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.
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!
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.
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.
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...)
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.
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.