mikeylikey

I think there may be a false premise here. You seem to be framing this as medium objection: That "no consumer" wants text messages. Texting is really just an implementation detail here. Many people _want_ to save money and receive special deals for their favorite eating establishment. Many would prefer receiving these offers in the form of an ephemeral text message vs. downloading another app, for example.

In this context: yeah, I want these messages and am even sometimes happy to see them.

Ultimately (and this was my paradigm shift), it appears markets are far more diverse than I gave credit to and my personal preferences can't be applied as generally as I previously assumed.

> Your market is restaurants, and the market is certainly huge.

The market I was referring to, in this context, was people who would happily receive texts from restaurants if it meant they saved money.

> Depending on how much VC money you've taken or will take in the future, you won't have this choice. Your investors will demand growth

Valid point and concern(s). Can never really underestimate the power of these incentive dynamics and would be foolish to suggest we might be immune to them. FWIW we are bootstrapped outside YC participation to this point. Appreciate your reference to MailChimp. I'll look to take note on some of their practices.

Aye. Yeah I was not "scratching my own itch" as we say. Shane has a background in restaurant sales and we started in the industry with an assumption that SMB restaurants were underutilizing their customer data. Your guess is accurate. The game as YC likes to say is "building stuff people want" and that's we attempted and eventually meandered into.

Brick and Mortar retail is a big market with similar dynamics to restaurants. We do have non-restaurant customers already but believe there are advantages to carving out this niche. Some of the best customers who like us best are those that were texting with more generic companies prior.

Well-structured line of questions. Thanks!

Clarification question for you to help me answer:

Why are you asserting we aren't "attached to" or "affiliated" with the restaurant?

Maybe there is a misunderstanding of the relationship here.

One of the greatest conveniences of my life has been my dentist utilizing texting and text reminders

> Who is opting in to getting spammed?

Generally they're opting in to save money and get good deals at their favorite eating establishments. For some, getting this via text is a preferred method and less friction than downloading an app or alternative medium.

> I'm going to assume you're not using dark patterns to pull one over people while still claiming to be "opt-in"

these wouldn't hold up very well in a lawsuit even if you wanted to do this

You keep up the good work here and you'll have to add "webdev" to your linked in before long

I appreciate the way you framed this.

> No consumer wants these messages.

While I personally resonate with this sentiment, it's not accurate in my (very skeptical) experience. "many" consumers? "most" consumers? maybe. but I'd be slow to underestimate the size of the market here.

> My concern is that these will turn SMS, one of the last (mostly) clean communication channels, into another cesspit like email and the web have become

Valid and well articulated. I don't have a great response on the broad concern (we've demonstrated as a society/culture why we can't always have nice things; e.g. robocalls) beyond knowing the degree to which this medium gets regulated by the big 4 utility companies (and government). They are quite sensitive to their customer's (and constituent's) preferences to not have this personal space invaded. As for boostly, I think it will only shoot ourselves in the foot to overstep (or even get close to) these important boundaries.

> They are by far the worst people I've ever had as clients, if you could even sell to them

Certainly not the easiest lot. We do view the ability to sell to them and meet needs as a competitive advantage of sorts.

Thanks for your informed feedback!

oh man yeah if we had a dollar for every time an owner passed on "more orders" because they didn't have the staff to handle more... we'd have another compelling revenue stream.

> Nobody would have time to work with anything related to sms marketing

That's actually one of the value propositions: we know you don't have time so let us do it for you. Just sit back and see the results

> But let’s see if this will work

The famous first words. So far we've been pleasantly surprised to see it does. I guess we'll find out to what degree and how far we still have to "go"

(Technical founder here)

Pretty boring answer here: Shane (non-technical) was left to put together the website and I think he just picked a wix template that happens to do this.

We are b2b and a majority of interactions with customers take place over the phone, including signing up to be a customer. The website, up to this point, has relatively little utility compared to other company websites. We've prioritized placing technical time and energy on the actual product. We did have a designer spend an hour on making it look better than it use to though.

I see what you did there

haha. Same. (Mikey here, technical founder )

It's not uncommon for new restaurant customers to see quick results and want to start texting more than once a week. Fortunately, we

a) know the short-sightedness in that b) have a white glove experience where we have tight control over what gets texted and how frequently. The system automation is literally constrained to a weekly texting pace

Love the grouped offer suggestion. As a consumer that's more in line with my personal preferences. I think eventually this would be a nice feature in an effort to give the consumer power to customize their notification preferences.

A hacker after my own heart (Mikey here, Technical founder ). Thanks for you diplomatic critiques.

This was/is the sentiment of myself and a majority of our developers from a consumer standpoint. It's a curious experience being your product's chief skeptic. It's also been interesting to observe the number of consumers eager to participate, along with the degree to which it works on behalf of our restaurant customers. A few months ago my skepticism decreased when one of my favorite local pizza joints became a customer and I found myself ordering a lot more with them despite my aversion to being "marketed to". Fortunately, food quality appears steady so far .

One of the things I look forward to with more bandwidth and runway is to craft the product in a way that may even appeal to the segment of the market that shares our preferences. In the meantime, thanks for taking time to share your perspective.