HN Gopher Feed (2017-07-22) - page 1 of 10 ___________________________________________________________________
Twilio - Why there's no API for crossing the chasm
56 points by rmason
https://exponents.co/twilio-market-opportunities-risks/___________________________________________________________________
rmason - 4 hours ago
I personally disagree with this guy but felt the debate on here
about what he wrote would be useful.If you've IPO'd in general
you've already crossed the chasm ;<). Sounds like a bitter former
employee taking his shot.
detaro - 4 hours ago
I'm curious why you think having IPOed means you'll successfully
sell to the enterprise market, which clearly is the "chasm" the
author refers to? Without much knowledge about the details, the
article seems like a fair representation of "I see this issue for
them if they want to grab this large market (which would help
them resolve some of their current risks), here is why".
rmason - 2 hours ago
I think it's twisting the meaning of crossing the chasm to
insist it means you have to be doing traditional enterprise
sales. Twilio, along with Atlassian and others showed that you
could build a business by marketing directly to developers and
bypassing the C suite.I've got a friend who is very plugged
into the enterprise telecom world. He's been using Twilio
since the beginning and told me that no one in that world even
knew what Twilio was until two years ago. Now he sees telecom
execs being routinely asked what's your strategy to respond to
Twilio?
Devolver - 2 hours ago
I did not insist anything about "doing traditional enterprise
sales."I said that when a company successfully crosses the
chasm, it has established a leading positition in a
mainstream market.What that mainstream market is or the
channels the company uses to win it is entirely dependent on
its products and the landscape of products it either must
displace (in an exiting market) or pre-empt (in a new
market).For example, Facebook crossed the chasm after it
opened up beyond .edu and pushed MySpace into complete
irrelevance.Salesforce, when it closed a huge deal with
Merrill Lynch (I think), made "the cloud" safe for
everyone.And as a counterpoint, Snap has not crossed the
chasm, despite a $25b IPO.And arguably, neither has Twitter,
despite over $2bn in revenue and being public for years.
sah2ed - 30 minutes ago
> And as a counterpoint, Snap has not crossed the chasm,
despite a $25b IPO.I think it is a bit too early to call
this one. I'd rather give Evan Spiegel and his team a few
more quarters to see what they've got in store against
Facebook now with IPO money in the bank.> And arguably,
neither has Twitter, despite over $2bn in revenue and being
public for years.Granted you qualified your statement with
"arguably", but why do you think this when there is no
corollary for "tweeting" outside of Twitter's service? If
Twitter goes belly up today, who will step in their place?
Devolver - 3 hours ago
I'm the author, and am not even the least bit bitter. I love
Twilio. I wrote this because I want them to succeed.A successful
IPO has no necessary correlation to having crossed the
chasm.You've successfully crossed the chasm when you are the
clear market leader in the a "mainstream market" segment.In
Twilio's case, that would be Being at the center of
communications infrastructure for Fortune 500-1000
companies.They've made some inroads (ING, etc). But most larger
enterprises are still using Cisco/MSFT/Avaya and other on-premise
tech for call centers, conferencing, video chat, collaboration,
etc.Also: Twilio is not profitable and it just lost one of its
highest volume customers (Uber) who had been using it for "point
solution" use cases, mostly around automated SMS and voice.So if
you disagree, that's fine. I'd find it much more productive to
know what you disagree with and why than the ad hominem
accusation that I'm a "bitter former employee" which is a. Not
useful and b. False.
toomuchtodo - 3 hours ago
I think it's important to remember that what Twilio offers is a
commodity, and there are no switching costs, which limits their
market value.Just as it's easy to spin up comms on Twilio, it's
getting easier by the day to spin up Twilio-esq infrastructure
itself. They had first mover advantage, but it doesn't seem
good enough (not taking into account their largest customers
deciding to internalize the functionality to reduce costs).
kevinburke - 2 hours ago
> what Twilio offers is a commodity, and there are no
switching costsThere are plenty of switching costs. Porting
numbers from one carrier to another with zero downtime, for
example. Negotiating a contract with a new carrier. The new
carrier may not support numbers, calls or SMS in some
countries you are currently supporting. Testing
deliverability and call quality across multiple carriers in
multiple countries; you might discover that the new carrier
routes messages/calls using unreliable carriers. The new
carrier may not have good procedures for avoiding toll fraud.
Sending SMS messages that contain Unicode might render like ?
on some phones; Twilio put a lot of time into figuring out
how every carrier treats those on the wire and ensuring that
messages get rendered properly. Fallback procedures may
break.If you want to host it yourself now you probably need a
NOC, and to test binds, and to test the fallback protocols,
and to figure out every edge case that carriers have with
respect to certain numbers, messages or routes.
toomuchtodo - 2 hours ago
I feel like you're exaggerating based on my knowledge of
interfacing with carriers using SS7, but that's just my
opinion.I agree that Twilio blazed the trail, but much of
what you mentioned is a known quantity now and can be
replicated with less effort.You don't need to be as good as
Twilio, just "good enough".
sjtgraham - 1 hours ago
As a former Twilio engineer he might be somewhat biased.
Full disclosure: I am also ex-Twilio.
Devolver - 1 hours ago
Hey Steve! Love what you're doing with the bank APIs!
[deleted]
chevman - 2 hours ago
I work at a company within the Fortune 10 and we use Twilio in some
isolated products, and they are pushing hard on a few potential
deals/opportunities to expand further.Technical foundation appears
solid to all their stuff, but their enterprise sales/account folks
seem very green - unsure of how to navigate large enterprises, not
connecting with the right folks at the right level within the org,
not understanding who or how decisions are getting made, etc.We see
this alot - deals with tens or potentially hundreds of millions of
dollars at stake where potential vendors have a couple sales folks
working the deal, not getting traction. Get a few more folks
working the deal and figuring out the right angles and they could
have it locked down in a matter of months, but they never seem to
figure this out and a year later they're still dicking around with
the wrong people at the wrong level not making progress.
Denzel - 2 hours ago
Have you ever thought of helping them out?I mean if (1) what you
say is true, (2) you have the know-how and ability to navigate
such structures, and (3) you can build a team that closes these
deals, then I'm positive Twilio would spend a small fortune to
hire you.Why not explore that route?
m3kw9 - 1 hours ago
Lol, knowing the route means you can do the job.
theseatoms - 36 minutes ago
Slicing through middle-men, lol
sjtgraham - 1 hours ago
(4) and that Twilio agrees with this argument.
Spooky23 - 2 hours ago
They also compete with themselves.It's pretty easy to figure out
the bottom dollar when people repackaging their services show up.
eapotapov - 1 hours ago
I've read the article and that's one more argument for me that IPO
is a very toxic thing sometimes. mass marketing strategy/creating a
commodity is a very hard longplay game. the prize is a huge stake
of the market, but it's very challenging to get there.now assume
you have your revenue and then you get two customers that are going
to pay you 25% of your current revenue (20% of the revenue after
they start working with you). if you're private you just stick to
your strategy and count these two clients as some random money (as
they don't fit your main strategy). being public, now, if you lose
these customers - you're at risk, the market forces you to make
decisions, to keep these customers, to go to the enterprise market,
hire sales people etc."In Twilio?s earliest days, multiple angel
investors and VCs told Twilio?s founders that focusing on software
developers would never lead to a venture-scale business. To make
their case, Twilio?s skeptics pointed out that software developers
have no control over budgets in the enterprise.But Lawson, Cooke,
and Wolthius were undeterred. They believed deeply that software
developers held the keys to the future?and not just of telecom, but
perhaps the whole world."well now, being public you can't just do
this.imagine Amazon listening to advise to use retail-chains
(system integrators in Twilio case), or should Amazon do really
care about revenue coming from one specific customer (even if it's
huge)?it's really hard to keep doing what you believe you need to
do when you're under pressure of the public market. I absolutely
understand why do such companies go public, but that makes me sad.
jrochkind1 - 2 hours ago
I was thinking about the 'systems integrator partner' strategy
before I even got to the end, without knowing that 'systems
integrator' was what that was called.After getting to the end, I
realized a very common path would be to start with the 'systems
integrator partner' strategy, then realize, hey, these guys took
the risk and proved it could be done, but now they're taking a huge
slice of our potential revenue -- let's build our own products, end
our partnerships, and screw the partners who got us here. Sometimes
it "works", sometimes it doesn't.
timfrietas - 1 hours ago
Twilio seems to be leaning a little bit in the directions of
solutions #1 and #2: https://www.twilio.com/showcaseBut they are
also going further all-in on the developer-first market with things
like their serverless offering: https://www.twilio.com/blog/2017/05
/introducing-twilio-funct...I'd be interested in the author's
thoughts on Twilio's strategy in context of AWS (which I think the
author would agree has crossed the chasm).
micaeked - 3 hours ago
Side note, please don't hijack normal navigation keys to do
something unexpected. In this case, page up/down navigates the
sections instead of the normal behavior.
Devolver - 2 hours ago
I had no idea it did that! Thanks for letting me know. Will look
into.
throwmeunderbus - 2 hours ago
Smooth scroll here. Windows 10/Chrome59.
thomasjudge - 1 hours ago
Agreed. pg up/pg dn takes me to top of page/end of article in
Chrome on a MBP
Devolver - 2 hours ago
Not being well-versed in such matters, I'd appreciate any insight
you can offer into why the Nav hijacking happens and what I might
do about it.I created the article using a WP plugin (Aesop Story
Builder) which integrates with the WP theme I'm using (Journalist
from UpThemes).
micaeked - 1 hours ago
Oh. I looked into it a bit, looks like that's something "Aesop
Story Builder" does. Not sure if they have settings that you
can control through their interface. If they do, it looks like
the relevant option might be called "arrowKeys".