Trext – Software that engages large groups in interactive texting
trext.me
trext.me
The first thing anyone sees about your company is: "Texting for education, health, advertising, and much more. Start the conversation." What does that even mean? I want to understand what your product does, and more importantly how it can help me. "education health, advertising and much more" are completely random use cases, and are confusing and distracting. This is the first thing a customer sees; a lot won't even scroll down past that line. It has to make sense.
I would say you should move up the "Software that engages large groups in automated texting" up, but that's a description of what you do, not how it helps me. It really should say something like "Engage your audience in automated, responsive texting conversations in "x" clicks." Something like that. It's still off, I don't know how you'd convey that you make it easy, but that's what you're getting after. The benefit to me as a user would be easily engaging my audience in automated, responsive texting conversations. In fact maybe that's it. "Easily engage your audience in automated, responsive SMS conversations." Massage it. Don't tell me what you do, tell me what you can do for me.
Just some friendly advice. I wish you the best of luck!
I think services like this that have real but somewhat complex use cases can compress a large amount of info into a short, interesting message by using a use-case or ideally a short video that describes a sample use case and how the product solves the problem. Basically exactly what Dropbox used to have on their landing page.
It really sucks that this is being reinforced. I read the tag line and was like "ok" -- but then I watched the demo movie of setting up the ITTT text tree and thought it was pretty bad ass.
People need to stop being lazy and actually expend a small amount of effort to understand something.
Its a sad state that everyone expects every single piece of information spoon fed to them.
Is it really, actually, sad that everyone who clicks a link on Hacker News doesn't spend 5 minutes watching a video to figure out what a web app even does? I think we should celebrate the fact that most people live busy lives doing things that matter to them.
If you force your potential customers to do research to figure out what you do you're going to lose most of the people who may actually use your service but couldn't figure out what you do in the 20 seconds they devoted to your site. It's the lowest of the low hanging fruit.
You, appear to me, to have some sort of ingrained attitude against having patience and curiosity. I presume you're a type where you expect every post made to be backed up with links to information you'd be able to google yourself in under 30 seconds.
Please. You assume too much.
In an attention economy, our most precious resource is our time.
If someone wants my attention, they have to do the work. If I gave everything the attention it deserved, I'd never get anything done.
I only looked at trext (at all) because another commenter said the demo video was great (and it is).
Sadly, we product people often get hung up on the feature set of our product. No matter how many times we repeat "Features do not sell software. Benefits sell software.", we often revert to implementation details when pressed for why customers should care about our apps. And when we start thinking in terms of benefits, we pick bad, non-specific, frilly benefits, like "Easy to use" and "Sleekly designed." Does anyone ever try to sell software as being hard to use and clunky?" "
- patio11
But instead of trying to describe the service (tech), I'd choose a catchy name (textback, textpong, pongtext) and show by example. People will grok it once they see it.
Identify a handful of use cases. Hope that one hits the mark. Run like hell.
Here's some of the ways I could imagine people using it.
- My chiropractor, hairdresser, mechanic wants to confirm an appointment.
- My chiro, etc needs to cancel, resched, etc.
- I'm on a wait list for time sensitive goods like flights, concert tickets, restaurant reservations or close out of cupcakes and vendors needs to confirm transaction, first come first serve (first right of refusal) style.
- I have a periodic donation to my favorite charity (or campaign contribution) and they want to do another "ask" (for more money). I'd like to respond, something like "thanks for asking, here's $100, please ask again in 6 months".
- Real time ad hoc game shows. It's trivia night at the local pub. Send a text to the game host to join. (Hmmm. This is a great idea. Yours, for free.)
Any way. I'm sure there's zillions of use cases. And there's at least a few customers who will pay to scratch an itch.
Best of luck to the OP.
My mind kind of checked out after reading that; I assumed I would not find this interesting, but I scrolled down a bit, and saw the demo, which was really cool.
"Automate your Text Conversations" or something similar, really large, with your video right underneath should be the first thing someone sees on the site.
But points "1" "2" "3" need the language toned down a bit need something simpler to convey the point. Didn't pass the 1st read test of knowing what you are selling.
By the way don't forget to put effort into things other than YC. Not the only game in town or path to success in business life.
I'm guessing I'm not in your target market, though. That is, someone who would use this for say, RSVPs to church events or something. Though, your demo would tell me otherwise. I'm a little confused about market fit, I guess.
I built something similar to this for my startup; it didn't have a pretty UI we could let our marketing team use, but it also didn't cost nearly $0.10/text - it cost $0.01/text after we went into production, and was free while we were devving it.
I would charge a fixed rate per month for the pretty front-end; that's what startups/marketing teams/etc. would sub for. I'd then charge for the variable SMS cost at nearly what you can pay a Twilio/Tropo for them, and make it a unified, uncapped plan.
TL;DR: Get a great sales team
Huh? I honestly don't know a single person (other than my parents) who don't use texting as their primary medium of communication between phones. It's easy, it's reliable, it removes the possibility of awkward or lengthy conversations.
What makes you think nobody texts anymore?
... or integrate the step 1/2/3 into the animated demo to save on web page real estate.
...but also not something that's just a video capture of your desktop.
Also, this sounds cool for IT Operations like if you integrated with Nagios or PagerDuty.
At the risk of sounding a bit harsh, anyone dismissing SMS has their head too far up Silicon Valley. Only half of the adult population in the US has a smartphone, and SMS is the best communication method for low-income, rural, and elderly communities. On top of that, something like 95% of text messages are read within minutes of being received. For the given use cases, this solution is right on.
I think the pricing is dead wrong, and there should be more emphasis on instantly signing up for free. Also, I think you should tone down the eco imagery and messaging.
My thought, however, is that there's a long tail pricing strategy that's being missed. Your plans right now are $60, $175, and $500/mo, which I feel eliminates a lot of folks in the sub-$60/mo region. I'm not sure what the low number should be, but I'd rhetorically ask if you think six $10/mo customers are worth more than one $60/mo customer -- the answer in my mind is no. Building six relationships means that as those companies or groups grow, they'll grow into your bigger packages. As someone at one of those companies leaves their employment and moves to a new job, they'll insist on implementing your technology. They'll tell their friends and colleagues. If you lose one of those six customers, you still have $50/mo coming in. That becomes even more clear when you start thinking about 50 customers at $10/mo versus one $500/mo customer. (I'm not saying $10 is the right number)
I'd also argue that there's a difference between a trial and a free account. If I'm thinking of using this service for some business use case, I personally am not going to let my mind be creative about really thinking how your service can intertwine with my needs if it's just a trial account. I'm not going to invest my time into something ephemeral. But, if there's a free service that I can actually test with a customer and use for a few weeks without that ephemeral feeling, you're starting that relationship building early. Free accounts will absolutely cause you to lose money, which is why it takes testing and analysis to determine the right balance. But if you're actually charging $60/month to send 650 texts, you're already making a profit of 90% after SMS fees and card processing charges.
* a way to assign 'expected words' in responses, with intelligent dictionary/thesaurus lookups to assist (so a free text response that asks 'where's the meat?' will be handled by the 'where's the beef?' path in the tree)
* a way to add nodes to the tree in real time as responses come in that don't have a valid mapping yet (so someone who attempts something completely bizarre like 'screw bear' can get a custom response)
* a simple way to handle game state, probably in another tree accessible in each node.
We've thought about the thesaurus and are thinking of going in that direction in the future, but right now it texts back the possible options. Does this seem good for the moment?
I'm not 1000% clear on your third bullet. Are you interested in nodes that you can access from any point in the tree, or are you interested in nodes that transfer you to another tree?
Imagine a 'choose your own adventure' book that accepted arbitrary input and could create new paragraphs on the fly. If your input maps to an existing paragraph, you're texted it immediately. If the book never heard of someone trying your input before, you're told to wait a bit and get a response once the book writes it. A very few commands do something special. 'inventory' spits out your current inventory state.
There are a few levels of game state. Characters carry around a small amount of state (alive, healthy, ugly, etc.). Locations carry around some state. (on fire, dark) Other state might be held in a calendar (May 1st, 9:00 am, the world will end) or the world itself. Each 'paragraph' in the imaginary book should be able to look up and/or update any of those states when entered.
Ideally, any input that comes in would be autocorrected and analyzed for parts of speech. If a new noun comes in, it could be compared to nouns mentioned in previous 'paragraphs' to figure out what the user meant. 'get brown tote' and 'get brownish bag' should resolve to the same thing.
My third bullet boils down to allowing a user to:
You are standing before a door.
> open door
The door resists your furious pushing and pulling. What's that thing people open doors with? A....key?
> get key
Who said anything about a key? There's no key here.
You are standing before a door.
> open door
The door rattles, but appears to be locked.
> use key on door
*click* The key fit, the door unlocked.
>> "Texting is already seen as more personal than email"
This is true but I don't think it's a plus for your product. Personally I despise getting texts from companies asking me questions and replying back to me, precisely because it's personal and unexpected. I don't want that kind of interaction from a business. It's an invasion of my personal life (ok a bit dramatic, I know).
Have you done much research on this? I'd be interested to know what you discovered.
I can think of a case or two where the pricing might make sense. But if we're really being honest, I'd probably just use the service to test my assumptions and prove out the model. Then, if the numbers looked good, I'd do the Twilio integration myself to save a little money and remove the additional dependency.
This is probably exactly the wrong group of people to ask about pricing, though, because many of us know what Twilio costs and can do the integration ourselves. It's the normal business owners who'll think your product is black magic.
Hopefully you're right about business owners. We anticipate that they'll see the value. Trext is designed to make SMS app creation accessible to non-programers.
A couple of UI problems I noticed:
I keep my secondary monitor vertical—which makes your banner image look like this: http://imgur.com/3MGDYel,sxRuvJY#0
Also, the text on the first section below the banner clips a bit: http://imgur.com/3MGDYel,sxRuvJY#1 (but only on my vertical screen).
I would have thought this plugs into whatsapp though, but maybe the messaging market is too fragmented and it wouldn´t be worth for you building it for every single platform (Facebook, Gmail, sms, whatsapp ...)
I can see entring each option being tiresome for larger applications.
Thanks and good luck! :)
Alternatively, use testimonials from actual users.