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

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

#61

Post by codalan »

criddell wrote: post #44
mikeylikey wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A hacker after my own heart (Mikey here, Technical founder ). Thanks for you diplomatic critiques. This was/is the sentiment of myself and a majority of our developers from a consumer standpoint. It's a curious experience being your product's chief skeptic. It's also been interesting to observe the number of consumers eager to participate, along with the degree to which it works on behalf of our restaurant customers.…

It sounds very strange to start a company to do something you don't initially believe in (although it sounds like you are a believer now). If it wasn't about creating something you wanted to exist, what was it that drove you to create Boostly? My guess: some combination of believing it could be a good business while helping restaurants. Now that you know it works, do you plan on expanding beyond restaurants? Wouldn't…

Feels like we've entered that marketing hellscape already.

I have to register for every other website if I want to purchase something, then get subscribed (without my consent) to some garbage spam mail. And god forbid if I abandon a shopping cart. Now I get some creepy email to come back and finish an order that I probably dgaf about.

And if I revisit some ecommerce site a year later, I get automatically re-subscribed to their marketing spam again.

I guess the next logical step is to migrate this nightmare to phones, where we'll all be forced to keep opting out of shit we never asked for in the first place.

I'm glad we're really using technology to make the world a better place.

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

#62

Post by codalan »

bombcar wrote: post #55
mikeylikey wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the greatest conveniences of my life has been my dentist utilizing texting and text reminders

What'd I'd love for dentists and various things like that to offer is "waitlist" - where I can say "look, I'm available the next cancellation that appears, and I can be at the office in 15 minutes".

I've had doctors and dentists that, internally, would move patient's appointments up if they had a cancellation. It was pretty awesome.

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

#63

Post by codalan »

bmismyname wrote: post #53

This is why I use a fake phone number when I'm forced to provide one, especially when ordering stuff off the internet. Good luck with your business, but I don't want to be in your database. It's quite annoying how every retail establishment tries to onboard you into their data harvesting scheme with their "points" and "rewards". No thanks, if I have to pay extra I'll do that. Phone numbers are terrible in particular…

I use a burner number in Google Voice, but even that has issues. I've had some retailers reject the number because they're able to tell that it's not tied to a cell phone.

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

#64

Post by missedthecue »

pluc wrote: post #7
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…

You could say the same about virtually all marketing. A product should let its product speak. Marketing is the art of shoving a sub-par product down users throats despite better alternatives existing.

I don't know... Sometimes I like a restaurant, but it's not always at the top of my mind to go eat there. In this sense, the marketing is a reminder of how much I like the food.

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

#65

Post by jlokier »

Last time I recieved a series of marketing messages over SMS, they implied I'd opted in, and included links to opt out. This went on for a year. Not often, about once a week, varying.

I thought I must have "opted in" non-consensually on some website (dark patterns abound), but I couldn't figure out which one. After a while I decided they were spam and it was best to not click the product links or opt-outs. Same reason we were taught to not click the opt-out links in spam email: Telling them a real person is reading increases your address's value as a target..

It took over a year before I spotted on my mobile bill that these were incoming premium rate SMS. This is in the UK, where incoming SMS is normally free, but each of these messages added a few £ to the mobile bill. They weren't spam, they were designed to look like spam! So the recipient would just ignore them if they were infrequent. They took about £100 total.

When I spoke with the mobile service provider, they said I must have agreed to receive them and I should contact the sender. As if I could figure out who they were and as if scammers would care. Later the provider said it was a known, common form of fraud but sorry, they couldn't block it or compensate.

Needless to say, I'm wary of incoming SMS that seems like marketing now. Even a message asking if I'd like to opt in would have me checking my next bill to see if it was SMS fraud, unless I recognised the connection to somewhere I agreed to receive messages from.

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

#67

Post by RunSet »

lucky_cloud wrote: post #5

> any experiences that you’ve personally had with text marketing that you wish had been different I wish I'd never received one single marketing text or notification ever in my entire life. I wish I could purge the entire world of such things.

"I like the way you framed that. Very articulate. I wouldn't be so quick to underestimate the demand for SMS marketing based on your entire lived experience."

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

#68

Post by aldebran »

Unsurprisingly, HN is going to be tough on an offering like this. I know there is a need for this tool though.

Questions:

1. How do you capture phone numbers even for optin? Does the restaurant port over their phone number to your automated answering before reaching a member of the staff? 2. What POSs do you integrate with and how? Does the server need to ask a customer for their phone number and enter it in the POS which then you pull periodically from? 3. When a customer redeems a promo, do you process orders or let the POS/server/other online ordering do it? 4. Do you tie promos to specific items that the business has higher profit margins on?

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

#69

Post by shaneliammurphy »

jlokier wrote: post #65

Last time I recieved a series of marketing messages over SMS, they implied I'd opted in, and included links to opt out. This went on for a year. Not often, about once a week, varying. I thought I must have "opted in" non-consensually on some website (dark patterns abound), but I couldn't figure out which one. After a while I decided they were spam and it was best to not click the product links or opt-outs. Same reaso…

Yikes! That sounds like a nightmare. I’ve never seen that here in the states, but I’ve certainly been on the receiving end of bad actors who truly are spamming. No fun.
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