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Are there any twilio based businesses left to start? It always struck me a cool technology.

Perhaps a service to automatically call customers when something is cancelled due to weather, etc?

There's probably ten thousand things that you can do with a telephone which can be offered to a business as straight-up monthly SaaS, and even more ways to embed a phone call/SMS into a business/product.

Seriously, if you lack for ideas, pick a business and enumerate all the calls they are likely to make. Anything where you use the common pattern of "Speak to an employee, as an alternative to a REST interface" is likely amenable to Twilio-ization.

Thanks. What do you mean about the speak-to-an-employee part?

Example: I used to work for a large office supply store. The most common phone call was "I ordered something from you on X. When does it arrive?" You know what I'm going to do, right? Ask you for enough identifying information, find your order in the computer, and then read you the expected delivery date.

The most common outgoing call was "Thanks for your fax order. We're calling to confirm receipt, tell you that you didn't calculate the total correctly and the actual price is $42.06 or $3 less than you expected, and inform you to expect delivery tomorrow." This phone call routinely took 20% of order entry time. Everything in that phone call just used me as a voice interface to our database.

A Twilio app would have obsoleted an entire floor of employees at that company.

This kind of anecdote makes me wish it was feasible to shadow a BigCo in a random industry for a week and just spend the entire time taking notes on choke points and practices.

It might be, you could ask. People are also generally quite willing to talk about their jobs, what they do all day, the annoying parts of said jobs. Or you could get a job for a week or a month in a place like that. Actually doing it beats seeing it done for insight.

When's the last time you had to call someone on the phone to get something done that lots of people routinely have to get done? Turn that into a computer program.

You can copy an existing business (that works), and apply it to a different industry.

Sorry, I'm drawing a blank. Can you give an example to get me thinking?

Pick any business tactic using phone/SMS, and replace the nouns with other nouns. For example:

Papa John's sends me a text every Friday at 4pm, giving me a pizza coupon for the weekend. I suspect this drives a ridiculous increase in pizza orders for them.

What other business can send a coupon to a customer at a time they are likely to want it?

- Service for movie theaters to text concession coupons on Friday afternoons

- Service for web gift stores to text coupons to customers before holidays

- Service for restaurants to text daily coupon right before lunch

Or copy a startup that limits itself to email / iPhone notifications (like e.g. peerby.com) and add SMS to have a much bigger reach.

Or copy an existing business and apply it to the same industry in a different country. No reason, say, Appointment Reminder wouldn't work just as well in Germany.

Yes. Note that when I say industry, I also cover geographical differences.

Or copy an existing business, and apply it to the same industry, in the same country.

Competition is proof that the market exists. And if there is an existing service provider, by definition there are customers that are not 100% happy with them.

B2B markets are usually very large, and there is room for lots of growth.

Hey, you are a MD student from Germany as well + interested in Programming/SAAS? Any way to contact you?

Finished studying as of November last year, actually. And sure, send me an email, cassandrexx on gmail.

Here are a couple ideas from brain storming. Can anyone critque?

A service to automatically call the pharmacy and request a refill. (I hate having to call every month)

A service to call a restaurant for you and find out how long the wait is.

A service to make automated collections calls for businesses.

You'd probably do better to target businesses than consumers. Sure, you don't want to call the pharmacy, but how much are you really willing to pay to save yourself one phone call once a month? (Beware, if you're a highly paid and highly antisocial HN user, your response to this is probably going to be "a lot more than the average customer".) Same problem for the restaurant call.

On the other hand, how much would your pharmacist be willing to pay to save his highly paid staff the four hours they spend on the phone every month reminding customers that the prescription they've ordered has been in for a week now? Find a way to solve problems for businesses, not consumers.

I suspect automated collection calls are illegal, or otherwise already exist, but if they're not and they don't, that sounds like a way to make absolute piles of cash from collection agencies (in a slightly ethically dodgy way).

Thanks for the feedback. I guess instead of collection calls, I'd call them payment reminders. This site appears to do just that: http://www.call-center-tech.com/payment-reminder.htm

Why not start with the customer first? Ask them questions to uncover their workflow...then pose questions like "what really makes you want to pull your hair out when it comes to doing xyz"...

Also at the OP said, any thing that involves communicating with phone + manual work - things businesses are already doing - are opportunities (potentially)

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