
Trext – Software that engages large groups in interactive texting - zekenie
http://trext.me
======
austenallred
Forgive me if I'm hyper-critical about the marketing.

The first thing anyone sees about your company is: "Texting for education,
health, advertising, and much more. Start the conversation." What does that
even mean? I want to understand what your product does, and more importantly
how it can help me. "education health, advertising and much more" are
completely random use cases, and are confusing and distracting. This is the
first thing a customer sees; a lot won't even scroll down past that line. It
_has_ to make sense.

I would say you should move up the "Software that engages large groups in
automated texting" up, but that's a description of what you _do_ , not _how it
helps me_. It really should say something like "Engage your audience in
automated, responsive texting conversations in "x" clicks." Something like
that. It's still off, I don't know how you'd convey that you make it easy, but
that's what you're getting after. The benefit to me as a user would be easily
engaging my audience in automated, responsive texting conversations. In fact
maybe that's it. "Easily engage your audience in automated, responsive SMS
conversations." Massage it. Don't tell me what you do, tell me what you can do
for me.

Just some friendly advice. I wish you the best of luck!

~~~
samstave
> __ _...a lot won 't even scroll down past that line._ __

It really sucks that this is being reinforced. I read the tag line and was
like "ok" \-- but then I watched the demo movie of setting up the ITTT text
tree and thought it was pretty bad ass.

People need to stop being lazy and actually expend a small amount of effort to
understand something.

Its a sad state that everyone expects every single piece of information spoon
fed to them.

~~~
leoedin
Why should I (or anyone else) spend 5 minutes (or about 1/50 of my free time
today) figuring out what someone's product does? I don't care about every web
app. Most of them are entirely useless to me. The likelihood is, this one is
as well.

Is it really, actually, sad that everyone who clicks a link on Hacker News
doesn't spend 5 minutes watching a video to figure out what a web app even
does? I think we should celebrate the fact that most people live busy lives
doing things that matter to them.

If you force your potential customers to do research _to figure out what you
do_ you're going to lose most of the people who may actually use your service
but couldn't figure out what you do in the 20 seconds they devoted to your
site. It's the lowest of the low hanging fruit.

~~~
samstave
I'm willing to be you spent more time writing this response than it would have
for you to have watched the demo vid that auto plays on their site had you
just scrolled down.

You, appear to me, to have some sort of ingrained attitude against having
patience and curiosity. I presume you're a type where you expect every post
made to be backed up with links to information you'd be able to google
yourself in under 30 seconds.

~~~
specialist
_some sort of ingrained attitude against having patience and curiosity_

Please. You assume too much.

In an attention economy, our most precious resource is our time.

If someone wants my attention, they have to do the work. If I gave everything
the attention it deserved, I'd never get anything done.

I only looked at trext (at all) because another commenter said the demo video
was great (and it is).

------
makerops
"Texting for education, health, advertising, and much more. Start the
conversation."

My mind kind of checked out after reading that; I assumed I would not find
this interesting, but I scrolled down a bit, and saw the demo, which was
really cool.

"Automate your Text Conversations" or something similar, really large, with
your video right underneath should be the first thing someone sees on the
site.

~~~
joshdance
+1. Is your product for education, or health or advertising? Those are very
different markets. Maybe pick one of those and highlight it. Or provide a use
case for each if you really want to be in all 3 markets.

~~~
makerops
I don't even know if you have to highlight a market right off the bat?
Automate Your Text Conversations, appeals to a ton of niches (including people
with significant others who text them every night at the same time, asking the
same questions!). Maybe develop several landing pages, and gear each text
conversation at that niche?

~~~
zekenie
That's what we're going to try.

------
BWStearns
Hey guys, I was looking for something like this for a while (search ended a
few weeks ago, sorry), but the pricing does seem a little steep. I'm working
for a small firm (<60ppl), and while we have a pretty good budget for tools,
this'd be a bit much for the ROI. One application I can see as being really
useful is polling. I'd reply to a text more readily than talk to a pollster.
Also, it'd be really good for getting information from populations in the
developing world since they're infrastructure poor but SMS penetration is
increasing. Wicked cool site and best of luck. If we have another use case for
you guys I'll see if we can use it.

------
hnriot
Sounds like spam in an Eco package. I like the site design, the photography
and you all look like nice, talented people, but I just cringe at reading
about sending txt's to thousands of people. The reason for those statistics
you quote (98% being read withing minutes) is because txt message are
personal, 1:1, not batch sent from this spam engine.

~~~
zekenie
Thanks for the feedback! A lot of the use cases we're looking at are reaching
out to populations who want the messages. For example, high school students
who've been admitted to a college and are looking for info on summer events;
texting in for customer support... areas where bidirectionally is valuable.

------
larrys
Site design is nice.

But points "1" "2" "3" need the language toned down a bit need something
simpler to convey the point. Didn't pass the 1st read test of knowing what you
are selling.

By the way don't forget to put effort into things other than YC. Not the only
game in town or path to success in business life.

------
jeremymcanally
I really like this idea, but the pricing (to me) is astronomical.

I'm guessing I'm not in your target market, though. That is, someone who would
use this for say, RSVPs to church events or something. Though, your demo would
tell me otherwise. I'm a little confused about market fit, I guess.

~~~
hackerkira
We've been getting mainly B to E interest and our major competitors in those
markets have starting plans of $1000/month. But we're interested in feedback.
How would you revise the pricing?

~~~
BWStearns
My issue with pricing isn't the lower plan really, 60 doesn't seem so much,
but the 10,000 text max plan seems to be too low for a lot of useful
applications of this software. If I want to reach a 10,000 person incoming
freshman class at a university then I would need to buy multiple plans just to
serve them a multi-question conversation. The other thing is that you could
provide higher priced (i.e. well over 1k plans) with TONS of texts available,
and maybe subsidize the lower plans to increase first time adoption and
increase the odds of being used for a bigger project/campaign/effort.

~~~
hackerkira
That's a great idea. We're giving a first month free for the $60 plan but
subsidizing it could get people hooked. Do you think we should offer a much
larger plan (hypothetically would 100,000 texts for 4k/month be plausible?)

~~~
BWStearns
I don't know your cost structure/margins, so I really can't give a specific
set of numbers in good faith. In my relatively limited experience in
polling/interviewing large numbers of people (a couple projects) I have gotten
the impression that my example of engaging 1000-2000ppl/month is unusual. The
tools we used seem to have been geared towards 1-2000/day or more
(inferred/back of envelope). This makes me think there may be a market for you
guys in the much higher volume brackets which might let you subsidize the
lower end and draw folks in. First month free definitely cool idea though. I
will definitely find a way to use this if possible.

~~~
hackerkira
We will make the first month free deal more obvious. I appreciate your
feedback and honesty. Get in touch with us via email (on our site) and I'd
love to chat more about your use cases.

------
ajiang
I like these types of businesses. Simple, useful technology for which the
success of the business depends almost entirely on the grit and hustle of the
team. Your greatest asset will be a killer sales team. All the comments on
this page about pricing and "oh I could do this in a weekend" are not as
relevant to your business because for the majority of your sales, your
customers won't even KNOW the product they're looking for. They have a problem
for which there are many kinds of solutions to. Your job is to sell them this
_type_ of solution. If this _type_ of solution is less expensive compared to
other types of solutions, you'll get the sale before your competitors (clones
or otherwise) ever hear the letters RFP.

TL;DR: Get a great sales team

------
VLM
I would propose a counterargument for those claiming the price is too high...
for those still texting in 2013, less than 10 cents per text is a pretty good
deal. Before I got my smartphone I was paying 25 cents per individual text, or
I could have paid $15/month to have "unlimited" service but the real world
limit was perhaps two or three per month for a cost of perhaps $5/text. These
prices are why people don't use texting/sms anymore. Which is a problem for
scaling...

~~~
dkrich
_These prices are why people don 't use texting/sms anymore._

Huh? I honestly don't know a single person (other than my parents) who don't
use texting as their primary medium of communication between phones. It's
easy, it's reliable, it removes the possibility of awkward or lengthy
conversations.

What makes you think nobody texts anymore?

~~~
VLM
Must be come cultural thing due to local network effect. My wife exclusively
uses facebook on her phone as do all her friends. For two way conversations I
exclusively talk on the phone.

~~~
mwctahoe
my parents, aunts and uncles all usually call to talk or send emails, most of
my friends gchat/text/tweet to communicate.

------
ForrestN
Small typo in the phone picture. The text says "its fantastic" when it should
say "it's fantastic". Not a big deal obviously, good luck with everything.

~~~
zekenie
Thanks!

------
volume
I didn't read the copy in the first section and instead scanned over to the
video/demo. Maybe lead off with that or place it higher on the page.

... or integrate the step 1/2/3 into the animated demo to save on web page
real estate.

...but also not something that's just a video capture of your desktop.

Also, this sounds cool for IT Operations like if you integrated with Nagios or
PagerDuty.

------
daseong
Hi, congratulations to the launch. A little bit of nitpicking on the site UI:
The most prominent button is the "Get trexting" button. Once someone clicks
it, there is no further info about the product and no way back. The logo won't
take you back to the product page and the signup alone might be a blocker.
Cheers

~~~
zekenie
Oops! Thanks. Just added a link back from the signup page.

------
tonywebster
I think this is an awesome idea, and the implementation of the conversation
designer is beautifully simple (although it should support collapsing threads
of conversation for complex interactions).

At the risk of sounding a bit harsh, anyone dismissing SMS has their head too
far up Silicon Valley. Only half of the adult population in the US has a
smartphone, and SMS is the best communication method for low-income, rural,
and elderly communities. On top of that, something like 95% of text messages
are read within minutes of being received. For the given use cases, this
solution is right on.

I think the pricing is dead wrong, and there should be more emphasis on
instantly signing up for free. Also, I think you should tone down the eco
imagery and messaging.

~~~
hackerkira
Thanks for the feedback. We strongly believe in the accessibility of SMS.
We're actually working on the collapsing threads feature. We'll make the free
trial more evident. Our initial customers haven't objected to our pricing,
maybe we're getting lucky. Why should we revise it?

~~~
tonywebster
If you already have customer feedback, I think you need to first assess
whether the customers you have now make up a strong segment of the types of
customers you'd like to continue converting. Hopefully you have data about how
you acquired those customers, and the effort and cost involved with that
acquisition and whether or not it's something you can replicate at scale. If
it's what you want, then that trumps anything you'll hear on HN. :)

My thought, however, is that there's a long tail pricing strategy that's being
missed. Your plans right now are $60, $175, and $500/mo, which I feel
eliminates a lot of folks in the sub-$60/mo region. I'm not sure what the low
number should be, but I'd rhetorically ask if you think six $10/mo customers
are worth more than one $60/mo customer -- the answer in my mind is no.
Building six relationships means that as those companies or groups grow,
they'll grow into your bigger packages. As someone at one of those companies
leaves their employment and moves to a new job, they'll insist on implementing
your technology. They'll tell their friends and colleagues. If you lose one of
those six customers, you still have $50/mo coming in. That becomes even more
clear when you start thinking about 50 customers at $10/mo versus one $500/mo
customer. (I'm not saying $10 is the right number)

I'd also argue that there's a difference between a trial and a free account.
If I'm thinking of using this service for some business use case, I personally
am not going to let my mind be creative about really thinking how your service
can intertwine with my needs if it's just a trial account. I'm not going to
invest my time into something ephemeral. But, if there's a free service that I
can actually test with a customer and use for a few weeks without that
ephemeral feeling, you're starting that relationship building early. Free
accounts will absolutely cause you to lose money, which is why it takes
testing and analysis to determine the right balance. But if you're actually
charging $60/month to send 650 texts, you're already making a profit of 90%
after SMS fees and card processing charges.

------
jmhnilbog
The tree manager is beautiful. It's the much prettier interface I didn't want
to have to build for my educational SMS-based text adventure. All it would
need to be ideal for me would be:

* a way to assign 'expected words' in responses, with intelligent dictionary/thesaurus lookups to assist (so a free text response that asks 'where's the meat?' will be handled by the 'where's the beef?' path in the tree)

* a way to add nodes to the tree in real time as responses come in that don't have a valid mapping yet (so someone who attempts something completely bizarre like 'screw bear' can get a custom response)

* a simple way to handle game state, probably in another tree accessible in each node.

~~~
zekenie
Very interesting! Couple of things. We're actively working on SMS to live
chat, which might take care of editing tree in live time.

We've thought about the thesaurus and are thinking of going in that direction
in the future, but right now it texts back the possible options. Does this
seem good for the moment?

I'm not 1000% clear on your third bullet. Are you interested in nodes that you
can access from any point in the tree, or are you interested in nodes that
transfer you to another tree?

~~~
jmhnilbog
If live chat responses were auto-saved as new nodes, that would meet my
requirements. The goal would be that any new input could be either manually
directed to an old node or auto directed to a new node.

Imagine a 'choose your own adventure' book that accepted arbitrary input and
could create new paragraphs on the fly. If your input maps to an existing
paragraph, you're texted it immediately. If the book never heard of someone
trying your input before, you're told to wait a bit and get a response once
the book writes it. A very few commands do something special. 'inventory'
spits out your current inventory state.

There are a few levels of game state. Characters carry around a small amount
of state (alive, healthy, ugly, etc.). Locations carry around some state. (on
fire, dark) Other state might be held in a calendar (May 1st, 9:00 am, the
world will end) or the world itself. Each 'paragraph' in the imaginary book
should be able to look up and/or update any of those states when entered.

Ideally, any input that comes in would be autocorrected and analyzed for parts
of speech. If a new noun comes in, it could be compared to nouns mentioned in
previous 'paragraphs' to figure out what the user meant. 'get brown tote' and
'get brownish bag' should resolve to the same thing.

My third bullet boils down to allowing a user to:

    
    
        You are standing before a door.
        > open door
    
        The door resists your furious pushing and pulling. What's that thing people open     doors with? A....key?
        > get key
    
        Who said anything about a key? There's no key here.
    

...later, after finding a key...

    
    
        You are standing before a door.
        > open door
    
        The door rattles, but appears to be locked.
        > use key on door
    
        *click* The key fit, the door unlocked.
    

without having to add hundreds of similar nodes at different points in the
tree. You'd just make the 'standing before a door' node check
'player.inventory.hasKey' and have it send you the correct 'paragraph'. (Also,
'use key on door' would update 'rooms.boring.door.locked'.)

~~~
zekenie
Very interesting. We already track "errors" (responses that don't have
connections) and we could make a real time error corrector. Let's say you have
a yes/no question and someone says "nah." If you didn't want them to recieve a
text saying "the options were yes and no," we could _maybe_ make it so you
could click on the node you wanted it to go to... But, I'm not sure if there's
much demand for this type of feature in general. I think most users won't want
to have real time people sitting in the trext app. I'd be interested in
talking about it more though!

~~~
jmhnilbog
Right, mine is a pretty specific use case. However, if a thesaurus lookup can
figure out that nah is close enough to no that it should just normalize the
response to no, that's a win for the user. (Scraping urban dictionary to act
like a thesaurus would be a decent way to decipher txt spk and euphemisms as
well.) Yes/No questions could be special cased to accept more oddball
responses off the bat..'for sure', 'totally', 'no way', etc.

~~~
zekenie
Agreed. I'm not a natural language expert by any means, but from the research
I did a little while ago, it seemed like the thesaurus apis matched "yes" to
"affirmative" and not to "yeah." Maybe I haven't found a good one?

------
k-mcgrady
As others have said you need to make it much more clear what the product does.
I understand immediately once I scroll down but the tag line "Texting for
education, health, advertising, and much more. Start the conversation." tells
me nothing.

>> "Texting is already seen as more personal than email"

This is true but I don't think it's a plus for your product. Personally I
despise getting texts from companies asking me questions and replying back to
me, precisely because it's personal and unexpected. I don't want that kind of
interaction from a business. It's an invasion of my personal life (ok a bit
dramatic, I know).

Have you done much research on this? I'd be interested to know what you
discovered.

~~~
zekenie
We don't have awesome data on this. But, we're working on it. Personally, I
think it really depends if the texter wants the interaction. It can have great
utility or be somewhat annoying.

------
gyardley
So, if I set up a back-and-forth conversation where I asked five questions and
got sent five responses, would that count as one text or ten texts towards the
monthly limit?

I can think of a case or two where the pricing might make sense. But if we're
really being honest, I'd probably just use the service to test my assumptions
and prove out the model. Then, if the numbers looked good, I'd do the Twilio
integration myself to save a little money and remove the additional
dependency.

This is probably exactly the wrong group of people to ask about pricing,
though, because many of us know what Twilio costs and can do the integration
ourselves. It's the normal business owners who'll think your product is black
magic.

~~~
hackerkira
I think you're absolutely right about the HN audience. In terms of your
question, it would be ten texts, so we count texts bidirectionally.

Hopefully you're right about business owners. We anticipate that they'll see
the value. Trext is designed to make SMS app creation accessible to non-
programers.

------
sharmanaetor
I just signed up. One suggestion. Improve the "Phonebook" feature. Entering
one contact per line? No excel/csv import? And no way to bulk add contacts
after a group has been created? Not fun when I need to add 2000 contacts.

~~~
zekenie
Yes. You are right!

------
jknightco
Good job on the launch! I'll second what jeremymcanally said: the pricing
seems absolutely out of control. Other than that, its an interesting concept.
Best of luck to you guys.

A couple of UI problems I noticed:

I keep my secondary monitor vertical—which makes your banner image look like
this: [http://imgur.com/3MGDYel,sxRuvJY#0](http://imgur.com/3MGDYel,sxRuvJY#0)

Also, the text on the first section below the banner clips a bit:
[http://imgur.com/3MGDYel,sxRuvJY#1](http://imgur.com/3MGDYel,sxRuvJY#1) (but
only on my vertical screen).

~~~
zekenie
Good catch! How much do you think we need to worry about vertical monitors?

------
twigger
Nice to see someone using the free stock photos site posted a while ago.

[http://unsplash.com/](http://unsplash.com/)

------
wellboy
Good title of the post. :) Sms sounds ancient though, there must have been
people that tried this 10 years ago. Why did it not work for them?

I would have thought this plugs into whatsapp though, but maybe the messaging
market is too fragmented and it wouldn´t be worth for you building it for
every single platform (Facebook, Gmail, sms, whatsapp ...)

------
matthewcford
Having built an sms/web decision tree application for healthcare information
([http://sxt.org.uk](http://sxt.org.uk)), my first question would be are there
plans to build in any database searches?

I can see entring each option being tiresome for larger applications.

~~~
zekenie
We're thinking webhooks would be a good way to achieve this. A texter gets to
a node which does a webhook to your server which provides the options or the
response. Perhaps some sort of database could be built in the future if we see
demand for it.

------
zbush
What's the name for this style of background? I've been looking for how to do
it, but I have no idea what to even search for. I'm undecided as to whether
it's nice or distracting and want to play with it a bit.

~~~
zekenie
Do you mean the one behind the video of the screen? Its just the corner of a
photo we shot. Its a little out of focus. Not sure what its called.

~~~
zbush
Sorry, I worded that awfully the first time around. What I meant is the
section under "Why Trext" that slowly reveals a different part of the laptop.

Thanks and good luck! :)

~~~
zekenie
Ahh... I don't know what that's called either. Sorry

------
lsiebert
I think you need some strong narrative examples of use. Show us a user with a
problem that you solve. Show us something that a user can use to sell this to
their boss.

Alternatively, use testimonials from actual users.

------
Doublon
Cool! There is just a weird depth effect on the picture... Or is it just me?
The left side of the screen is bigger whereas it should be smaller.

------
jaytaylor
How is this different from SendHub[1]?

[1] [https://www.sendhub.com/](https://www.sendhub.com/)

~~~
hackerkira
We allow users to design an interactive conversation with branching logic.
Sendhub focuses more on marketing through unidirectional texting. We focus on
use cases where bidirectional information exchange is valuable.

------
sharmanaetor
This looks like an excellent idea!

------
jonaldomo
This is cool. How does legal compliance work with people who do not want to be
contacted?

~~~
hackerkira
We're working on some SMS best practices white-papers. Ultimately our
customers are responsible for complying with rules and regulations. But, we
advise them to provide an opt-out in the first message (text STOP at anytime).

------
imissmyjuno
The changing fixed background trend is on the rise.

------
vishalzone2002
good idea. wrong pricing.

------
kamakazizuru
not sure what it does..

