
SendHub (YC W12) Lets Businesses Text Their Customers, Teachers Text For Free - ashrust
http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/12/yc-backed-sendhub-lets-businesses-text-their-customers-and-teachers-text-for-free/
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idl
As someone on the founding team of an identical startup a year ago, I can
share experience:

\- This market is beyond saturated, with countless large companies competing.

\- In our experience, small businesses, teachers, etc. will do everything they
can to avoid paying for the service, no matter how much value it creates for
them. This is why many of the other providers have an 'ad-supported' free plan
- freemium is a tough route here (but I'm sure they're just doing that right
now as a ploy).

\- The general consensus received is 'Oh we have [Facebook|Twitter|Email|...]
for that, and they're all free!'

\- SMS is more of a private sanctity that people use for family and friends.
Facebook, Twitter, Email can be ignored, filtered using labels and lists, and
checked when the person has time. People do not want to be SMS spammed with
'We have freshly baked cakes!' 5 times a day.

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bambax
> _The big draw for SendHub has nothing to do with buzzwords (aren’t you sick
> of local, social, photo-sharing apps, anyway?)_

> _In a couple of weeks (...) the mobile-optimized website will include social
> sharing buttons, so a business can spread its message even further through
> the recipients’ circle of friends._

Right.

~~~
abbasmehdi
Being social and using social are not the same thing. You use
Facebook/Twitter, are you a social app?

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MicahWedemeyer
Selling unlimited messaging to users for a fixed fee while paying Twilio $0.01
per message sent is pretty ballsy. Further, paying $0.01 per message while
offering a free plan is extremely ballsy.

In their defense, though, my understanding is that once you reach a certain
volume of messages, the cost to send quickly heads to zero, especially if you
deal with the carriers directly. The phone carriers want you to be sending the
messages since they can charge people to receive them (at least in the USA).

I'll definitely be curious to see where this goes.

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keithpeter
UK Specific comment: remember in UK there is no cost to _receive_ sms messages

I work as a teacher and use bulksms.co.uk to send text messages to my students
who are 19+. I use an Intranet based system with a fixed set of non-editable
messages to send to 18 year olds and under because of the UK child protection
laws.

Students respond well to sms messages compared to email. If someone was
missing, a quick sms results in a phone call explaining absence. I pre-pay for
1000 messages every couple of months out of my own pocket because it makes my
job easier.

~~~
DanBC
Can I ask how you protect, and show that you're protecting, people's phone
numbers?

How do you handle the data protection compliance stuff?

Or is that something that you don't have to concern yourself with because of
the use case or somesuch?

thanks.

~~~
keithpeter
I'm in the UK.

I ask adult students if it is ok to send them text messages, everyone says yes
basically, I've had one opt out in about 5 years. The Colleges were I work
have enrollment forms that include the relevant data protection clauses as
they collect addresses/phone numbers for contact purposes anyway. I use a
password protected Web site to send messages which keeps an audit of the text
of the messages sent, and I have not enabled the answer facility so these are
'one way' messages. I think that is more secure for the students than using,
say, my own phone.

Under 19 its official channels only, and the College system has 'standard
messages' that we click a button on to send from the Intranet. The student
database has phone/address details and we have all the legal permissions to
contact both students and their parent/guardian as needed.

Basically I'm in a regulated professional role where contacting students is
regarded as good practice.

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jetsnoc
This article is a great example of spinning a disadvantage in to a feature.
Short-codes are expensive and most small organizations wouldn't or couldn't
pay for them anyways. Instead of sharing a short-code among their subscribers
SendHub has spun the ten-digit telephone number (NPA+NXX+LOCAL) as a feature,
value-add or strength in their product. Great work!

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dholowiski
Hands up if you thought about building this, but didn't because you thought it
was too simple.

~~~
frankdenbow
I'm working on one of these for a client. There are _tons_ of similar services
out there.

~~~
GnomeChomsky
Since I'm not familiar with this space, what are some of the other big
competitors out there? And how do they (seemingly) stack up against SendHub?

~~~
frankdenbow
Texting.ly (TechCrunch Disrupt/ Dave McClure funded) Recessmobile.com
TextMarks.com CallFire.com Tatango.com CellIt.com TxtWire.com Mobivity.com
Sumotext.com Message-media.com Trumpia.com

Trust that there are many more for more granular use cases.

~~~
smcguinness
As you said, there are a ton of niche companies that handle this. Just look at
the attendee list at the Bar & Nightclub show in Las Vegas. I work for a
company that provides a similar service, but we have a short code and work
directly with the carriers. Lots of competition and not a whole lot of margin
if you don't have the volume drive cost down. Good luck to the, but free isn't
going to last too long.

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mustpax
I really hope SendHub requires users to explicitly sign up before they receive
mass updates. I bet a lot of your customers are going want to import their
existing customer database so they can "stay in touch" and send out inane spam
about their lunch special.

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benjlang
Makes me look back at www.ClassParrot.com, we should have focused on something
more general like this, instead of just teachers...

~~~
mildavw
Did the 80% for $1 ever produce a cofounder?

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cbs
Thats funny. I can't think of a single company I do business with that
wouldn't piss me off if they sent me a text.

~~~
solnyshok
how about airlines informing you about flight delays, or credit card warning
of unusual activity with the card?

~~~
cbs
They have my for-spam email address, they can use that.

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ksakhuj
This seems like a weekend project building on top of twilio.

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revelation
What nonsense. SMS gateways are so 2000. This would be more interesting if
their mission was to integrate all the various kinds of notification systems,
including SMS, into one unified solution.

~~~
saryant
Sounds a lot like Wuphf.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuphf>

;)

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sunnynagra
What does this have over Google Voice?

~~~
ashrust
SendHub makes it easy to send 1 message to any number of people and allows
your customers to join groups by simply texting a keyword to your SendHub
number. For example, Tom's Pizza could have its customers text 'pizza' to be
signed up for alerts from them. We also have feedback built in and you can be
signed up and sending messages in under a minute - hard to do with Google
voice.

