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Comment by Shivetya | Hacker News Reader

okay, I am still laughing and yes I used it just now.

Still how do places like yours actually get the word out?

We got pretty big about a year ago when we posted it to /r/internetisbeautiful (mods took it down after about an hour since it requires a phone number and that's "personal info"). From there, @thepacketrat from Arstechnica picked it up and ran a story and it just sort of exploded from there for a couple days. At the peak of it's popularity we were on Ars, Business Insider, the front page of Mashable, and a handful of other outlets I can't remember off the top of my head.

That's crazy. If you don't mind my asking, does it actually make a decent amount of money? I always wonder whether things like this with very tiny transaction amounts, and (I'm assuming) a low avg. orders/person.

Also curious how hard it was to code something like this. I can think of a few less funny things like this that I'd find pretty useful for my own projects and wondering if I have enough skills to make something like this.

It makes a bit of money but not enough to quit a day job. Writing it was super simple. Both Braintree and Twilio have excellent NuGet packages for managing both APIs. I've used Twilio with node as well and same thing, very easy to use module on npm for dealing with their API. If you're thinking about doing something with Twilio stop thinking about it and just go do it. You can send yourself a text message in literally 2 lines of javascript using their npm module, 3 if you include a callback (https://gist.github.com/bcruddy/2a5bb8ac0ee538519a45fc2b3925..., got it down to 2 with a callback).

Thanks for the info, much appreciated! I did the Codecademy Twilio tutorial ages ago and wanted to try it again recently but it appears to be down unfortunately.

I'll have to give it another go and it looks like they have a Ruby gem up on their repo I'll dig into.

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