Comment by Devolver | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Devolver | Hacker News Reader

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I'm the author, and am not even the least bit bitter. I love Twilio. I wrote this because I want them to succeed.

A successful IPO has no necessary correlation to having crossed the chasm.

You've successfully crossed the chasm when you are the clear market leader in the a "mainstream market" segment.

In Twilio's case, that would be Being at the center of communications infrastructure for Fortune 500-1000 companies.

They've made some inroads (ING, etc). But most larger enterprises are still using Cisco/MSFT/Avaya and other on-premise tech for call centers, conferencing, video chat, collaboration, etc.

Also: Twilio is not profitable and it just lost one of its highest volume customers (Uber) who had been using it for "point solution" use cases, mostly around automated SMS and voice.

So if you disagree, that's fine. I'd find it much more productive to know what you disagree with and why than the ad hominem accusation that I'm a "bitter former employee" which is a. Not useful and b. False.

I think it's important to remember that what Twilio offers is a commodity, and there are no switching costs, which limits their market value.

Just as it's easy to spin up comms on Twilio, it's getting easier by the day to spin up Twilio-esq infrastructure itself. They had first mover advantage, but it doesn't seem good enough (not taking into account their largest customers deciding to internalize the functionality to reduce costs).

> what Twilio offers is a commodity, and there are no switching costs

There are plenty of switching costs. Porting numbers from one carrier to another with zero downtime, for example. Negotiating a contract with a new carrier. The new carrier may not support numbers, calls or SMS in some countries you are currently supporting. Testing deliverability and call quality across multiple carriers in multiple countries; you might discover that the new carrier routes messages/calls using unreliable carriers. The new carrier may not have good procedures for avoiding toll fraud. Sending SMS messages that contain Unicode might render like Ã on some phones; Twilio put a lot of time into figuring out how every carrier treats those on the wire and ensuring that messages get rendered properly. Fallback procedures may break.

If you want to host it yourself now you probably need a NOC, and to test binds, and to test the fallback protocols, and to figure out every edge case that carriers have with respect to certain numbers, messages or routes.

I feel like you're exaggerating based on my knowledge of interfacing with carriers using SS7, but that's just my opinion.

I agree that Twilio blazed the trail, but much of what you mentioned is a known quantity now and can be replicated with less effort.

You don't need to be as good as Twilio, just "good enough".

As a former Twilio engineer he might be somewhat biased. Full disclosure: I am also ex-Twilio.

Hey Steve! Love what you're doing with the bank APIs!

Ex-Twilio here too.. and worked for an SMS aggregator before that.

While working with one carrier is easy, working with 5, 10, or 100 is a horrible pain in the ass. In addition, you need a compelling reason to convince higher ups in your org to sink $texas-sized dollars into this.. long before you can send that first message.

Uber is a special case as they needed coverage in countries that Twilio didn't support. Further, they had a ridiculous pile of money. Since they had to stand up the architecture anyway, adding the "easy" countries made sense.

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