Hacker News Reader

This person businesses.

And to others reading: Miguel didn't say anything bad about Twilio really, just that the alignments for them aren't there - and that's ok. Maybe it back fires and Twilio adjusts back to its dev-focused strategy. Businesses just evolve as they need to. If Twilio ends up being "bad" it just means there's now a spot for someone else to form "The Good Twilio" :) See: the many Google competitors, the many smartphone competitors, the many VPN competitors, etc...

Question: What does Twilio do with the profit it does make off those bad actors once it discovers they are bad actors?

Probably my top issue with companies like Google which make a ton of money off of crime is... they keep the money from the crime! That's a perverse incentive to at least do a poor job preventing it.

I remember visiting the Twilio offices when it was still tiny during a Google Glass related thing. I still have the T-shirt.

You have the CEO of a public company come out to play and address a public post, which is pretty cool! Your attacking style of questioning just makes people like Jeff less likely to engage with the community. You could frame the same question in a more constructive style.

(for the record, I didn't downvote you)

Curious, what in GP's question rubbed you the wrong way? To me it seemed like a legitimate question. I'd actually like to know the answer myself because in the end it always comes down to incentives. But maybe I missed some nuance? (not a native english speaker, obviously)

Anyway, hoping for the answer to the question, and that it is taken in a positive way.

I actually don't have a strong issue with Twilio, and I think it's a good question that concerns me about other larger companies which also have problems with bad actors on their platform. It is potentially something that CEO could use as a huge differentiator if they want to as well. It definitely wasn't meant to be attacking in style, and I also wasn't aware this was the CEO. =)

That being said, I'm not a scary individual, I assume I am softballing compared to what a CEO faces day to day.

I didn’t take ocdtrekkie’s question as attacking. How would you have phrased it to be more constructive?

>come out to play

Jeff is the CEO of a public company, and hence works for shareholders.

It's in Jeff's interest to engage with the community, and we are glad he's here. We certainly don't need to tiptoe around delicate sensibilities though...

It’s a good question because it goes to the incentives of a company to truly fight the problem vs saying the right things but looking the other way when convenient.

For us, we typically work with customers who are victims of fraud and the first time, we give them advice on how to better protect themselves and then refund them ~ the amount of profit we would have made. Ie we recoup costs but that’s it. For the financially aware, this is bad for our gross margin and profit but we do it to help customers the first time. After that though we expect them do implement some defenses otherwise our incentives aren’t aligned. Now however, we have Fraud Guard rolling out which should prevent much of the fraud in the first place.

There are other forms of bad actors but that’s the most prevalent these days.

That's a better answer than I expected, thanks! I agree it definitely makes sense to ensure your customers also have incentives aligned with yours.

Only tangentially related—and I know the odds are low that you worked on this personally—but I want to give sincere thanks for the stuff you guys have shared via Twilio Labs. The netlify-okta-auth package in particular was exactly what I needed to complete a recent project, and the documentation it came with was nearly perfect.

(former netlify here) - what does netlify + okta have to do with Twilio?

https://github.com/twilio-labs/netlify-okta-auth

Twilio authored/published the package GP is referring to.

Nice to hear it's appreciated! (Developer of the netlify-okta-auth package here.)

first of all, big admirer of you.

if you feel inclined, would really love your comment on OP's observation:

> Sadly, us developers are not at the center of everything anymore at Twilio.

it does seem the recent messaging has de emphasized that in favor of "Customer Engagement Platform". as the originator of "Ask Your Developer" (I read your book!) that has to sting a little bit. would love to hear your thinking on how Twilio continues to also engage developers in its next phase.

At this phase we have to talk both to the business and to developers. Only talking to developers isn’t savvy or smart. AWS etc do the same thing.

We can have good APIs and make a compelling case to the business why they should pay for it.

I agree that sometimes our engagement messaging isn’t quite right for developers. As a developer, I prefer more technical and matter of fact marketing of products. But interestingly, as a CEO, sometimes I need companies to simplify the message especially in a domain I’m not an expert in and don’t want to become an expert in!

For the entrepreneurs in the HN community, it’s talking features vs benefits. Developers love what a product does in a literal sense because they’re close to the implementation. Business folks tend to look for the benefit statements more as they’re not as close to the implementation. It’s a like to walk when you’re talking to both!

I'd be interested to know how you think the business folks should judge the benefit statements without the detail that they could run by experienced developers? Surely they get a lot of vapourware pitches all the time.

This sounds reasonable and reads much better than glossing over OPs post. Hard to argue against.

definitely. my most quoted dev marketing tweet is about me constantly having to relearn “"Talk benefits, not features" doesn't work!” in the early stage devtool startup playpen i operate in, but at your stage you have multiple equally impt constituencies.

whenever i’m caught between a thesis and an antithesis i try to look for a synthesis to break through the apparent conflict. perhaps TWLO can find messaging that does the same. it feels like Msft is doing this well by essentially having a different group of brands that are keenly developer oriented, with Azure on the backend filling in all the enterprise messaging.

Link to tweet?

https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1361279902889086980

(Former Twilion here)

I’ve always described this as “selling features vs selling solutions”. As a startup grows, the buying persona changes. Startups that sell to developers do best when they’re selling features, whereas a product manager/CEO is shopping for a solution (like increasing customer engagement). A neat thing I’ve noticed is that at one point, almost every B2B company will add a “Solutions” page to their website to highlight that.

Wrote about it more here: https://memos.hawkhill.ventures/p/selling-features-then-solu...)

"At this phase we have to talk both to the business and to developers."

How can I send my wife a grocery list, with a twiml bin, and not register a business use-case and provide a US EIN for A2P 10DLC (along with example messages and opt-out mechanisms) ?

Haha - just kidding.

I know I can't do that.

... and as long as we have you here, what, pray tell, will Twilio do with the pages and pages of use-cases and howtos for home automation, personal alerts, person to person messaging, self-reminders, email forwards - like this, for instance:

https://www.twilio.com/blog/build-adhd-lifehack-tools-python...

Will you just remove all of those ?

Because they are impossible.

There are no hobbyist uses of Twilio after July.

I as wondering about the exact same thing. Sad to learn it’s just not an option anymore.

For what it’s worth, this is driven by federal regulations and carrier requirements, not by Twilio itself.

Yes, but the Twilio implementation of this has been very frustrating. The process is (needlessly?) complex and has changed several times since it's inception. The last time I had to adjust our 10DLC configuration I was forced to use the Twilio API instead of the web console.

An API is great if you have to do something hundreds of times or automate a process, but I had >10 sub-accounts to update and doing it through the API made it much more difficult. I feel like Twilio really dropped the ball here and could have done much more to make the 10DLC process more manageable.

> At this phase we have to talk both to the business and to developers. Only talking to developers isn’t savvy or smart. AWS etc do the same thing.

AWS does it well for both, may be learn from them. Twilio outbound communication has turned completely undecipherable (too much marketspeak) for both business and developers. The billboards in Miguel's blog post sums up the stark contrast very well. There need to be a balance.

Just an anecdotal data point, recently a company was interested in integrating internet voice calling systems, having used Twilio about 8 years ago, I suggested them to check out Twilio. The company mentioned they couldn't figure what Twilio does and doesn't and in the end went with the solution being pushed by local Telco.

What better example of Twilio becoming a completely sales driven organisation than this opportunistic and self serving response, with a paragraph directly lifted from you sales 101 deck no doubt.

Well done!

Hey Jeff,

Good to see that y'all are still pushing in the right direction! I left between the layoffs to pursue some innovation in the semiconductor space, but I look back fondly on my time at Twilio (Sendgrid)!

Building APIs into businesses is no easy task, but I'm glad that there are those still fighting the good fight, even if the field changes. Best of luck to the Twilio of the future!

Hey there, this is tangential but you just launched limited MMS support in Australia, but no voice and not 2-way and from what I can gather only on the Optus network.

I offer a virtual mobile number that does voice, txt and mms in Australia which could be globalised, interested in chatting?

Hi Jeff

If I understand the page for Fraud Guard correctly, this appears to cost money.

Seems like Twilio should be filtering spam (a) by default / auto-enabled for all and (b) at no cost to the user.

Much like how spam is included & auto enabled for all (and free) from Gmail/Outlook/etc.

It's no cost to the user! Defaults are rolled out to everybody, but the users opts-into aggressive protection because of the risk of false positives. Note, this is Verify today. All Programmable SMS customers will get it soon as well.

FWIW, the “Cost of Terminating Each SMS” is what confused me.

Haha.

Yes, fighting the good fight - doing god’s own work.