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Comment by bubbamack | Hacker News Reader

The idea is to give user's control of the messaging and marketers better options. SMS is good for individualized messages like you would get from loyalty programs. Our focus is on broadcasting messages to a group - we don't target an individual user by design.

We built this to solve problems we've dealt with personally: - getting a ton of spam and scam text messages - text messages from coaches that got lost in a group chat - difficulty in unsubscribing from some community texts - etc

We got frustrated that anyone can send anything to us as long as they have our email or phone number and wanted a platform that made broadcasting a message more effective by letting users control who can reach them.

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> The idea is to give user's control of the messaging and marketers better options. SMS is good for individualized messages like you would get from loyalty programs. Our focus is on broadcasting messages to a group - we don't target an individual user by design.

Who is your ideal customer? This seems worse for marketers because it's yet another channel to integrate, and the messaging cannot be personalized. The market moved toward personalized marketing years ago, so a channel that lacks personalization seems destined to underperform.

Asking my shoppers/users to download someone else's app seems like a non-starter.

This all seems great for end-users, but terrible for the marketers/organizations that would actually be paying you.

I can see this working for conferences, but most of those have their own apps.

Your comments are on point and ones we've discussed internally. Big thanks for sharing them because it's super helpful to hear others pushback and express those same concerns.

Marketers already use different channels for different purposes - email, text, social - so we know introducing a new type of channel will definitely be a heavy lift.

However, we believe personalization at the expense of privacy has been out of hand and want to see control put back in the hands of users. My co-founder and I pioneered and have patents on tracking and personalization and feel we helped give birth to these problems. The Notifier is an idea we had to push the pendulum back towards user control. We'll give it a shot and see if the market feels the same way.

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