing is much, much cheaper and they have cloned the Twilio APIs. I am not affiliated with them, other than as a customer of both Twilio and SignalWire at different times (small dev accounts.) https://signalwire.com/pricing/messaging
I'm interested on their pricing, sadly they only available in US/CANADA. Our main user mostly on Asia
Re: Twilio’s Dutch rival MessageBird plans an IPO
#56Re: Twilio’s Dutch rival MessageBird plans an IPO
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
A few things ... When I say that it is a no-brainer, I mean that it is a no-brainer feature ... that is, something that everyone would have a very ready use-case for. Second, I think we're all well aware of the vast gulf between email service and the mobile phone network. That's the point of a service like Twilio: they have both systems (email and SMS) terminating inside of their own cloud environment. This means tha…
What’s your use case here? Want to make sure I’m clear on it.
"What’s your use case here? Want to make sure I’m clear on it."
There are a lot of ways I would use this, but the basic use-case is as follows ... my primary phone number lives at Twilio and I receive SMS with this simple twiml:
{{From}}: {{Body}}
{{From}}: {{Body}}
Subject: Incoming SMS {{Body}}
The immediate issues that comes to mind is spam and unwanted messages, etc., but that's easy to solve - just have a simple challenge/response proof that you own whatever email address you are sending to and only allow people to send to email addresses they own. I am, after all, just emailing myself.
cc'ing SMS, in programmable messaging, is currently very very difficult and time consuming. You either need to host code at some third party site[1] or you need to sign up for a sendgrid account (again, third party, additional account, etc.) and write functions to pass onto the sendgrid account ... but you can't actually fire off emails from sendgrid unless you authenticate with actual real names and physical addresses ...
I just want to cc: myself from within twiml. Christ.
[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/44768719/can-i-forward-s...
Re: Twilio’s Dutch rival MessageBird plans an IPO
#58Is there a Twilio competitor for which per-minute rates to Belarus aren't ~ $0.50 USD? I remember purchasing "calling cards" in the 90s at convenience stores with better rates.
I'm in a nearby (EU) country and the VOIP rates to terminate calls here are also quite expensive compared to Western EU countries. In a lot of cases it's actually cheaper to make calls to numbers here on a mobile phone from another EU country, than over VOIP.
Telephony in general is fairly cheap, so I'm guessing there's only one or two providers here providing VOIP termination, and without much competition they price their services as high as enterprise companies who need it will allow.
Re: Twilio’s Dutch rival MessageBird plans an IPO
#59I remember when MessageBird was giving away free tacos across the street from Twilio's Signal conference. Left me feeling that their brand is tacky and desperate. On the other hand, I learned that there was an alternative to Twilio. And got free tacos.
Seems like an inoffensive way to get your name out to devs and/or decision makers who largely think Twilio is the only option. Twilio resells commodity product (SIP/SMS) at Saas margins by offering good developer experience and - by this point - major brand recognition. It’s not a defensible business long term, they just had a huge head start, and they still compete terribly for service outside North America. This is…
> Twilio resells commodity product (SIP/SMS) at Saas margins by offering good developer experience and - by this point - major brand recognition. It’s not a defensible business long term, they just had a huge head start, and they still compete terribly for service outside North America.
You would think! I was one of the first interns at Twilio in 2011, when they were about 20 people. When I was deciding whether to go back full time, this was exactly my concern. The product was great, people loved it, but it was ultimately just a SaaS layer on top of open-source PBX software. Already they were starting to attract lower-cost competitors. I thought they didn't have much of a future.
And now, 9 years later, that tiny startup is a $30B company.
This was a great lesson for me on how facile this sort of business model analysis is. It turns out by radically simplifying a hard, important problem (programmatic communication) and providing a great product around it is worth a lot! It doesn't really matter if someone can hack together some of the pieces that make up Twilio in a weekend. Many, many businesses will pay a premium for a good, cohesive product that works well.
Re: Twilio’s Dutch rival MessageBird plans an IPO
#60I remember when MessageBird was giving away free tacos across the street from Twilio's Signal conference. Left me feeling that their brand is tacky and desperate. On the other hand, I learned that there was an alternative to Twilio. And got free tacos.
https://blogs.dcvelocity.com/dispatches/2018/09/oracle-troll...
Oracle have been doing the trick of having all the taxis outside a competitor event decked out in the Oracle logo. They used to do it to Sybase in London in the 90s.
You know of the competitor and it stuck in your mind enough to remember because who doesn't love tacos.
Larry may be wasting all that money on taxis when all he needs is a taco truck.