I remember when MessageBird was giving away free tacos across the street from Twilio's Signal conference. Left me feeling that their brand is tacky and desperate. On the other hand, I learned that there was an alternative to Twilio. And got free tacos.
Seems like an inoffensive way to get your name out to devs and/or decision makers who largely think Twilio is the only option.
Twilio resells commodity product (SIP/SMS) at Saas margins by offering good developer experience and - by this point - major brand recognition. It’s not a defensible business long term, they just had a huge head start, and they still compete terribly for service outside North America.
This is why they are building on top of the underlying commodity and moving upmarket into things like call center automation products, which start to compete directly with many of their customers.
You can easily negotiate down your SIP/SMS Twilio prices the second you realize they have plenty of competitors.
If a smaller competitor gets their name out there by doing some basic guerrilla marketing against a behemoth public company with tons of money, it seems pretty benign. Everyone wins but the overpriced incumbent.
> Twilio resells commodity product (SIP/SMS) at Saas margins by offering good developer experience and - by this point - major brand recognition. It’s not a defensible business long term, they just had a huge head start, and they still compete terribly for service outside North America.
You would think! I was one of the first interns at Twilio in 2011, when they were about 20 people. When I was deciding whether to go back full time, this was exactly my concern. The product was great, people loved it, but it was ultimately just a SaaS layer on top of open-source PBX software. Already they were starting to attract lower-cost competitors. I thought they didn't have much of a future.
And now, 9 years later, that tiny startup is a $30B company.
This was a great lesson for me on how facile this sort of business model analysis is. It turns out by radically simplifying a hard, important problem (programmatic communication) and providing a great product around it is worth a lot! It doesn't really matter if someone can hack together some of the pieces that make up Twilio in a weekend. Many, many businesses will pay a premium for a good, cohesive product that works well.
SignalWire is also a Twilio competitor. Their SMS pricing is much, much cheaper and they have cloned the Twilio APIs. I am not affiliated with them, other than as a customer of both Twilio and SignalWire at different times (small dev accounts.)
They found themselves in the same place as Dropbox. A company built on being a wrapper around a commodity has a way of becoming a more robust company's feature. They always try to add more stuff on to differentiate, but it doesn't always work.
I have so much respect for Dropbox. I remember laughing when Dropbox gave away 2GB for free back in 2009(?) and I never really thought they had a valid business plan. I read Drew Houston talked to Steve Jobs and I still don't understand why he wouldn't sell. But then I'm poor. Anything that puts more than USD 20M in my pocket would be life changing for me.
> What Houston does is Dropbox, the digital storage service that has surged to 50 million users, with another joining every second. Jobs presciently saw this sapling as a strategic asset for Apple. Houston cut Jobs’ pitch short: He was determined to build a big company, he said, and wasn’t selling, no matter the status of the bidder (Houston considered Jobs his hero) or the prospects of a nine-digit price (he and Ferdowsi drove to the meeting in a Zipcar Prius).
Great insight and thoughts on Houston and Dropbox. Dropbox would have floundered at Apple. Even a loose competitor, Box, where Aaron, the co-founder, owned around 5.5% (after all exercised stocks) post IPO, that still was over $100M while he got to continue running the company through now. Apple buying Dropbox for $800M back in 2009-2010 would’ve given Houston $300M or so I am assuming? I’m sure even if he eventually came out with much less, even less than Aaron, continuing to run the company for over a decade more is far more fulfilling.
And of course Houston is a billionare from Dropbox since it went public a little over two years ago in 2018.
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I remember thinking Snapchat, namely, Spiegel and Murphy co-founders as being a bit crazy to not sell Snapchat to Facebook in late 2013 for $3B when Instagram was bought for $1B 1.5 years earlier.
However the two remaining founders had taken $10M a piece in the previous 2013 funding round. So like you said about $20M being insane as it would be for me. A lot easier to turn that down with all the possibly upsides and millions in your bank account.
Even with Snapchat not exploding the way it was thought it would later on:
- a year after rebuffing FB, they raised almost $500M at a $10B+ valuation in late 2014.
- 2.5 years later, in early-ish 2017, they went public at $30B+, raising $3.5B.
- Tencent became the next big company to have a large stake in Snapchat. After being a previous small investor. Gathering 12-18% of the company by late 2017/early 2018 when Snap stock was doing pretty badly.
- Today, the co-founders still have super voting rights and Snap stock is back to being above $30B while seemingly everyone copies them.
They unethically (IMO) kicked out the third co-founder for a while by then, like Twitter did before them, but less ruthlessly in the end since Snap’s 3rd guy, Brown, still made out very well.
Twitter’s Noah Glass on the other hand...it’s just too sad. No less seeing the worst Twitter guy of them all, Dorsey, getting all this praise for his recent big donations with almost no mentions of how he began his lies and consolidation of power [at Twitter]
Messagebird user here, on enterprise level: we're happy with their services, both in terms of delivery and reliability. The fact that they (just like almost all other SMS/SIP providers to be fair) asks lower prices than Twilio certainly does not hurt.
Oracle have been doing the trick of having all the taxis outside a competitor event decked out in the Oracle logo. They used to do it to Sybase in London in the 90s.
You know of the competitor and it stuck in your mind enough to remember because who doesn't love tacos.
Larry may be wasting all that money on taxis when all he needs is a taco truck.
At one of the early TwilioCons (second, I think?) we had a competitor set up in front giving away coffee and donuts. It was amusing and showed how desperate they were.
If you're targeting competitors' customers after they've spent the time, money, and effort to come to a conference, they're probably not a good prospect. They're deep and unlikely to switch easily or quickly. There are much better targets elsewhere.
Twilio and MessageBird have the same customer. Someone who is using Twilio could reasonably convert faster than someone who doesn't use any api-based telephony integration. You skip the step of convincing internal teams that you should do this in the first place.
At ZenPayroll we didn't just ignore people on ADP, Paychex, Intuit, etc. That would be nuts!
If you're trying to reach "people who integrate with telephony APIs" the Twilio conference is…the perfect place to find them!
re: spending time/money/effort to come to conferences:
1) They are networking events.
2) They are paid for by companies so employees aren't by default that invested.
3) It's not a lot of effort. Employees like going to conferences. You meet people. It's paid for. You don't really have to do anything. It's a workation for most.
As for retention, much of Twilio is mostly a commodity. MessageBird came to the US and started a price war, which is really what you're competing on. Switching SMS APIs isn't the same as, say, switching off of SalesForce.
A few good points but the market stage was wildly different.
In payroll processing, there are a handful of major entrenched providers. Going (almost) directly at them is the only approach. Yes, you have to differentiate yourself but odds are there's a rip & replace coming.
In 2012, outside of SMS aggregators, sending and receiving text messages was still novel. Add in automated calling and there were some options with Asterisk (worked on that many times) but still novel. Going after that tiny market may have been cheap but probably not effective.
If MessageBird started a price war, that's a weak value prop by itself but could work so followups:
- How much have they driven down pricing across the space since they've come to the US?
- If that value prop is the main motivator, how much share have they taken?
- Are you going in on their IPO?
(I don't care either way, I don't own any Twilio shares anymore.)
> How much have they driven down pricing across the space since they've come to the US?
Prices to the US are already super cheap. I think twilio was at or close to a penny when I first saw them. Prices elsewhere could use some lowering though, and it's a lot bigger deal if a 50 cent call becomes a 40 cent call than if a 1 cent call becomes a 0.8 cent call.
It kind of depends on what you're doing though. At my last job, I was a high volume customer, and we never went to the conventions, because everything worked / it was essentially a commodity for us; we had several vendors and directed traffic towards best results and price. I guess we would have met message bird earlier, instead of when they aquired one of our vendors.
Mostly a US issue. Api’s on messaging have been in europe and asia since 2002. The main value prop is easy api’s and global connectivity for our SMS API’s as more and more businesses go global. Also we didnt start any price war. Our pricing is a bit cheaper than Twilio 0.0075 T vs 0.005 MB. That said - welcome any messaging users to email me and we can talk about the price war :-)
>If you're targeting competitors' customers after they've spent the time, money, and effort to come to a conference, they're probably not a good prospect.
You are informing a self-selected set of power users about a direct alternative - you can't get cheaper exposure than this.
How much money they would have to burn on advertising campaigns to get comparable exposure on such relevant audience ? Even if it leads to 0 conversions the awareness inside of that group is very valuable.
when we launched zecco back in 2007 we gave out free hotdogs on wall street under the banner of “There is such a thing as a free lunch”. Thats marketing
