

Outbound (YC W15) Helps Businesses Message Customers Over Both Email and Mobile - muhammadusman
http://techcrunch.com/2015/03/04/yc-backed-outbound-helps-businesses-message-customers-over-both-email-and-mobile/

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joshweissburg
Good question on Intercom, alishiu. Here is how we think about this:

Intercom, true to its name, is a really nice tool for 2-way communication with
your users. Here's where it shines:

1) Visibility: It acts as a CRM that auto updates - it automatically shows you
what each user has done and lets you build rich profiles from their
interactions with your app and your communication history.

2) Conversations: Intercom is wonderful at initiating conversations via email
or in-app messages based on what your users are doing. You get a granular
sense of what is going on with each user and so it's easy to talk with them
about it.

3) Handholding: The lines between onboarding, product feedback and support are
very fuzzy. Intercom helps you handhold your users through your product,
heading off some support tickets before they happen and helping you understand
at a very basic level what it takes to make an active, engaged customer.

Where Intercom is not as strong is: 1) Scaling communication for a large
number of users: It's hard to have these 2-way conversations with your users
as you scale up. You can do some automation with Intercom but building
sophisticated business logic based on combinations of events and user
attributes is difficult.

2) Mobile: They don't do native mobile push or SMS, both of which are very
important touch points if your users primarily interact with your product on
mobile or on the go.

3) Testing and analytics: It's very useful to have deep analytics (not just
clicks and opens) and a testing infrastructure, including control groups, that
allows you to try things quickly. The key thing here is that it is not enough
to know how many messages you send to users and how many users took an action
- you need to understand how many users took a particular action BECAUSE they
got a message.

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dhruvkaran
Hey guys, I'm one of the founders at Outbound. We're trying to build the most
developer friendly marketing automation solution -- so we appreciate any
feedback from the community. Happy to answer any questions.

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preetnation
This looks awesome. Going to ping my team to get us set up. How quickly can we
integrate?

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dhruvkaran
Integration usually takes about 20 minutes. The product will give you copy-
paste instructions in various languages once your campaign is setup.

If you're hooked up with Segment.io, it's just a flick of a switch.

And of course if you need any help, you can always write in to support [at]
outbound.io and we'll be right on it.

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alishiu
Product looks great -- definitely agree that the ability to integrate w/ other
tools like salesforce would be really useful. How do you guys differentiate vs
intercom?

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gmays
Interesting. Definitely useful since most the marketing automation tools I've
used are just email focused. Can we look forward to a Zapier integration?

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dhruvkaran
What kind of zapier integration would be most useful? Would it be best if we
hooked up with salesforce, or other larger providers? Or just expose zapier
hooks for our APIs?

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mikeknoop
Hey Dhruv! The cool thing is if you expose some triggers and actions via an
app, your users can decide how to hook it into other apps (like Salesforce,
etc.)

Perhaps things like:

\- Trigger when a message is opened

\- Trigger when a message is sent

\- Trigger when a new contact is added (if you have lists)

etc. Happy to answer any questions, you can also shoot me an email.
[https://zapier.com/developer](https://zapier.com/developer)

~~~
dhruvkaran
That does seem cool. It's a convenient wrapper on our API. I'll check it out.

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sandstrom
Looks very similar to customer.io (though it only send emails currently).

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joshweissburg
Hey this is Josh, the other Outbound founder. Good question, sandstrom. The
key difference with Customer.io (other than SMS and mobile push) is that we're
built on your event stream: we use events to send messages but also to tell
you what effect each message you send has on customer actions inside your
product.

