There is a certain point at which the engineering is no longer what makes a company successful, it fuels an initial growth and can sustain it longer, but then the deciding thing on whether the company survives and thrives becomes the more operational aspects, the traditional sales & marketing.
With the product-market fit nailed, a solid offering out there, Twilio now occupies that later stage, and the buildboard reflects it. Everything changes at this point, because it's also not the top priority of the company to keep their own engineering happy at this point.
To me there's just an argument for effective marketing. That new billboard can't be more effective at generating industry and brand awareness, can it? It's so forgettable. It's _mediocre_, and reads just like every other uninteresting stat point most B2B enterprise SaaS companies put out there. That's the part that I don't get, even if they are moving up market and away from a pure developer play, that kind of messaging still should raise Twilio's stature, no?
I think the “Ask your developer” resonates with only a small segment of the market (a fairly passionate segment).
The “Lower your aquisition costs by 66%” resonates with the CFO, who will drive past the board every day until he remembers to tell someone in passing to “investigate this twilio thing”. From there the cogs of the org start turning and 6 months later out rolls a several million dollar order for Twilio.
To everyone’s surprise the bill is 20% higher a year after release, but by that point everyone responsible for it has already been promoted.
The issue is that everyone is saying some version of that tagline. It's forgettable and the kind of thing you tune out over time. I guess we'll see how they perform moving forward though.
Early Twilio engineer here. There was never really all that much unique ground breaking technology work being done, we used open source tools running on AWS to build the core products. Our differentiators were reliability and user experience. Both of those came from how the organization was built and run. There was an obsession with uptime and DevOps, with a carefully guarded culture of collaboration and blameless postmortems when things went wrong. Empowering individual engineers and product designers to call out when things sucked really went a long way, and is really hard to scale. Initially managers and directors had very little power over the actual makers and maintainers, which lead to a lot of quality. A few years post-IPO we hit a scale where a lot of that culture began to fall apart. That’s when I made my exit/was pushed out.
> It reflects the defensible moat in our industry (SaaS offerings in general) is no longer technology.
I feel like it was never technology, especially in SaaS.
Sure you need some initial technical chops to get a service up and running, but after MVP —> PMF, it’s all marketing, momentum, consumer trust, your brand, etc.
For every successful SaaS (take Notion for example) it’s easy to say things like they never had a real competitor, but the truth is they had a lot of competition but they were able to overcome it and build a moat initially propped up by really good usability, but now their usability could easily go to shit and they’d still do well with a traditional sales/marketing moat.
With the product-market fit nailed, a solid offering out there, Twilio now occupies that later stage, and the buildboard reflects it. Everything changes at this point, because it's also not the top priority of the company to keep their own engineering happy at this point.