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Comment by jlundberg | Hacker News Reader

I make a living from the SMS & telephony API I made.

Our MRR is ~500 000 EUR and our pricing model is pay-as-you-go (per SMS, per MMS, per phone call minute, per month for virtual mobile phone numbers).

The problem we solve is programmatic access to the mobile networks, specifically in Europe/Sweden.

We got out first paying customers through offline networking: going to hackathons, meetups and poking tech friends to find the first few early adopters.

Which is also our biggest challenge, it is hard to scale an offline based go-to-market method.

It has certainly been a painful struggle to get here and it still feels surreal it works so well.

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Mind if I ask what stack you use? I've got some acquaintances working with Swedish infrastructure, and they have lots of stories.

We connect directly with the operators using the protocols of their choice. Mostly IP-based protocols such as SMPP, SIP, MM7 and various kinds of VPN/TLS technology.

Very custom contracts and back in 2011 when we started there was no such thing as a virtual mobile phone number.

These days the operators are a bit more aware of the value of A2P (application-to-person) versus P2P which was/is very much on the decline. That also means the operators have capacity built of ready to be used without new investments.

As for our own software, we are mostly a Python based shop. And we use tons of open source. The most heavily used components we replace over time with cusomized software as these are generally fully not suited for our needs.

The true value for our customers is our technical support, our operator conectivity, the robustness of the platform, and lastly the nice REST API with it’s debugging capability.

So like Twilio but for some local European networks?

Yes, very much so. We came to the same conclusion but started with two-way SMS text messaging. Twilio started with voice.

We basically have full international support these days, but are strongest in Northern Europe.

For instance, if you want a virtual mobile phone number in Sweden that supports both SMS and voice, Twilio can’t provide that but we do.

Plus we have nicer API if you aks me :)

Company name is 46elks. The country code to Sweden is +46 so the name is an hint our service is in the telephony space.

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