

SendHub (YC W12) raises $3M Series A, Launches Attachments for SMS - ashrust
http://techcrunch.com/2013/09/04/sendhub-secures-3-million-series-a-to-be-the-mobile-alternative-to-business-phone-systems/

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sologoub
First of, Congrats on the round!

The article provides some interesting numbers to chew on: \- 150,000 users \-
15,000 business (let's call them customers) \- $50,000 in monthly revenue \- 6
lines average per customer.

Impressive numbers to backup traction! But they also tell the story of the
freemium model very well.

Sendhub website lists cheapest paid plan at $25/month/line. This means that at
most, they have 2,000 paid lines (based on $50k monthly revenue) and in the
neighborhood of 400 paid customers.

These are still very good numbers and nothing to frown upon, but if you
compare that to the massive adoption of the free accounts (150k users), it's
very telling of how difficult it is to convert people from free to paid.

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ashrust
Yep, pretty close. We used to offer individual accounts - those folks were
hard to convert, hence the large number of free users.

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sologoub
Thank you for validating the pseudo-math :)

And, yeah, converting any free accounts to paid is an achievement in and of
itself. Best of luck in growing the company!

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josh2600
Great to see more investment in Telecom.

This space is red hot right now :). Congrats Ash!

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ashrust
Thanks Josh.

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colinsidoti
Are you actually sending arbitrary files over SMS? How does that work?

My thought is it would be technically possible over MMS, but most default
messaging apps wouldn't play nice with them. Also getting into the network is
a huge challenge.

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ashrust
MMS is coming soon but the network operators aren't always easy to deal with.
Right now, we put a link in the sms, that way you can send any file type.

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josh2600
Getting an MMSC exposed from a network operator is a nigh-impossible task
(source: I'm a telecom junkie).

The MMSC infrastructure is unnecessarily complex and, for some ungodly reason,
is seen as a proprietary network advantage. Your best bet is to make an end-
run around the carriers by partnering with an aggregator like Acision (or
someone smaller if you lack the volume).

MMS is one of the most difficult things to get carriers to expose :/...

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jansen
Fantastic, congrats to Ash, Garrett and team!

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ashrust
Thanks Jan.

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omarish
Great work SendHub team!

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ashrust
Thanks Omar - waiting on hearing your news too.

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old-gregg
Woo! Congrats guys!

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chriscareycode
Congrats SendHub!

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ashrust
Thanks Chris.

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cristinamm
Great feature!

