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Comment by dickeytk | Hacker News Reader

Trouble is offsetting the twilio bill.

Getting money is the hardest UX problem ever, so I just decided to skip it as long as I can afford it haha

Trouble is offsetting the twilio bill.

This is the least hard problem in startup-dom, because Twilio lets you solve Serious Problems for Serious Businesses and they are ecstatic to pay money for them. (P.S. In case it isn't obvious, don't charge based on what you're paying for Twilio. Underlying phone service: cheap. Application logic: expensive.)

There are a lot of one-week Twilio applications worth 5 or 6 figures to the right people.

The problem is that you then have to

A) Find those businesses

B) Sell it to them

I suspect B) is the most difficult, especially for programmers who may not have a deep network into fortune 500s.

I also have a feeling that if you could sketch out a way to do B) in a blog post you may write the most valuable post ever made.

Not asking you to write a business book or anything, but can you give an example of the sort of thing you're thinking of? (Is callinwith.us an example?) I looked at Twilio because I thought it sounded really cool, but in the end I couldn't think of many Twilio applications that 1) have a clear revenue model, and 2) aren't already features of Goldmine or similar that anyone who wants it would already have.

I guess I feel that since it's SO simple and obvious it isn't worth anything. It was more of an itch I wanted to scratch, so I did.

> I guess I feel that since it's SO simple and obvious it isn't worth anything.

There are lots of "simple and obvious" things that aren't. "Hey, this mold kills bacteria." Sometimes, realizing what's simple and obvious is the valuable bit.

True story. A friend and I were two shakes of a salt shaker away from launching a business on top of Twilio using openVBX and a few other things.

There are tons of ideas out there in the mobile voice arena.

You might consider adding something like this: "This meeting cost me $3.45, which I'm paying out of my own pocket. Want to donate that amount? Click the Paypal button below. Thanks! -Jeff"

ooo! I love it! How could I communicate that though? I don't track emails. I COULD send an sms afterwards, but I don't have a good way to figure out who was the originator of the conference call.

Maybe I could just put a side note on the page saying how much the average meeting costs and asking for donations there?

Do not do this. Just let it be free for now then build up traffic, call your most active users and see what type of businesses they are and ask them what else you could do to help.

If you can't monetize it, you can at least sell the source code as an enterprise solution -- i think there are many SMB would like to get this simple system in house.

Honestly, Twilio's API is so well done I don't believe my code is worth anything. However, it's available here: https://github.com/dickeytk/callinwithus for anyone to take a look at if they're curious how it works.

Remember, people don't pay for code, they pay for solutions to their problems. The amount they are happy to pay isn't related to the code, but to their problem.

If it's easy to write the code, you will (or might...) quickly have competitors, that's all. But since you couldn't find any, that might not be the case...

Thank you so much for sharing the code. <3

No problem! I MIT licensed it as well, so feel free to hack, change, sell away! If you have any questions about it, let me know.

Great that in 2 hours it is done that much code:)

Most of it is just what you get on a standard Rails app. The interesting stuff is right here: https://github.com/dickeytk/callinwithus/blob/master/app/con...

What about starting everyone off with a balance of say $5-10, and running it down after the first call with an option to top up via PayPal once over?

Trouble is, without accounts, how can I tell who the originator of a conference is? My goal is to keep the UX as brutally simple as possible. I'm really against having payments get in the way of using the product in ANY way since I feel that this is a problem that needs to be insanely simple and easy since conference calls are always a pain in the ass for some reason.

By the incoming phone number - if they are out of money prompt them for a credit card when they call in

Twilio provides call logs in .csv through the API.

premium number is audio advert free?

From a UX perspective, it'd be great, unfortunately getting advertisers hooked into their system would need much more work than it took to actually build the project in the first place.

I was thinking of just putting it out for free until it got too expensive, then asking for donations and if that didn't make ends meet putting some restriction on such as advertisements or a time limit or something.

clearly your conference call gets rickrolled after 10 mins unless you call the premium no :P

Maybe the rickroll could start out quiet but just get louder and the other callers get quieter until you pay!

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