SMS-First Startups

The blogpost is well meaning but its certainly wrong/naive about a number of things:

1. You don't bypass bandwidth and latency issues; you're a hostage to them. Want to get more SMS/sec capacity? Well, you need to renegotiate your terms with each mobile partner. If you have a shortcode, you can't negotiate because the operators own the codes, the tariff and the capacity and you have no alternative. Contrast this with internet bandwith which is 1,000x cheaper and easier to get a hold of.

2. Similarly, you don't "Own the network", you are at the mercy of your mobile operator who has near absolute control. The operator is a party in your commercial decisions, on your rev-share model, on your product behaviour (so it doesn't compete with existing services/investments), bandwith etc.

3. There is no rich media. MMS is a different beast altogether and has very very tiny adaption (<10% of mobile internet users).

That being said, there are 6Billion mobile users and 2.2Billion internet users. This gulf will exist for a long time to come and it is unfair to limit innovation, information and access to just internet users and in that, the article is spot on. My company specifically focuses on creating a social network that covers both these spectrums in a way that doesn't exclude non-internet users from the national debate and the only that is possible is via SMS.

1. You pay through the nose for each "request/response" cycle. SMS aggregators will set you back a few pennies per message received and sent.

2. At some point you have to purchase a short code phone number, which typically start at $500 USD per month. Countries like Australia are worse, costing upwards of $1500 USD per month.

3. Phone numbers don't behave consistently globally. In an SMS world, you can bet on maintaining multiple phone numbers to access the same app. This can get confusing if you have a German mobile phone user in Canada trying to text an Australian phone number.

4. If you operate a US short code, there is rampant censorship and policing of how and where a short code is displayed. For example. If you operate the short code 88088 from your web app and a customer publishes this to their own personal website completely out of your control, expect to respond to a letter about taking this phone number down.

While the reach of SMS is high, I wish it would die a swift death and be replaced with mobile web technology because its really a horrible environment to build applications (much worse than any App Store environments)

If you decide to dive into SMS, check out this Sinatara-like DSL app framework we built for handling messages: https://github.com/polleverywhere/message_router

I have a vague (but exciting) sense that there are some big companies waiting to be born at the nexus of (1) the developing world's exploding population, (2) cheap server possibilities (e.g. Raspberry Pi's) + API (e.g. Twilio), and (3) 100% SMS coverage.

SMS is a hugely under-utilized vertical!

I think Twilio's rise to success has just begun.

Even most real-world Twilio examples mostly seem to be along the lines of rather frivolous applications such as BeerText.Us, which is great but hardly stuff you can build a business upon.

Only really arguable if you forget voice calls...