SendHub (YC W12) Lets Businesses Text Their Customers, Teachers Text For Free | Hacker News Reader

SendHub (YC W12) Lets Businesses Text Their Customers, Teachers Text For Free

techcrunch.com

89 pointsashrust33 comments

As someone on the founding team of an identical startup a year ago, I can share experience:

- This market is beyond saturated, with countless large companies competing.

- In our experience, small businesses, teachers, etc. will do everything they can to avoid paying for the service, no matter how much value it creates for them. This is why many of the other providers have an 'ad-supported' free plan - freemium is a tough route here (but I'm sure they're just doing that right now as a ploy).

- The general consensus received is 'Oh we have [Facebook|Twitter|Email|...] for that, and they're all free!'

- SMS is more of a private sanctity that people use for family and friends. Facebook, Twitter, Email can be ignored, filtered using labels and lists, and checked when the person has time. People do not want to be SMS spammed with 'We have freshly baked cakes!' 5 times a day.

> The big draw for SendHub has nothing to do with buzzwords (aren’t you sick of local, social, photo-sharing apps, anyway?)

> In a couple of weeks (...) the mobile-optimized website will include social sharing buttons, so a business can spread its message even further through the recipients’ circle of friends.

Right.

Being social and using social are not the same thing. You use Facebook/Twitter, are you a social app?

Like the lure of the Sirens, the viral factor of social sharing is too hard to resist.

Oh VCs, some of our users put adblockers in their ears, but where's our rope?

Selling unlimited messaging to users for a fixed fee while paying Twilio $0.01 per message sent is pretty ballsy. Further, paying $0.01 per message while offering a free plan is extremely ballsy.

In their defense, though, my understanding is that once you reach a certain volume of messages, the cost to send quickly heads to zero, especially if you deal with the carriers directly. The phone carriers want you to be sending the messages since they can charge people to receive them (at least in the USA).

I'll definitely be curious to see where this goes.

UK Specific comment: remember in UK there is no cost to receive sms messages

I work as a teacher and use bulksms.co.uk to send text messages to my students who are 19+. I use an Intranet based system with a fixed set of non-editable messages to send to 18 year olds and under because of the UK child protection laws.

Students respond well to sms messages compared to email. If someone was missing, a quick sms results in a phone call explaining absence. I pre-pay for 1000 messages every couple of months out of my own pocket because it makes my job easier.

Can I ask how you protect, and show that you're protecting, people's phone numbers?

How do you handle the data protection compliance stuff?

Or is that something that you don't have to concern yourself with because of the use case or somesuch?

thanks.

I'm in the UK.

I ask adult students if it is ok to send them text messages, everyone says yes basically, I've had one opt out in about 5 years. The Colleges were I work have enrollment forms that include the relevant data protection clauses as they collect addresses/phone numbers for contact purposes anyway. I use a password protected Web site to send messages which keeps an audit of the text of the messages sent, and I have not enabled the answer facility so these are 'one way' messages. I think that is more secure for the students than using, say, my own phone.

Under 19 its official channels only, and the College system has 'standard messages' that we click a button on to send from the Intranet. The student database has phone/address details and we have all the legal permissions to contact both students and their parent/guardian as needed.

Basically I'm in a regulated professional role where contacting students is regarded as good practice.

This article is a great example of spinning a disadvantage in to a feature. Short-codes are expensive and most small organizations wouldn't or couldn't pay for them anyways. Instead of sharing a short-code among their subscribers SendHub has spun the ten-digit telephone number (NPA+NXX+LOCAL) as a feature, value-add or strength in their product. Great work!

Hands up if you thought about building this, but didn't because you thought it was too simple.

I'm working on one of these for a client. There are tons of similar services out there.

Agreed. There are a lots of companies tackling this problem, for all sorts of niche solutions (texting students to remind them of homework, restaurants texting customers that their table is ready, etc.)

Since I'm not familiar with this space, what are some of the other big competitors out there? And how do they (seemingly) stack up against SendHub?

Texting.ly (TechCrunch Disrupt/ Dave McClure funded) Recessmobile.com TextMarks.com CallFire.com Tatango.com CellIt.com TxtWire.com Mobivity.com Sumotext.com Message-media.com Trumpia.com

Trust that there are many more for more granular use cases.

As you said, there are a ton of niche companies that handle this. Just look at the attendee list at the Bar & Nightclub show in Las Vegas. I work for a company that provides a similar service, but we have a short code and work directly with the carriers. Lots of competition and not a whole lot of margin if you don't have the volume drive cost down. Good luck to the, but free isn't going to last too long.

Heh, yep. There are many competitors in this space already and there will be many more thanks to services like Twilio. I actually learned about these services through my sister who is a high school teacher. I was turned away from the idea once she explained to me that lots of teachers use them but will never pay for it. They hop from one free account to another.

Technically it's pretty simple, as Twilio is doing the heavy lifting. I'd looked at building something similar (well - actually did build the basics - doesn't take long) but the big issue becomes monetization and such.

I guess I don't have enough business "wisdom" (guts?) to launch a pay service that offers unlimited texts for $10/month, when those texts have a real hard cash cost. $10 = 1000 texts, not counting the texts people would send back to you to say "remove me" and such.

Twilio have volume pricing - http://www.twilio.com/pricing/volume-pricing - at 500k SMS you get a 25% price break, and even at 30k messages per month, they're not breaking the bank so far on Twilio credits.

But... as this grows, what's the goal? I see 'freemium' on the TC article, but I've just signed up for sendhub, and it gave me a number, but it doesn't seem to work at all like the video described it. I've got no option to set a specific wordcode, nor is there any info on freemium pricing/upgrades.

EDIT - isn't this groupme all over again? What's the difference?

Pricing and upgrades are coming soon. You can create groups from the contacts page, click on new on the groups section on the left. From there you'll be asked to create a keyword for your group. Hope that helps - if not, please feel free to ping us support [at] sendhub.com.

TC pricing info: "Paid levels providing unlimited messaging are available for $10, $50, and $150 per month, with access to 1,000 contacts, 100,000 contacts, or 250,000 contacts, respectively."

This sounds like a gamble that the user will buy the service, but never reach the number of contacts: for $10 it's $0.01 per contact, for $50 it's $0.0005 per contact, at $150 it's $0.0006 per contact. For $50, they'd want the user to send/receive less than 5k messages to break-even on Twilio retail costs.

The main problem they will have if anyone tries to send to 100k contacts, is that Twilio limits the send rate to 1 sms per second. This batch will take 27.78 hours to send and 250k will take 69.45 hours to send. Not to mention that it will cost the company $1,000 and $2,500 respectively (although they will have a way better deal from Twilio than $0.01/sms at that point).

You're assuming they're only sending from one phone number.

Hrm... that's probably how it would work in most cases, as it would be confusing to end users to sign up from one number and get a text from one they don't know about (even if the footer text indicated who it was from).

This pricing issue is one of the reasons I could never justify pressing forward with my initial idea of getting in to this market. Someone will end up being the "constant contact of sms" - that seems a logical market to pursue, but I'm not sure how to get there with the current pricing models (I mean in general, not specifically sendhub).

This is the major disadvantage of using longcodes (regular 7 digit phone number) and is the reason that any company that is serious about sending out large quantity of messages, is using a shortcode (5-6 digit number) which can (with twilio) send up to 60 messages per second.

I really hope SendHub requires users to explicitly sign up before they receive mass updates. I bet a lot of your customers are going want to import their existing customer database so they can "stay in touch" and send out inane spam about their lunch special.

Makes me look back at www.ClassParrot.com, we should have focused on something more general like this, instead of just teachers...

Did the 80% for $1 ever produce a cofounder?

Thats funny. I can't think of a single company I do business with that wouldn't piss me off if they sent me a text.

how about airlines informing you about flight delays, or credit card warning of unusual activity with the card?

They have my for-spam email address, they can use that.

This seems like a weekend project building on top of twilio.

What nonsense. SMS gateways are so 2000. This would be more interesting if their mission was to integrate all the various kinds of notification systems, including SMS, into one unified solution.

twilio and tropo, while great in us, still has troubles with reliably delivering sms to international numbers. once they solve it, service like you described, becomes viable

Sounds a lot like Wuphf.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuphf

;)

What does this have over Google Voice?

SendHub makes it easy to send 1 message to any number of people and allows your customers to join groups by simply texting a keyword to your SendHub number. For example, Tom's Pizza could have its customers text 'pizza' to be signed up for alerts from them. We also have feedback built in and you can be signed up and sending messages in under a minute - hard to do with Google voice.

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