SendHub (YC W12) raises $3M Series A, Launches Attachments for SMS
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
The article provides some interesting numbers to chew on: - 150,000 users - 15,000 business (let's call them customers) - $50,000 in monthly revenue - 6 lines average per customer.
Impressive numbers to backup traction! But they also tell the story of the freemium model very well.
Sendhub website lists cheapest paid plan at $25/month/line. This means that at most, they have 2,000 paid lines (based on $50k monthly revenue) and in the neighborhood of 400 paid customers.
These are still very good numbers and nothing to frown upon, but if you compare that to the massive adoption of the free accounts (150k users), it's very telling of how difficult it is to convert people from free to paid.
And, yeah, converting any free accounts to paid is an achievement in and of itself. Best of luck in growing the company!
This space is red hot right now :). Congrats Ash!
My thought is it would be technically possible over MMS, but most default messaging apps wouldn't play nice with them. Also getting into the network is a huge challenge.
The MMSC infrastructure is unnecessarily complex and, for some ungodly reason, is seen as a proprietary network advantage. Your best bet is to make an end-run around the carriers by partnering with an aggregator like Acision (or someone smaller if you lack the volume).
MMS is one of the most difficult things to get carriers to expose :/...