Hustle, a text-distribution tool, raises $3M | Hacker News Reader

Hustle, a text-distribution tool, raises $3M

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71 pointstbrock41 comments

The best way to end up on my Giant List of Most-Hated Entities is to send me a text message. Texts are for friends and family only. I'll tolerate the occasional appointment confirmation text, but other than that, my text inbox is the last place that has yet to be invaded by spammers.

And don't play dumb, randomly texting someone "Go Vote!" is absolutely spam. Texting someone because some sign-up form had automatic opt-in is equally spammy.

Yeah, something tells me I don't want to receive random text messages from "X with Z for Congress" inviting me to rallies. My reply to them would be considerably less polite than the one shown in their screenshot.

This last election was brutal for my phone. Every day for two weeks I got atleast 1 text and sometimes 5 reminding me to vote for some particular candidate or issue.

I don't know how my number got on these lists, but I replied STOP to every one of them.

yup, same

Your number is sold by the state from your voter registration information. A phone number is not required to vote and is used solely for that purpose.

Everyone has different boundaries. For me: phone calls are for friends and family and texts messages are public; when I hand people my business cards I tell them "SMS only". I also despise email, but really don't mind receiving tons of text messages every day. Since no one is the same, it just isn't fair to be as annoyed as you are, especially when it sounds like your problem is so completely trivially solved that you have no one to blame but yourself: turn off notifications for text messages from people who are not in your address book.

Ok, and now someone has downvoted me within seconds of me posting that paragraph; the "I hate people contacting me" crowd is so amazingly vicious :/. Let's look at this from another perspective: I work with a group called Student Activist Network. The entire point of this group is you give them your phone number and they text you when actions come up related to your interests. Much like how anti-email spam people never are willing to believe that some people sign up for mailing lists on purpose, I bet they are also going to refuse to believe that hundreds of activists and protesters specifically want this kind of functionality, and right now the distribution is done manually by people copy/pasting.

They're complaining about being "randomly" texted without signing up for something.

Which is not a legitimate thing--and I will argue is actually an incredibly harmful thing--to have bubbled to the top of a thread about a tool like Hustle: I bet it is an extremely minority use for someone to try to use a tool like this to just randomly send messages to ranges of phone numbers.

I don't think that's what people are suggesting is happening.

A couple people who have my contact information from playing local sports have added me to email lists for causes they care about, which is incredibly irritating. I could see this happening with a texting tool.

Anti-spam people in general not believing in legitimate mailing lists is a pretty bad misrepresentation IMHO.

Well, it's "generally" true: go look through threads on this stuff; what you always see are people who get extremely upset about having received e-mail, and it isn't actual spam by the legal definition: Amazon sending me random "junk" because I bought something from them is not spam, as I have a prior business relationship with them and I probably left some box checked and started getting their e-mails... yet these people don't think "ok, I guess I don't want that and I'll stop Amazon sending it", nor do they even think "ok, that's what kill files are for: I'll just make it so e-mails like this one get filtered by my e-mail infrastructure"... instead, you see rants about "how dare someone send me e-mail" and then they abuse the shared resource of a spam filter by marking it as spam :/. I sign up for these things. I actually like receiving e-mail marketing updates from some companies, and I essentially never dislike it: but the anti-spam blok are ruining shared spam filters by marking stuff that isn't spam as spam. And this is yet another great example: the tool Hustle is extremely close to the thing that Student Activist Network wanted--they have a ton of different tags that people use to specify interests and then do delivery decisions based on filters--and it doesn't deserve the top post being "how dare someone send me a text message": if nothing else, it scares people off of building stuff like this for fear of retribution from people like that poster, and that's bad for people who are sufficiently organized as to not freak out if someone dares to send them stuff.

Another case of taking advantage of a low-noise medium. If it works, others will follow and we'll need to get spam filters for SMS.

We are not a spam sms tool. We work best with organizations that have existing relationships or want to create long lasting relationships.

This is what all spam-distribution platforms say. Nobody ever says "we spam people."

A spam distribution platform is not a defensible business. In a year someone will come along that does it better and cheaper. There is just no long term value.

If the recipient explicitly asks you (or your partners) to text them this and that, and you text them this and that, you're not a spammer. Anything more and you've become a spammer. Seriously. Not cool. Receiving a spam text costs me a postage stamp each time. Buy your own postage stamps.

If you're not spam, how do you prohibit bulk unsolicited SMS?

"Relationship" is the word that is most used by spammers.

Kellogs imagines that we have a relationship. So does Subaru.

More of that, I don't need.

Even if you aren't, if you do well then a different company will follow with different ethics.

Due to the TCPA rules in the US, the penalties for just missing a few details are high enough many companies just avoid it altogether. I guess this could be an attempt at a loophole since people are doing it "manually." On the other hand, political stuff gets an exemption.

Overall I wouldn't be worried about SMS. The economics don't make sense either with the front end cost or the long term penalties, and soon everyone will be on a third party messaging platform anyways.

I got texts from 'For Our Future' before the Nov 8th general election, that appear to have been sent from this service, or similar. The first was signed by 'Carlos' and the second was signed by 'Matt' - for the talk of personalization and how effective that is for text, the discontinuity was jarring. (They came from the same number).

My other caveat with the piece: "The Hillary campaign ended up building their own clone of Hustle called “Megaphone,” though clearly that didn’t quite work."

The success of a SMS engagement app is measured in getting people to go to the polls and vote, not winning the election. As I've written about previously here, getting voters to believe in your cause is a different matter.

Spam issues aside, I am curious why they are using Twilio, which is a (relatively) expensive proposition. Rather, I'd have the app send the messages directly from the user's number. The app could then upload all sent/received messages to the sever and have all of the same benefits. None of this would be a problem on Android. On iOS it's a little more tricky since SMS access is locked down, but incoming iOS SMS can be read indirectly by reading device notifications. So it could be done.

In what sense is Hustle 'grassroots'?

YC alum Vote.org used this tool too [1]. This is pretty sweet! Wonder if they'd use twilio on the backend?

[1] https://backchannel.com/the-simple-secret-weapon-that-could-...

Happy to answer any questions people have about Hustle. And of course we are hiring! http://hustle.life/jobs

Reminds me of Optimizely that was born out of Obama's campaign. Nice work!

I'd never heard of this, but it seems like a pretty innovative solution. It's refreshing to see money go to apps/ideas that actually add something new to social media.

The last thing I want is a Mailchimp for SMS. Hardly innovative.

It's Mailchimp for SMS, without opt-in. The latter is the fatal problem.

They aren't the first with mail merge / templates hooked to SMS...textmagic (and probably others) do this today.

Hey everyone, I work at Hustle and I could not be more proud of our team and the work we have done so far.

If anyone has any questions about the technical aspects of how we did it, our stack, whatever, I'd be happy to answer as a long time lurker.

Where's your opt-out form?

Good question. Hustle tries its best to only work with organizations that are reaching out to people who actually want to hear from them.

If you receive a message you don't want you can ask to be removed. You'll instantly be opted out of receiving messages from that organization in the future. Also, like all SMS based tools, if you reply with the word "STOP" you'll never hear from them again.

> Hustle tries its best to only work with organizations that are reaching out to people who actually want to hear from them

But I can still receive unsolicited texts, correct? If organization X discovers my phone number, they can add it to their distribution list without my consent?

We texted a large portion of the United States so I apologize if you happened to get caught in the crossfire. Better than someone knocking on your door or calling during supper though right?

Here's the rub. I'm from a generation that treats SMS as a more personal medium; it's exclusive to my friends and family.

The last thing I want is random spam from any organization, regardless if you think they are trustworthy. If it's unsolicited, it's spam.

Feature request: add a platform level opt-out.

Ahh but what if it's unsolicited but sent on behalf of friends and family in the form of anonymous birthday SMS messages?

e.g. http://birthdaymob.com

You don't really want to opt out of birthday spam do you? :-P

> Better than someone knocking on your door or calling during supper though right?

Please don't pitch yourself as a lesser of two evils. And I can at least cuss out / slam the door on a solicitor. And they aren't going to wake me up in the middle of the night.

Follow up question: do you respect the 'Do not call' registry?

You have a useful product that will appeal to a number of people (on the sending side). But please don't delude yourself into believing that you have a product that make the world better for all of the millions of recipients that somehow ended up in your databases.

A global opt-out is the absolute least you can do.

This is not a smart thing to say if you hope to continue to sell to progressive political campaigns. Door-to-door canvassing is the most effective organizing medium [0]; by disparaging it, you come across as completely out of touch with the field Hustle is entering.

[0] http://isps.yale.edu/node/16698

"Also, like all SMS based tools, if you reply with the word "STOP" you'll never hear from them again."

Or, it will result in your number being tagged as "confirmed as valid # as of (date)", making your number even more valuable to spammers. The recipient can't be sure which.

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