
Twilio's Seed Pitch - mathattack
http://avc.com/2016/06/best-seed-pitch-ever/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+AVc+%28A+VC%29
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patio11
Twilio also had a very powerful stock demo, which is (IMHO) the best demo
since the Mother of All Demos. You've seen it if you've ever seen a Twilio
demo.

If you haven't: the presenter "live codes" a quick Twilio application in front
of the audience, showing a server-side program which serves TwiML (Twilio
markup) that does some trivia action, like "Say hiya to the caller." They then
have one person call a number which connects them to the application. It says
hiya to them.

People clap a little.

Then they ask the entire room to call the same app. It says hiya to everyone.

People clap a lot.

Then they say "We can get the list of numbers which just called our number
from the API, in one line of code. Here, let me print some on the screen with
the last four digits covered." Nervous laughter happens.

"And then I'm going to have it call all of you, and bridge you into a
teleconference."

Presenter hits enter. Every phone in the room rings at once. Crowd goes wild.

I've seen this demo 15 times and it never ceases to be absolutely magical.

~~~
at-fates-hands
"...my birth cry will be the sound of every phone on this planet ringing in
unison."

~~~
crabasa
Lawnmower Man?

~~~
at-fates-hands
Yes sir.

Circa 1992 and seemed strangely appropriate.

------
patleeman
I went to an event once where a Twilio developer evangelist presented and he
did the live coding exercise. Using flask he wrote a quick server, and started
receiving text messages from the audience in about 5 minutes. Then he applied
a NLP library to the text messages, all in all quite impressive.

Here's a copy of his presentation, it was pretty awesome to watch.
[https://github.com/RobSpectre/Talks/tree/master/SMS%20For%20...](https://github.com/RobSpectre/Talks/tree/master/SMS%20For%20Humans:%20Using%20NLP%20and%20Python%20To%20Build%20Text%20Interfaces%20Fat%20Fingers%20Can%20Use)

~~~
jmsdnns
That was probably Rob Spectre:
[http://twitter.com/dn0t](http://twitter.com/dn0t)

~~~
jmsdnns
Rob also built [http://trumpfilter.com/](http://trumpfilter.com/), built
[http://www.jeterfilter.com/](http://www.jeterfilter.com/), and sings in
Adventure Capitalists: [https://adcap.biz](https://adcap.biz)

------
wslh
It is based on "Show, don't tell" but it is not that easy to do. I think the
Twilio presentation was impressive because automating SMS and getting a phone
number was difficult and required slow back-end setup. It was a simple concept
to understand but difficult to implement. Stripe example also simplify the
work with payments.

The problem is: how do you follow these principles for less obvious
applications? For example, how do you impress your audience if you sell a
database engine? It is a good startup exercise to think about it. I would be
impressed with a tool to quickly design a web application in the same way
Visual Basic did 25 years ago instead of talking about Bootstrap, Foundation,
AngularJS, React, etc.

~~~
atonse
Regarding impressing the audience with a database engine, I think it was
rethink who did the demo of a cluster of a dozen Mac minis and they'd start
unplugging them and whatever steam of data never ceased.

I found that quite impressive. Was it Rethink or MemSQL or some such?

Anyone else remember that video?

~~~
jacquesm
That's a direct clone of the Tandem demo of the mid 80's.

~~~
beat
Today's generation wasn't even born in the '80s. :)

~~~
wslh
Alan Kay was posting here... probably he comes from the future.

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dchuk
What this boils down to is that they weren't really pitching anything in the
traditional sense. There was no salesmanship going on, no grandiose statements
or numbers tossed around about market potential or "even if we can manage to
just get 1% of the market..."

Instead, they had something to show, and touch, and feel. They actually had a
product. That is the key to a good pitch.

~~~
spinlock
Ummm ... I'd call that salesmanship.

I also heard the CEO of SAP (I think) talk about a sales call he made while he
was a JR sales rep at Xerox. It was also pure salesmanship but the end of the
story was that he closed the deal without the woman who owned the company even
turning on the copier or typewriters.

So, I think the thread that ties these two pitches together (one that was all
demo and the other that was zero demo) is probably that the salesman got the
decision-maker to trust him.

~~~
drdoom
This.

I have given similar demos. You first explain what you are going to do. Before
the demo, they go all go into "no, it is impossible. I have been in this
business for 20 years. Blah blah." You demo it, and once in a while, they get
it, their jaws drop and they appreciate it. But mostly, it is a suspicious
disbelief, followed by adversarial challenges where they insist you disclose
everything under the covers right then and there.

I have even heard this: If this was possible, why hasn't IBM done it?

Sometimes, it is pretty depressing.

------
manuelflara
Reminds me of the whole "Just run this cURL request and a payment is made,
it's that easy." messaging that Stripe used to have right at the top of their
landing page in the beginning, showcasing not only how easy their payments API
was but also that they were a company by developers for developers.
Brilliantly simple :)

~~~
atonse
I just realized what stripe has done is now I always tell clients "payments
are the least of your worries" thanks to stripe. Hard to understate that sea
change.

~~~
phillc73
Which is true, unless your business falls in their "Prohibited" list [1]. It's
quite a long and wide ranging list, which would appear to restrict many
businesses from accepting Stripe payments. For example, 51. Personal computer
technical support and many things to do with travel and tourism: 13. Airlines,
23. Currency exchanges or dealers, 27. Cruise lines, 49. Timeshares, 50.
Centralized travel reservation services or travel clubs

[1] [https://stripe.com/at/prohibited-
businesses](https://stripe.com/at/prohibited-businesses)

~~~
jerf
That list looks to me mostly like a list of things that are either scams, or
that Stripe and the CC companies have perfectly Bayesian-rational reasons to
believe are scams. Travel and tourism is the only one on there that strikes me
as coming from CC agreements rather than that.

"Personal computer technical support", for instance, is almost certainly
referencing the scam where someone cold calls you and tries to explain that
your computer is infected. There aren't a lot of legitimate businesses that
could be called "personal computer technical support", and I suspect of the
ones you may even be thinking of that Stripe may classify them differently. I
imagine the mom & pop shops are classified as hardware vendors who happen to
also offer services and the more serious versions of that business are
"consulting". (And at that point, probably not using Stripe anyhow.)

~~~
throwaway987611
> That list looks to me mostly like a list of things that are either scams

That's easy to say right? Oh it's a scam.

I can't use Stripe because my business falls into the "Scam" area. Am I a
scammer? No because otherwise my business would have failed years ago.

I happily use another competitor. I haven't had any issues with them and since
I am not a scammer, I don't foresee any either!

Remember. One mans ITS A SCAM, HE'S A SCAMMER is another mans very successful
business which people don't have a problem with.

~~~
pc86
It's hard to take this comment seriously if you're not using your main account
and refuse to say what your business actually is.

------
harel
I competed in the telephony space between 2006-2009. Us and Twilio all
launched at the same time approx. We lost, they won and I'm happy for that.
Today I'm their customer (and they are non the wiser about our somewhat
parallel history). Everything about Twilio is top notch, from the tech all the
way down to customer service. I only wish them success and growth.

~~~
untilHellbanned
Curious to know of your company's experience. Why did you lose?

~~~
harel
People. Lethal choice of CEO. I'll avoid names if you don't mind. Our product
was essentially like Twilio, to start with at least, until the company was
dragged into a more social arena (with deals with then big, now defunct social
networks). We had some pretty cool features like the ability to trigger calls,
sms chats, voice blasts etc, via text commands ("call humpty, dumpty and
numpty tomorrow at 5pm", or "text johnny, bonny and sonny: Hi guys"), so you
could communicate with the system via IM, email, web etc. We then essentially
took all that lovely stuff and instead of being the API behind Telephony, or
even the Telephony behind the social, we did stupid marketing stunts for some
singers and stuff like that.

The whole story is a fascinating tale of human nature more than technology.
Maybe one day...

~~~
untilHellbanned
Wow, very interesting. Thank you for sharing. It seems like the moral of the
story is to follow the money as Twilio did. B2B may be boring but at least
they pay you.

What was the thought about where the "marketing stunts" would lead? More
consumer-focused product would lead to your company becoming the next AT&T or
something?

~~~
harel
There was no thought behind it. Not rational anyway. Hence it was death by
Lethal CEO. We the founders were kindly removed from the company not far from
its actual demise.

And yes - I would take B2B any time. B2C is hard and requires twice the luck
B2B does. When you provide a service to businesses, if your service adds
value, they will buy it. When you deal with consumers, you have to be trendy,
at the right place and time, cool, exciting, amazing, talked about, add value
or not - who cares, etc. That startup started as a B2B idea, and morphed
fairly arrogantly to a hip wannabe consumer app.

------
anotherarray
In my experience, minimalism and cohesion are also one of the best way to sell
products.

Just show how it's done. Be simple and clear. Don't try to spin. Don't inflate
the future or past.

------
api
I've never thought of pitching like this. Demoing, yes, but pitching investors
with a live coding demo? Wow.

Definitely going to dig up some of Twilio's demo videos and study them.

------
fitzwatermellow
Great story! And congrats to Twilio on the IPO, 90% first day of trading pop,
and creating a great (and essential) service ;)

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fapjacks
Interesting. That's also how I felt the first time I ever used Twilio, having
come from a background including telephony (including wrestling Asterisk). I
can easily tell Fred has also been exposed to the hellish nightmare of
telephony in his past at some point. You can't really imagine just how bad it
used to be, even with the Asterisk project. For example I have a fairly large
library of computer books (perhaps five or six shelves) in my office
("laboratory"). The thickest book in that place _by far_ is the Asterisk
animal book from O'Reilly. The next thickest book is Sendmail's animal book.
Twilio really did do something totally amazing.

------
ilikerashers
Twilio, like Stripe, should be commended for their fantastic marketing
efforts. Looked to use Twilio as really liked their offering but too pricey
here in the UK.

------
soneca
This site was denounced as unsafe by my Windows Phone Nokia 930 IExplorer and
it blocked my access. No idea why, this is the first time for avc.com

~~~
crystalmeph
This should not be downvoted. I'm getting "This website has been reported as
unsafe" on IE11 on Win7 x64. Even if it's a false positive, it's disconcerting
to see this on an article linked from the front page of HN.

~~~
voltagex_
[https://www.stopbadware.org/clearinghouse/search?url=http://...](https://www.stopbadware.org/clearinghouse/search?url=http://avc.com/2016/06/best-
seed-pitch-ever) doesn't show anything.

Is there any further information on the warning?

~~~
crystalmeph
Microsoft Smartscreen says it's been reported as a phishing site. However, if
I strip out the URL parameters and just go to [http://avc.com/2016/06/best-
seed-pitch-ever/](http://avc.com/2016/06/best-seed-pitch-ever/), there's no
problem. It's only when you go to the full linked URL
[http://avc.com/2016/06/best-seed-pitch-
ever/?utm_source=feed...](http://avc.com/2016/06/best-seed-pitch-
ever/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+AVc+%28A+VC%29)
that there's a problem.

------
starikovs
A long time ago I saw how my friend writes code. Since then I started to learn
how to write code too ) Live coding has something special..

