[HN Gopher] Goodbye, Twilio
___________________________________________________________________
Goodbye, Twilio
Author : joaopaulomcc
Score : 311 points
Date : 2023-06-18 17:34 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.miguelgrinberg.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.miguelgrinberg.com)
| berkle4455 wrote:
| Twilio went from cool developer tooling to facilitating global
| robocalls and being a net negative for the world.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| [flagged]
| late2part wrote:
| Twilio board members read daily email reports?
| grogenaut wrote:
| Seems they have multiple income streams from negative actors
| ... https://billychasen.medium.com/twilios-toll-fraud-
| problem-28...
| kec wrote:
| Twilio was always that way, the zeitgeist has just moved on
| from the unbridled optimism of the 2010's which masked it.
| INTPenis wrote:
| As a Swede I naturally gravitated towards the 46elks.se service
| instead of Twilio. Been using it for years now, no issues. They
| even called me once to find out what their clients were doing,
| like a survey.
| smallerfish wrote:
| I've been playing with Twilio recently, and it's certainly not
| the lean platform that it once apparently was. In the Java client
| SDK for example, I count 7 separate Message classes. There are
| multiple APIs with overlapping functionality; you can send SMS
| and whatsapps several different ways each. The documentation is
| likewise byzantine and bloated.
|
| I get that scaling tech organizations is hard (Stripe is another
| company with abysmal bloat in their APIs) but jfc, get a
| competent chief architect who is opinionated, please, and aim
| towards coherency. If you launch a new API that's intended to
| replace older ones, then stop exposing the legacy APIs in the
| default SDK.
|
| (That said, better than MessageBird, who don't even have SDK
| support for the APIs they're promoting as the correct way; on the
| other hand, their documentation is markedly better than
| Twilio's).
| rabiddmeese wrote:
| > If you launch a new API that's intended to replace older
| ones, then stop exposing the legacy APIs in the default SDK.
|
| They might want to alienate and break things for many of their
| existing clients who use the older APIs. Plenty of companies
| contract out dev work until they have a working product and
| keep it as is. They don't have devs on hand to update them if
| they deprecate older APIs leading to a completely broken app
| despite all the old functionalities being perfectly adequate
| for the task.
| joeythedolphin wrote:
| The developer only exists to serve the product and customer. I do
| not know why the developer should be the center of any company,
| none the less why they should be on a billboard. Buyers don't
| care, they want a great product. Great products are built by
| companies that love their developers. They don't need to tell
| that on billboards, they need to tell that privately to each
| engineer they employ. It is not appropriate for a developer to be
| the center of a company. Why not quietly say thank you for the
| employment opportunity (a rare treat across all time and
| history)? Accept the fortune they gave you, if they were good
| share it with the world, and if not, move on to your next
| opportunity? HN may downvote me but I do not understand these
| "goodbye" posts. I don't think anybody cares and it just makes
| you think twice about the person who is leaving if they showed up
| at your door for a job.
| freedomben wrote:
| > _The developer only exists to serve the product and customer.
| I do not know why the developer should be the center of any
| company, none the less why they should be on a billboard.
| Buyers don 't care, they want a great product._
|
| I think the point is that developers _are_ (or _were_ ) the
| customers. Twilio got adopted because they targeted and excited
| developers. Now they don't care about targeting the developers,
| they're targeting executives and marketing professionals.
|
| I did not down vote you, and I don't think you deserve the down
| votes.
| buro9 wrote:
| 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 reflects
| it. Everything changes at this point, because it's also not the
| top priority of the company to keep their own engineering happy
| at this point.
| yesimahuman wrote:
| 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 messaging
| still should raise Twilio's stature, no?
| Toine wrote:
| Isn't the main thing to keep the main thing the main thing ?
| liuliu wrote:
| It reflects the defensible moat in our industry (SaaS offerings
| in general) is no longer technology.
| cj wrote:
| > 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.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| There's nothing surprising here.
|
| This is a typical cycle for a venture backed technology business.
| There's just nothing else to say here other than this is 100%
| expected outcome if you decide to build a product on venture
| capital money, which requires an exit and an increasingly large
| exit to the point where you IPO.
|
| Unless you avoid this structural pathway, you will be 100%
| guaranteed to do this.
|
| I am unaware of a venture capital funded technology company that
| has maintained the core of what they do, and the value
| proposition, but didn't push most of their money into paying for
| sales marketing executive compensation and eventually finally,
| stock buybacks, or other things that directly enrich investors at
| the cost of employees.
|
| Having had a couple points with Jeff Lawson I believe he's a good
| person who wants to do the right thing for the most amount of
| people and do it ethically, which is why he jumped into this
| thread. However, he faces the same pressures as everybody else,
| and so it's honorable that he is attempting to find ways to
| mitigate the downside harms of this new direction but at the end
| of the day the arrow of history is clear.
| jmacd wrote:
| Venture capital has been long gone from Twilio at this point.
| It's a public company and no matter what the history of how the
| company raised the capital to build its business initially, it
| is simply acting as a public company now. Had they chosen to
| stay private and continue to use venture capital, they may not
| have had to reposition the way they have. See: Stripe.
|
| Plenty of privately owned businesses IPO and become subject to
| the same forces. Less than 50% of publicly listed companies are
| VC backed.
| louwrentius wrote:
| It's funny to me that I'm reading this while listening to
| "Abolish Silicon Valley" by Wendy Liu.
|
| I don't think any CEO can be moral if your primary obligation
| is "shareholder value". Or in plain language: making other
| people more rich at the cost of others.
|
| I'm just happy the guy got out when the company didn't align
| with his values anymore and he has the means to afford himself
| a conscience.
| sethammons wrote:
| > making other people more rich at the cost of others
|
| Not everything is zero sum. There is a reason that when you
| purchase something both sides say thank you.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| The world is 100% legally zero sum
|
| unless you can legally appropriate property with no money
| or any other type of compensation then where is this
| magical free pie?
| refulgentis wrote:
| Who is Jeff Lawson and what thread did he jump into?
| nordsieck wrote:
| > Who is Jeff Lawson
|
| https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffiel/
|
| "CEO and cofounder of Twilio"
|
| > and what thread did he jump into?
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36383229
| [deleted]
| el_nahual wrote:
| How do stock buybacks enrich investors _at the cost of
| employees_?
|
| They are (almost identical) to a dividend, which yes, enriches
| shareholders but
|
| a) that's kind of the point of a business
|
| b) _especially_ in startups employees are often shareholders as
| well, and meaningfully so
|
| c) even if they weren't, how do they hurt employees?
| reaperman wrote:
| Stock buybacks represent excess profits which otherwise could
| be used for employee bonuses or salary raises. There's a
| _lot_ of room for argument here, because it 's not clear if
| in the absence of stock buybacks, that excess profits
| wouldn't go more directly into the pockets of the owners via
| direct capital withdrawal.
|
| But it's not an entirely invalid viewpoint. There really is a
| lot of room for reasonable minds to disagree.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Your root problem is a)
|
| The modern, for-profit stock corporation with EXTREMELY rare
| exceptions, does not materially benefit labor in the long
| run.
|
| In the US at least, the fact of employment isn't some gift to
| the laborer, which a lot of employers claim. You will
| literally die decades earlier as an unemployed person unless
| you have a job and you have no say in keeping it.
|
| What funny is, a decade ago here on Hacker News the vast
| majority of advice was "don't expect any payout as an early
| employee at a startup" and "VC aren't your friends"
|
| However it's been a big shift since then with people (mostly
| non engineers) arguing on behalf of shareholder primacy as
| valid and ethical.
|
| (this audience is extremely biased by the way given that its
| mostly made up of the global 1% that befits from capitalism)
|
| They hurt employees becase the share of company profits is
| going to investors, who did no work and through a luck of
| history or hard work had a lot of money at hand (the money
| they gained directly from work is the only ethical
| compensation (1))
|
| (1) https://files.libcom.org/files/Proudhon%20-%20What%20is%2
| 0Pr...
|
| Chapter 4 of the above reference
|
| " " Axiom. Property is a droit d'aubaine which the proprietor
| claims as a thing marked by him with his seal.
|
| " 1st proposition. Property is impossible, because it exacts
| something out of nothing.
|
| " 2nd proposition. Property is impossible, because wherever
| it is allowed, production costs more than it is worth.
|
| " 3rd proposition. Property is impossible, because on a given
| capital, production is in proportion to labour, not in
| proportion to property.
|
| " 4th proposition. Property is impossible, because it is
| homicidal.
|
| " 5th proposition. Property is impossible, because where it
| exists society consumes itself.
|
| " 6th proposition. Property is impossible, because it is the
| mother of tyranny.
|
| " 7th proposition. Property is impossible, because in
| consuming what it receives it destroys it, because in saving
| it, it annuls it, because in capitalizing it, it turns it
| against production.
|
| " 8th proposition. Property is impossible, because its power
| of accumulation is infinite, whereas it has to do with finite
| quantities.
|
| " 9th proposition. Property is impossible, because it is
| powerless against property.
|
| " 10th proposition. Property is impossible, because it is the
| negation of equality." "
| blobbers wrote:
| I'm curious why this got upvoted on hackernews. Isn't this some
| rando- employee (no offense Miguel Grinberg) that joined an
| established medium sized software company and then is moving on
| after spending a fairly short time there. Did this particular
| engineer move the needle on their product somehow?
|
| How is this in any way "news" worthy.
| obiefernandez wrote:
| Another one bites the dust. Goddammit
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| It seems the MBAs are at it again.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4VBqTViEx4
|
| Twilio is now another Xerox.
|
| MBA programs should be illegal. You can thank MBAs for spreading
| PFAS everywhere, single use plastic, profiteering from insulin,
| making every American a diabetic by adding sugar into everything,
| selling glyphosate for residential use, killing all the
| pollinators, moving all manufacturing to countries with no
| environmental laws, and other consumer and planet-fucking
| initiatives.
|
| The number of extinct species, diabetic patients, number of
| employees on minimum wage with no health insurance, policitian
| revenue from lobbying activities, dead bees, cut trees, lost
| topsoil, former Roundup users with non-Hodgkins lymphoma, revenue
| from weapons, atmospheric temperature increase, ocean acidity,
| plastic waste, pollution, every form of ecocide and every other
| measure of things going wrong is directly proportional to the
| number of MBAs.
|
| Why? because if shareholder value is everything, then the
| employee, the environment and society at large becomes
| irrelevant.
| [deleted]
| cyberax wrote:
| > selling glyphosate for residential use
|
| What's wrong with glyphosate?
| richbell wrote:
| There's a lot that can go wrong when unqualified and
| untrained people are given a powerful pesticide for
| residential use.
| cyberax wrote:
| Can you list some of that "wrong", since there's a lot of
| it?
| oofta-boofta wrote:
| [dead]
| namtab00 wrote:
| Italian here.
|
| I HOPE this a sarcasm filled question.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| Read the safety data sheet, see what precautions are needed
| and then ask an average residential roundup user if they care
| at all about following those instructions.
| cyberax wrote:
| The precautions for glyphosate are basically "don't drink
| that". My dishwasher detergent has sterner warnings. Heck,
| Tide pods are just as dangerous.
|
| That's because the principal "danger" of glyphosate
| formulations comes from surfactants.
|
| Pure glyphosate by itself is pretty benign.
| SamuelAdams wrote:
| Alright fine. Twilio has largely saturated the communications
| space. You can now send an API request for a phone call, SMS
| message, and WhatsApp notification in a lot of countries.
|
| If you were calling the shots, what would your next growth move
| be? What should Twilio expand into?
| klabb3 wrote:
| > If you were calling the shots, what would your next growth
| move be?
|
| In biology, tissue that keeps growing indefinitely is lethal
| to the organism.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| Not spam-calling elderly people and causing them to fall and
| die could be a good start.
| __blockcipher__ wrote:
| Your comments in this thread seem to me to be heavily laden
| with the cognitive distortion of catastrophizing: https://e
| n.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_distortion#Magnifica...
|
| > Catastrophizing - Giving greater weight to the worst
| possible outcome, however unlikely, or experiencing a
| situation as unbearable or impossible when it is just
| uncomfortable.
|
| ---
|
| Hopefully it goes without saying that talking about elderly
| people falling and dying due to a supposed spam text
| originating from Twilio is...a bit farfetched...
| sethammons wrote:
| Source?
| enono wrote:
| [flagged]
| Solvency wrote:
| Preach.
| mkl95 wrote:
| Twilio are still doing better than their competition. To name an
| example, MessageBird laid off 30% of their workforce in late 2022
| vs Twilio's 17% in early 2023, and they are known to be an
| absolute clusterfuck, which is not something you hear about
| Twilio (yet).
| wilg wrote:
| 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!
| karussell wrote:
| Re 2: had the exact same experience. And the big problem was
| that in order to contact support I needed an activated account
| :). But at some point I found a support Email and with that I
| got an activated account.
|
| Still all this was too slow and left a bad taste. And I already
| finished integrating a different and IMO simpler (and probably
| less powerful) solution. And as the pricing was ok it was just
| the Twilio brand that I missed...
| mightybyte wrote:
| Anyone else share my thought that Twilio (and any other companies
| like them that I'm not aware of) is likely the primary driver of
| the massive epidemic of spam text messages and phone calls? Phone
| and text have been rendered almost completely useless to me. I
| often get close to double digit spam texts and calls per day.
| Obviously the drivers of this stuff are many and complicated, but
| it seems like the automation layer is the main thing that enabled
| it all.
| singpolyma3 wrote:
| To send SMS with Twilio (or any other similar service) you need
| to jump through a bunch of hoops to register your traffic with
| major carriers and get their sign off.
| rsync wrote:
| 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)
| 1270018080 wrote:
| Why is A2P bad and why does it make your personal telco fall
| apart?
|
| https://support.twilio.com/hc/en-us/articles/223133807-What-...
| grumple wrote:
| I assume they are talking about a2p 10dlc registration.
| Twilio has badly mishandled the rollout, it's been extremely
| painful. OP seems to blame them for making things too easy
| for spammers which caused the changes to be needed, which may
| be true.
| shakes wrote:
| I had the privilege of working with Miguel at Twilio. His work
| had a meaningful impact on our goal of empowering developers
| around the world and I'm unsurprised to see such a thoughtful
| take from him has he departs. A huge loss for Twilio but I can't
| wait to see what he does next.
| miguelgrinberg wrote:
| Thank you, Ricky! The privilege was also mine. :)
| firebirdn99 wrote:
| 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.
| joeythedolphin wrote:
| Friends are friends and business is business. If you get it
| confused, you will stay confused while the world moves on. I
| noticed most people are confused. You serve for your paycheck
| and then you are forgotten. They don't ask you what you spent
| the money on. Your reward is the package they gave you. Best to
| make friends in areas of life where that is the goal.
| drdaeman wrote:
| The concept of family varied quite a lot over times and
| cultures, there probably are some that fit. Medieval families
| are quite different social constructs from modern first-world
| nuclear families. Heck, and if anything - family abuse is,
| sadly, a very real thing, too.
|
| Same for the companies - they vary, a lot. Working at a two-
| person startup can resemble a family to some extent (or, well,
| there are genuine family startups, where partners in life start
| business together, and some succeed), but large corporations
| are entirely different experience.
| rajanaccros wrote:
| The trend we are seeing across the tech industry and business in
| general is to know/consolidate/extract/exploit. Even users who
| pay now are still "the product". Who are the buyers? Intelligence
| agencies, both governmental and private who have different aims,
| but with the same intermediate goal is to know everything about
| you.
|
| The only (ONLY) motive is profit. Growth, growth, growth above
| all costs at the expense of people and the environment. Jeff
| jumped into this thread to try to color it with verbiage such as:
|
| > we came to the conclusion that the world doesn't need more
| communications, it needs better communications. More relevant.
| More effective.
|
| This is another way to habituate and legitimate the exploitation
| of users for those few who profit. An example, is the A2P 10DLC
| registration that is being forced on users of the product that
| will charge a registration fee, a vetting fee, and a recurring
| monthly cost. From what I can tell, there is no legal basis
| forcing this. The Telco cartel got together and came up with a
| way to make more money off of you. Sure they will talk about it
| in terms of "improving your experience" and "stopping spam
| texts". While there may be a kernel of truth in there, that is
| not the main reason. Go back to rule number 1: profit, profit,
| profit.
|
| It is a shame that the Telcos are strong arming the CSP middlemen
| to make them abide by these rules or not deliver their messages.
| And of course that rolls down to the end users.
|
| But I think the bigger issue here is that they need to know
| exactly who you are in terms of registration. Blocking VOIP
| numbers for OTP verification, etc etc. Why do you think this is?
| Because they will take all of the data you provide, the metadata
| you produce and sell it to third parties for profit at your
| expense and without your consent (or otherwise wrapped up in a
| "privacy policy" that is too long that no one reads).
|
| None of what I am saying is new, it is the same old playbook that
| most people are ignorant of. I suggest reading _The Age of
| Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff_ for a deeper study of
| this topic.
|
| If you would like to refute any of this @jeffiel I would welcome
| it. I find the forced registration of A2P 10DLC absolutely
| horrifying. The trend for everybody is to put them into a "pre-
| crime" bucket. In doing so, we lose all privacy on the web, and
| with it the web itself.
| erhaetherth wrote:
| FWIW I never thought Twilio was good as a developer. At least not
| coming hot off of Stripe. Which is glorious. The dev mode is
| fantabulous, and so are the docs. Twilio... I.. it's just
| atrocious in so many ways. Firstly, it needs a proper dev API key
| and then all the SMS's should just be collected into a dashboard
| on their site instead of going to phones. And their Connect
| option is very half baked. Customers should be able to re-use
| their existing Twilio numbers, not re-buy under a connected app,
| and they should be able to manage their numbers on twilio.com,
| not force me to rebuild the entire Twilio UI.
| catgirlinspace wrote:
| Kinda disappointing to see how Twilio has changed. used to have a
| pretty positive opinion of them even though i hadn't used their
| services, and then i went to signup for twilio sendgrid for
| sending emails for a little website and i immediately got
| suspended before i even activated my account? support was
| completely useless too
| kypro wrote:
| I'll try to add some perspective to help people understand
| Twilio's side here.
|
| Twilio is has always been a very unprofitable company. Unlike
| their SaaS counterparts Twilio's PaaS model has significant costs
| in the form of fees which they pay to network providers. They're
| also loved by bad actors who can leverage their service for fraud
| (search "toll fraud" if you're interested) and the ongoing effort
| and investment needed to counter this growing fraud problem is
| significant. What's more there's very little moat in a
| communications API so Twilio has little pricing power which only
| compounds the cost issues they face since they cannot easily
| increase prices to offset growing costs of an already
| unprofitable business model.
|
| Basically the business model sucks. I'd argue it's one that can
| only exist in a world where investors are not interested in
| profits. Now interest rates are rising it's becoming harder for
| companies like Twilio to attract investors by posting revenue
| growth alone.
|
| I don't think Twilio wanted to shift their focus, they simply had
| to. They had to find something that had more of a moat, and
| therefore better margins. Segment is the answer, but ultimately
| it's a different product which understandably requires a
| different focus. If you sell a communications API then developers
| are the people whom you must evangelise, but Segment is a product
| used by business folks to grow their business.
|
| I don't envy the position Jeff and Twilio's management team are
| in. They've had to make some really tough decisions, but if you
| like Twilio then I'd see this simply as them doing what they need
| to do to survive and continue providing the awesome developer
| focused products they provide.
|
| I'll also note that unlike Facebook's mass layoffs Twilio's
| layoffs weren't simply done to increase profitability, but needed
| to right side a business that's currently burning over $1 billion
| a year.
| ds0 wrote:
| Tangentially, I'd like to shout out both Miguel's work both in
| explaining the Flask web development framework for Python as well
| as his work developing Flask-SocketIO, both of which I've used
| extensively.
| miguelgrinberg wrote:
| Thank you so much. Glad to hear you've found my work useful.
| Animats wrote:
| 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 additional monthly "campaign" charge for the service. Their
| business model no longer comprehends a pure request-reply
| service. They now assume their customers want to spam.
| atkailash wrote:
| [dead]
| ramy_d wrote:
| what's the alternative for something straightforward like that?
| RobotToaster wrote:
| A raspberry pi with a 4g hat?
|
| Overkill I suppose, in the past for similar stuff I've used a
| microcontroller with a GPRS modem, but since the 2g switch
| off I'm not sure it can be done that simply.
| sparrish wrote:
| 4g hats don't even work with many providers anymore since
| many US carriers are whitelisting only their allowed
| devices to send SMS on their networks.
| paulddraper wrote:
| There isn't one. This headache is legal, not Twilio
| netr0ute wrote:
| There is, it's called a USB 4G modem that plugs straight
| into whatever server you want.
| sparrish wrote:
| Many carriers don't allow non-authorized devices like 4g
| modems to send SMS on their networks now. That's a recent
| change (last year).
| tomjen3 wrote:
| Your work sounds absolutely awesome. Did you blog about it
| somewhere?
| foolfoolz wrote:
| they still support pure request reply, but that has become
| commoditized. there's a bunch of sms gateways to choose from
| today. so twilio is finding the most valuable forms of sms and
| productizing them. this is classic growth steps for a 15 year
| old business. aws has been doing this since before twilio was
| founded
| toast0 wrote:
| SMS was highly commoditized before Twilio. In my mind, what
| made Twilio rise was programatic Voice with a better API and
| developer centric marketting (including examples, showing up
| at conferences, demos etc), maybe a bigger US focus than most
| aggregators helped too. Self-service signup is pretty handy.
|
| Disclosure: I was at WhatsApp from 2011 to 2019, and worked
| on SMS and Voice verification. We started using twilio as an
| alternative voice provider, and only later added them for
| SMS.
| moneywoes wrote:
| Have you written any stories or learnings of your time at
| WhatsApp anywhere?
| buttocks wrote:
| Not defending Twilio, but this isn't their doing. Every SMS
| gateway service now requires this due to new anti-spam
| regulations by US authorities. (FCC or FTC or maybe both.)
| johndhi wrote:
| 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.
| supriyo-biswas wrote:
| I wonder if Amazon SNS SMS (terrible naming there!) has the
| same constraints, I assume not.
| agildehaus wrote:
| The carrier terminology for this is "A2P 10DLC", and yes,
| absolutely everyone is involved.
|
| https://docs.aws.amazon.com/sns/latest/dg/sns-settings-
| regis...
| btgeekboy wrote:
| https://docs.aws.amazon.com/sns/latest/dg/channels-sms-
| origi...
| ryanSrich wrote:
| 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.
|
| We switched to Gmass, which sort of hacks your Gmail account
| to send campaigns. We haven't had any issue with Gmass
| blocking our campaigns, so I have doubts SIB was being
| genuine about the legal requirements.
| johndhi wrote:
| 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.
| moneywoes wrote:
| Did u try SES
| tlogan wrote:
| 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 to combat the issue. Indeed, it's a puzzling
| world...
| tapoxi wrote:
| 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.
| tlogan wrote:
| I hope that you are right. I'm pessimistic but maybe I
| hang out too much with Russians and Albanians ...
| singpolyma3 wrote:
| Pretty sure it's contractual obligations by the major
| carriers. Traffic registration is with the carriers, not with
| any regulatory body. So, it's out of Twilio's control but not
| "legal requirements".
|
| Also its technically not required for actually inbound only,
| but it sounds like this application also sends ack replies.
| seanp2k2 wrote:
| Good. The fact that the FCC refuses to act (and GOP in
| Congress blockades things like chair nominations (read up on
| what happened to Gigi Sohn) to ensure inaction) against
| telcos just allowing spammers to ruin our national
| communications infrastructure because the pennies they get
| from them are worth more than all their consumers is an
| embarrassment to our country.
| TheNewsIsHere wrote:
| Some of these requirements aren't even from Twilio but from
| upstream, Tier 1 telcos.
|
| T-Mobile for example has made many changes over the past
| few years intentionally designed to make it harder to
| onboard large numbers of texts, and they're happy to tell
| intermediaries like Twilio to get fucked if they don't play
| ball.
|
| Which in absence of any stronger measures is great, but
| those stronger measures could at least serve to create a
| baseline that's the same and reliable across the industry.
| If you want to launch a 10DLC-based campaign it can be a
| real headache.
| kyrra wrote:
| For Gigi Sohn: https://www.wsj.com/articles/watch-out-gigi-
| sohn-is-back-sen...
|
| > She's shown unapologetic animus to conservative views,
| calling Fox News "dangerous to our democracy," accusing
| Republicans of suppressing the vote, and describing Justice
| Brett Kavanaugh as an "angry white man." She's also
| supported progressive attacks on law enforcement, which
| prompted the Fraternal Order of Police to oppose her
| nomination.
|
| > During her Dec. 2021 confirmation hearing, she committed
| to acting with transparency and integrity. But then she
| stonewalled the Senate's request for a copy of a legal
| settlement she signed with broadcasters and the defunct app
| Locast, whose board she sat on. Locast was sued for
| capturing and retransmitting broadcasters' signals over the
| internet without their permission.
|
| > We were told that Ms. Sohn's political statements made
| Democratic Senators Catherine Cortez Masto, Joe Manchin,
| Kyrsten Sinema and Mark Kelly uneasy.
|
| It's not just the GOP blocking her.
| kalkin wrote:
| The sometime political media convention that an action
| can't be described as a GOP responsibility if the 50
| Republican senators are joined in it by 3 Democrats is
| purely obfuscatory if one is trying to actually
| understand what sides are involved in a political debate
| and what's entailed by empowering one party or another.
| Let's not adopt it here.
|
| (Also, while maybe there's something to the Locast stuff-
| no idea-I'm not sure what a Democratic nominee is
| supposed to think about Fox News or Kavanaugh's
| temperament.)
| seanp2k2 wrote:
| (Article courtesy of WSJ owned by Rupert Murdoch who has
| a very large interest in keeping regulators out of the
| medias money printing machinery, out of ISPs rent-seeking
| grift, out of conglomerates which own both media
| companies and ISPs collusion against consumers)
|
| Be doubly sure to read up on how the media AKA vested
| interest was weaponized against her nomination too.
|
| Edit: here's an article to get started
| https://www.theverge.com/23437518/biden-fcc-gigi-sohn-
| fox-ne... Note that it explicitly mentions Fox News (also
| Murdoch) so again I don't have much faith that WSJ is
| unbiased about this issue. The Verge has some other in-
| depth articles about Gigi Sohn as well. Pretty ironic
| that the first response defending the GOP actions is from
| a source overseen by someone directly responsible for the
| media campaign against her. It obviously worked.
| kyrra wrote:
| Moderates on both sides are adverse to appointing people
| to executive positions if they are nakedly partisan.
| These people are supposed to implement the policies
| written by Congress to their best ability. If the
| appointee is acting like a politician and not a civil
| servant, they should consider running for some political
| position.
| seanp2k2 wrote:
| Counterpoint: Ajit Pai
| echelon wrote:
| This deplatforms a lot of legitimate transactional use cases
| and innovation. It's a horrible compromise.
|
| I can't help but fear for what congress will do to neuter
| generative AI.
| lost_tourist wrote:
| If it cuts down on spam to my phone, I am willing to let
| others pay for that cost.
| Fordec wrote:
| My open question becomes, who is servicing the request-reply
| service in its void? It still has a place as a subsystem within
| IoT that itself isn't anything necessarily hype worthy, but
| quiet background productive infrastructure in an easy to
| consume API format.
|
| Maybe the answer isn't SMS but someone working on constrained
| satellite internet?
| predictabl3 wrote:
| The writing was on the wall when they got acquired, forced two-
| factor auth with SMS only and forcibly locked me out of my
| account by turning it on when I didn't have a phone setup. If you
| want to use SMS as spam prevention, then just do that. Breaking
| your product and forcing bad security to harvest numbers is,
| well, just shitty.
| [deleted]
| arnvald wrote:
| When who got acquired? Twillio? They're a public company,
| aren't they?
| tnzk wrote:
| I assume parent is talking about when SendGrid got acquired
| by Twillio. I had the similar experience with it at that
| time.
| predictabl3 wrote:
| You know, I think this is correct. I was using them to do
| some Email workflow stuff with Pipedream, and ended up
| replacing it with my own Gmail SMTP since I'm just emailing
| myself and it's low volume. Apologies for getting that
| mixed up.
| wayeq wrote:
| > I'm sure you want to know what the future has in store for me.
|
| do I though?
| toni_bk wrote:
| Why can't a company just be happy making several billion dollars
| a year in profits? Always about growth, growth, growth!
| macspoofing wrote:
| >Why can't a company just be happy making several billion
| dollars a year in profits?
|
| Twilio doesn't make billions in profits. Twilio has been losing
| money for years. I'm not sure if Twilio was ever profitable?
| fassssst wrote:
| You could ask the same of yourself, presumably you have a
| retirement account invested in things that grow...
| Johnny555 wrote:
| A retirement account is based on the premise that its owner
| is going to stop working and adding money to it so they can
| draw money out of it for the rest of their life.
|
| Companies don't generally have the same long term goal to
| stop earning revenue and ride out their savings until they
| die.
| rsynnott wrote:
| From the linked AI product page:
|
| > What is digital greatness?
|
| Has no-one in Twilio ever seen Parks and Rec? This is definitely
| a Ron Swanson thing.
| chopete3 wrote:
| >> 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 such
| devs in the YC community surprised or curious about this
| phenomenon.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| 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.
| oytis wrote:
| I'm not sure why I as an engineer would not want more focus
| on security, testing, documentation and reliability. It's by
| far not the worst that a company can become
| paxys wrote:
| "The company was great when it was just engineers, but then they
| hired account managers and sales reps and business people and
| marketers who ruined everything."
|
| Common refrain from developers at SaaS companies who don't
| realize that the party they were enjoying all these years was
| directly funded by VC dollars, and these other people who they
| hate so much in fact do critical jobs and are necessary for
| converting all their work into a viable business.
| rewmie wrote:
| > (...) and these other people who they hate so much in fact do
| critical jobs and (...)
|
| Just because someone is hired for a position of a sales
| rep/account manager/business people, that does not mean they
| walk over water. Those positions attract plenty of types whose
| primary skill is to leverage their soft skills talent to latch
| themselves to a organization while delivering no added value at
| all.
| paxys wrote:
| You can say the same for engineers, and really anyone else.
| throwaway675309 wrote:
| Perhaps, but I would argue that the door in order to be
| able to get access to these positions is more heavily
| barred when the interview process can include clinically
| quantifiable demonstrable competency in the form of
| architectural whiteboarding, algorithm design etc.
|
| It's more difficult to assess and measure soft skills that
| you would find in sales positions.
| rewmie wrote:
| A startup lives and dies by the engineers. Without them
| there is no product. This very case documents how engineers
| created value only to get new arrivals whose net
| contribution is non-positive, to the point they effectively
| drive out the talent that made everything possible.
| eightysixfour wrote:
| No, a startup lives and dies by revenue or fundraising.
| Engineers are a means of achieving revenue for many
| startups, but that does not mean they live and die by
| their engineers. There are plenty of large companies that
| got there without engineering excellence.
| paxys wrote:
| And conversely there are plenty of startups (the majority
| even) that had excellent engineering but failed due to a
| myriad of other reasons. "Engineering = success" is a
| very naive view of the industry and the world.
| withinboredom wrote:
| If you really want an adventure into this 'engineers vs.
| funding', look up Roberts Space Industries.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Is that really a representative example though? Roberts
| basically invented a gaming subgenre despite himself
| until he had so much money there was no one left who
| could say "stop, that's enough". His ambition appears to
| keep engineers busy with an ever growing product scope.
| ramraj07 wrote:
| How wrong can someone be? Unless the startups core
| proposition is some advanced algorithm (like openai),
| something very hard to replicate, it absolutely does not
| matter how great their engineers are. They merely need to
| be barely competent. Of course, better engineers means
| more efficiency and a different structure but that never
| fails a startup. Bad growth does. But growth numbers
| expected of VC backed startups can fail it. Thus the
| factors that fail or succeed most startups is not the
| engineeers.
| unusualmonkey wrote:
| I'm sorry, but that's kinda of nonsense.
|
| You can build a fairly successful startup with little to
| no engineering.
|
| Sure, engineers are usually pretty important (they're
| great at automating tasks to improve efficeincy)... but
| so are many other roles.
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| I guess these are engineers who somehow don't need to
| draw a wage then?
| Turbots wrote:
| I was an engineer for 15 years and have been a tech
| presales for 4 years now. You couldn't be more wrong.
|
| Best engineers making the best product ever will not make
| a dollar without good sales people and marketing and
| product managers and VC and ... You need ALL of these to
| make a succesful company.
| Gooblebrai wrote:
| Very interested in knowing why do you think they don't add
| any value?
| lumost wrote:
| I've been on sales calls as the primary tech contact with
| 10 other people on the line. After 4 months on that
| account, only one other person actually did anything in my
| opinion. Perhaps the other bodies gave the perception that
| a lot of people "cared" about the customer?
|
| Unfortunately, this is a common outcome. Sales/marketing
| will quantify revenue/profit goals, these goals often
| implicitly assume that it is only because of sales that
| those numbers were hit. Sales then grows headcount and
| gains influence in the organization. Eventually, you get
| some insane ratio of dev:sales and things get strange. The
| terminal state of such firms is the sales team driving
| acquisitions of products - so that they can sell the new
| product. By the time you've reached this point "technical"
| innovation is impossible.
|
| On the flip side, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with
| driving a business from the sales side. There is lots of
| room for business process innovation. However, as an
| engineer - I'd much rather work at an engineering driven
| firm.
| afavour wrote:
| > viable business
|
| A developer run and developer focused business could absolutely
| be a viable business. But it wouldn't be the 10x hockey stick
| growth company venture capitalists demand and ultimately they
| hold the power here. So we get the inevitable.
| sethammons wrote:
| Where does the money come from? Customers don't magically
| appear. Any, and I mean _any_ example you can dream of, will
| require something more than just the product.
|
| Price, promotion, product, and distribution. You need all
| four.
| afavour wrote:
| > Where does the money come from?
|
| You realise that businesses are successfully formed without
| venture capital, right?
|
| I'm not saying "create a business and ignore the entire
| concept of marketing". I'm saying that you can create a
| small business with a tight focus and it can be a success,
| a great success even, without the necessity of scaling to
| the level VC investments usually require you to.
| gamesbrainiac wrote:
| I think you read a different article. Miguel is aggrieved by
| the fact that it is no longer a developer focused company,
| which was the reason for its success.
|
| Sure, you need sales, marketing and the rest of it; it does not
| mean that you need to forget what made you great in the first
| place.
| cvalka wrote:
| What's a good twilio alternative? Voximplant, plivio, bandwith
| are not very good.
| cjcampbell wrote:
| Would you be willing to share more about your experience with
| these companies? I have a client evaluating Twilio alternatives
| due to skyrocketing costs, and some of these companies are on
| the list.
| jagtstronaut wrote:
| I work at bandwidth and would also love to know what you
| don't like with messaging at least.
| coderintherye wrote:
| 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 and product team
| that can turn that into real products.
| cj wrote:
| 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
| nine_zeros wrote:
| I have seen number 2 at my company. They've given up on
| midsized and startup companies. They are only chasing the
| large ones and government contracts.
|
| Which makes sense from a shareholder perspective as they look
| to leech as much return as possible. But, it also ensures
| that the company is not going to innovate anytime soon.
| personperson wrote:
| I feel like this isn't the "betrayal" that it's made out to be.
|
| Twilio won at their niche. People often talk about "if we just
| get 1% of the market..." -- is there a modern engineer on earth
| who hasn't used Twilio's API at least once?
|
| They're moving towards doing the same thing with other parts of
| tech companies, in this case it's marketing. It's not like their
| APIs change because of it, these are additional products they're
| introducing. Engineers generally find anything marketing related
| icky, but they're very happy to collect the checks which are
| funded through these icky distribution methodologies.
| thomasfromcdnjs wrote:
| Agreed.
|
| The author is upset for XYZ "other" reasons, I would have
| recommended they slept on it and not post that publicly.
| jeffiel wrote:
| 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, I know that's really hard to pull all the threads
| together to make realtime personalization of every communication
| hard -- and Segment is so good at it.
|
| So that's what we're focused on!
|
| As an aside, the fraud and scam vectors of email, sms, and voice
| have grown a lot since we started the company 15 years ago. We
| are always fighting that cat and mouse game with the bad folks of
| the world. Are we perfect, no. But are we here to make money off
| those bad actors? Hell no. That's why we just launched fraud
| guard [1] for free to all Verify customers, and soon to all SMS
| customers as well. More to come like this.
|
| Happy Father's Day (in the US) HN!
|
| [1] https://www.twilio.com/docs/verify/preventing-toll-
| fraud/sms...
| alberth wrote:
| Hi Jeff
|
| If I understand the page for Fraud Guard correctly, this
| appears to cost money.
|
| Seems like Twilio should be filtering spam (a) by default /
| auto-enabled for all and (b) at no cost to the user.
|
| Much like how spam is included in auto enabled for all (and
| free) from Gmail/Outlook/etc.
| matanyal wrote:
| Hey Jeff,
|
| Good to see that y'all are still pushing in the right
| direction! I left between the layoffs to pursue some innovation
| in the semiconductor space, but I look back fondly on my time
| at Twilio (Sendgrid)!
|
| Building APIs into businesses is no easy task, but I'm glad
| that there are those still fighting the good fight, even if the
| field changes. Best of luck to the Twilio of the future!
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| Question: What does Twilio do with the profit it _does_ make
| off those bad actors once it discovers they are bad actors?
|
| Probably my top issue with companies like Google which make a
| ton of money off of crime is... they keep the money from the
| crime! That's a perverse incentive to at least do a poor job
| preventing it.
|
| I remember visiting the Twilio offices when it was still tiny
| during a Google Glass related thing. I still have the T-shirt.
| ITB wrote:
| You have the CEO of a public company come out to play and
| address a public post, which is pretty cool! Your attacking
| style of questioning just makes people like Jeff less likely
| to engage with the community. You could frame the same
| question in a more constructive style.
| itsoktocry wrote:
| > _come out to play_
|
| Jeff is the CEO of a public company, and hence works for
| shareholders.
|
| It's in Jeff's interest to engage with the community, and
| we are glad he's here. We certainly don't need to tiptoe
| around delicate sensibilities though...
| bornfreddy wrote:
| (for the record, I didn't downvote you)
|
| Curious, what in GP's question rubbed you the wrong way? To
| me it seemed like a legitimate question. I'd actually like
| to know the answer myself because in the end it always
| comes down to incentives. But maybe I missed some nuance?
| (not a native english speaker, obviously)
|
| Anyway, hoping for the answer to the question, and that it
| is taken in a positive way.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| I actually don't have a strong issue with Twilio, and I
| think it's a good question that concerns me about other
| larger companies which also have problems with bad actors
| on their platform. It is potentially something that CEO
| could use as a huge differentiator if they want to as well.
| It definitely wasn't meant to be attacking in style, and I
| also wasn't aware this was the CEO. =)
|
| That being said, I'm not a scary individual, I assume I am
| softballing compared to what a CEO faces day to day.
| AJayWalker wrote:
| I didn't take ocdtrekkie's question as attacking. How would
| you have phrased it to be more constructive?
| jeffiel wrote:
| It's a good question because it goes to the incentives of a
| company to truly fight the problem vs saying the right things
| but looking the other way when convenient.
|
| For us, we typically work with customers who are victims of
| fraud and the first time, we give them advice on how to
| better protect themselves and then refund them ~ the amount
| of profit we would have made. Ie we recoup costs but that's
| it. For the financially aware, this is bad for our gross
| margin and profit but we do it to help customers the first
| time. After that though we expect them do implement some
| defenses otherwise our incentives aren't aligned. Now
| however, we have Fraud Guard rolling out which should prevent
| much of the fraud in the first place.
|
| There are other forms of bad actors but that's the most
| prevalent these days.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| That's a better answer than I expected, thanks! I agree it
| definitely makes sense to ensure your customers also have
| incentives aligned with yours.
| spondylosaurus wrote:
| Only tangentially related--and I know the odds are low that you
| worked on this personally--but I want to give sincere thanks
| for the stuff you guys have shared via Twilio Labs. The
| netlify-okta-auth package in particular was _exactly_ what I
| needed to complete a recent project, and the documentation it
| came with was nearly perfect.
| swyx wrote:
| (former netlify here) - what does netlify + okta have to do
| with Twilio?
| Jenk wrote:
| https://github.com/twilio-labs/netlify-okta-auth
|
| Twilio authored/published the package GP is referring to.
| fallat wrote:
| This person businesses.
|
| And to others reading: Miguel didn't say anything bad about
| Twilio really, just that the alignments for them aren't there -
| and that's ok. Maybe it back fires and Twilio adjusts back to
| its dev-focused strategy. Businesses just evolve as they need
| to. If Twilio ends up being "bad" it just means there's now a
| spot for someone else to form "The Good Twilio" :) See: the
| many Google competitors, the many smartphone competitors, the
| many VPN competitors, etc...
| rsync wrote:
| Haha.
|
| Yes, fighting the good fight - doing god's own work.
| swyx wrote:
| 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 Twilio
| continues to also engage _developers_ in its next phase.
| jeffiel wrote:
| 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,
| as a CEO, sometimes I need companies to simplify the message
| especially in a domain I'm not an expert in and don't want to
| become an expert in!
|
| For the entrepreneurs in the HN community, it's talking
| features vs benefits. Developers love what a product does in
| a literal sense because they're close to the implementation.
| Business folks tend to look for the benefit statements more
| as they're not as close to the implementation. It's a like to
| walk when you're talking to both!
| pkiv wrote:
| (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 website to
| highlight that.
|
| Wrote about it more here:
| https://memos.hawkhill.ventures/p/selling-features-then-
| solu...)
| nasduia wrote:
| I'd be interested to know how you think the business folks
| should judge the benefit statements without the detail that
| they could run by experienced developers? Surely they get a
| lot of vapourware pitches all the time.
| johnwheeler wrote:
| This sounds reasonable and reads much better than glossing
| over OPs post. Hard to argue against.
| swyx wrote:
| definitely. my most quoted dev marketing tweet is about me
| constantly having to relearn ""Talk benefits, not features"
| doesn't work!" in the early stage devtool startup playpen i
| operate in, but at your stage you have multiple equally
| impt constituencies.
|
| whenever i'm caught between a thesis and an antithesis i
| try to look for a synthesis to break through the apparent
| conflict. perhaps TWLO can find messaging that does the
| same. it feels like Msft is doing this well by essentially
| having a different group of brands that are keenly
| developer oriented, with Azure on the backend filling in
| all the enterprise messaging.
| moneywoes wrote:
| Link to tweet?
| xwdv wrote:
| I'm hoping Cloudflare will eventually offer the SMS stuff that
| Twilio used to, along with other real time communications.
| sethammons wrote:
| How does that fit in with Cloudflare? DNS is different than
| SMS, email, etc. Industry regulations, integration with
| providers, spam fighting, etc. Both benefit from network
| peering. I would think it would be easier to add DNS to Twilio
| than to add SMS to Cloudflare.
| aprilnya wrote:
| If you think Cloudflare only does DNS, you don't know what
| Cloudflare is
|
| They do way more than just DNS
| sethammons wrote:
| For any of the following Cloudflare products, are any as
| complex as SMS or Email? None of these are adversarial and
| covered by legal constraints to my knowledge (except ddos
| which is a resource game). I'm unfamiliar with their "china
| network" - probably some legalities there.
|
| Cloudflare Services:
|
| Advanced Certificate Manager Advanced DDoS Always
| Online(tm) Analytics Anycast Network API Apps Marketplace
| Audit Logs Argo Smart Routing Argo for Spectrum At Cost
| Registrar Bot Management Browser Insights & Origin
| Monitoring Browser Isolation (Advanced) Bring Your Own IPs
| (BYOIP) CDN Certificate Transparency Monitoring China
| Network Cloudflare Access Cloudflare Gateway(tm) Cloudflare
| Gateway(tm) (DNS Only) Cloudflare Images Cloudflare Logs
| Cloudflare Network Interconnect Cloudflare Pages(r)
| Cloudflare Registrar Cloudflare's Security Operations
| Center (SOC) as a Service Cloudflare Spectrum Cloudflare
| Stream Cloudflare WAF Custom SSL Data Localization Suite
| Dedicated SSL DNS Firewall Enterprise DNS Only Enterprise -
| Primary DNS Error Pages Healthcheck Image Resizing Intel
| Keyless SSL Load Balancing Magic Firewall(r) Magic
| Transit(r) Magic WAN(r) Page Rules Page Shield Premium
| Success Rate Limiting Secondary DNS Secure Registrar SSL
| for SaaS SSL for SaaS Advanced Standard Success Offering
| Static IPs Teams for Enterprise Waiting Room Workers
| Bundled Workers KV Workers Unbound
| taf2 wrote:
| This is unfortunate that he got disillusioned but the shift is
| for really one simple reason - segment. The original twilio that
| went on to acquire sendgrid, was increasingly in a low margin
| commodity market. Segment is hugely profitable in contrast and is
| not dependent on increasingly competitive upstream providers
| (carriers) providing lower cost similar apis as twilio
| voice/messaging. It still stands that Twilio's apis are better
| than the competitors but that will only last so long. Segment
| will keep twilio relevant for a much longer time.
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