I enjoyed this post, although you didn't mention one of the most interesting things w.r.t. SMS-first apps: super high SMS coverage in the developing world.
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.
It's not all peaches being an SMS-fist startup. Consider:
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)
Also, good luck getting your short code approved. I watched my co-workers struggle for many months trying to get a short code approved, and there was cycle after cycle of stupid arbitrary demands from different carriers. (It's been a while and I wasn't working directly on it, so the details are a bit hazy, but it was a giant mess and made me feel like we were back in the AT&T monopoly days, where you're a supplicant before the phone company.)
Hey Andrew. Michael from Twilio here. Yes, the short code process is tough, that's why we also sell short codes. We are able to apply for them at scale and take care of the application process. It still takes time and money, but we aim make it a lot less painless. Check it out at http://www.twilio.com/sms/shortcodes
Don't really care about the startuppy angle, but I like the idea of SMS as fruitful constraint. The idea of building an app that delivers its full experience to SMS, browser, or something wearable like Glass is pretty sexy.
At Market Loco, we are SMS-First. It's been crucial to our success as people are moving to mobile. SMS is to mobile what email is to the web, except with a lot less spam.
While I too have the vague feeling that there's a lot of unrealized potential in SMS I must admit that apart from appointment reminders and alerts I can hardly think of any (first world) business use case where SMS-first actually does make sense.
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.
We're an SMS-first startup in Pakistan since 2009 doing a billion+ SMS every month (pringit.com). Supporting SMS is key considering 120M cellphone users and 25M internet users.
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.
If a business sends me an SMS without other communication options I wouldn't do business with them (unless the SMS is the point, eg twitter). Family/friends only is a feature, not an opportunity to exploit the trust in giving you my phone number.
For me SMS was a great way to give my users mobile access before having a mobile app or even a mobile friendly version of the site. Using Twilio I was able to whip up a system where users could use the 2-factor auth and the other main feature of my little app whether they had a smartphone or not. I still support these SMS features today because sometimes a text is just faster than an app. Sometimes, not always.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 51.9 ms ] threadI 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.
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
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.
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.
Only really arguable if you forget voice calls...