
Show HN: FounderPhone – make customer support personal with SMS - parthi
Hi HN! We&#x27;re Parthi and Kunal from FounderPhone (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;founderphone.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;founderphone.com</a>). FounderPhone is a shared customer support inbox for SMS and calls in Slack.<p>We&#x27;ve built and shipped 7 products recently and if there&#x27;s one thing we&#x27;ve learned, it&#x27;s that your personal relationship with your customer is your secret weapon as a startup. Having customers email support@company.com or message a bot via Intercom doesn&#x27;t feel personal. People are skeptical they will ever get a response. We&#x27;ve had a lot of success giving out our phone number to the top customers we really care about and telling them to text us whenever something comes up. Apparently, lots of great founders like Patrick from Stripe did this for their VIP customers while growing their startups.<p>The problem is that a single SMS inbox isn&#x27;t sustainable at scale. So we hacked together a solution for ourselves where we made Slack a shared inbox. When a customer texts or calls me, our team can also see the messages and incoming calls. We can discuss how best to handle the issue in Slack and then anyone can respond via text. For calls, anyone available can redirect calls to their own number. From the customer&#x27;s perspective, they&#x27;re just texting a single number. They&#x27;re not frustrated with messy tickets or being routed to 3 different people. They will always read your responses because it&#x27;s in their SMS inbox instead of being lost amongst their 20,000 unread emails.<p>This is just the start! We&#x27;re looking into building a whole suite of software to make customer support feel both personal and immediate. We&#x27;re making an integration with Segment and Sentry to alert you when a customer has an issue so you can reach out to them about it before they complain to you.<p>Text our FounderPhone (510) 756-2522 with your name or email founders@founderphone.com if you have any questions. Thanks for checking us out!
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yjftsjthsd-h
I'm a _little_ sorry to rain on your parade, but this seems like you're
turning a personal contact back into a normal support system. "Hey, here's my
direct contact info" works _because_ it's not "our team can also see the
messages and incoming calls. We can discuss how best to handle the issue in
Slack and then anyone can respond via text". You've just reinvented a support
phone number, and as soon as customers actually try to interact with it the
whole charade will collapse.

~~~
parthi
For larger teams that aren't startups, we don't intend for this to be used for
everyone. We think it should be reserved for your most important customers. In
a lot of B2B businesses, a handful of customers account for the lion's share
of your revenue. You want to build a personal relationship with them and make
sure they are taken care of and happy. We think it's best to stratify support
and give your most valuable customers direct access to your core team vs
general support where they can get lost. It's worked well for us (we have 10s
of customers) and we think it can work for just "VIP" customers at larger
companies

~~~
yjftsjthsd-h
So like an account manager, but a group of people rather than a single person?
I suppose that could have value.

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anomaloustho
I think this is a great idea. It seems like it’s getting a lot of resistance
due to the dishonesty.

On the website it looks like the message is purposefully withholding the
information that A) the text went to everyone, and B) the person who replied
wasn’t ‘Richard”

But the value is the customer received a personal-feeling experience even
though it wasn’t actually what they probably thought. And you showed that by
having the customer say, “Yo Richard!” as to imply that they had their guard
down and were being informal.

I could argue that even though it is dishonest (in that withholding
information can be regarded as a form of dishonesty), it is still ensuring
greater success by creating a perceived personal relationship. And that’s also
psychologically beneficial to the customer and their success with whatever
product is being supported.

It seems like you will have to be very careful in how this experience is
portrayed, marketed, and worded to get around the subterfuge aspect.

A technology approach could be to have it automatically say, “I forwarded your
text to John and he replied “I restarted the server for you. Everything should
be working.”

You’re in a delicate position where the value in your startup is due to a
psychological perception that’s based in withholding information. You’ll need
to trot down that path very carefully so that you still can maximize the
psychological benefits to the customer while minimizing the appearance of
deceit.

But I think it definitely provides for a great customer experience.

~~~
parthi
Thank you for your thoughts! Yeah, technology is making everything more
distant and impersonal. We're trying to figure out how we can make business to
customer interactions feel like you're actually cared for by a real person
instead of a nameless entity. We definitely have a lot of work to do to figure
out the right way to scale that while keeping it authentic. This is the first
step

------
Olscore
Neat product, we rolled something similar to this using Slack where we manage
the phone system, etc. I especially like how you can reply within Slack and
text back the customer. Seems like your major problem with this startup is
usage costs as text messages and phone calls can quickly add up. We are a
small team of ~7 people and our monthly Twilio expense is twice your price
here. I.e., not priced high enough.

I might prefer this product with a slight change: instead of trusting you my
business phone number, maybe I could simply point my Twilio endpoint to your
servers? That way you are not soaking up passthrough costs of customer usage;
plus, I don't have to worry about getting my number from you after all my
customers are familiar with that number. Anyways, it's a neat concept. I have
provided our phone system to other businesses and can totally see the value in
this product.

~~~
parthi
We can do that for you. We can give you the API endpoints to hit from Twilio.
Want to shoot me an email at parthi@founderphone.com or text at 510 756 2522?

------
wtmt
> We've built and shipped 7 products recently and if there's one thing we've
> learned, it's that your personal relationship with your customer is your
> secret weapon as a startup. Having customers email support@company.com or
> message a bot via Intercom doesn't feel personal.

Agree with the personal relationship with the customer part. But if the email
is <realname>@company.com, wouldn’t that be personal? I do see giving a phone
number as way more involved with the customer.

> From a customer’s perspective, they’re just texting a single number. They’re
> not frustrated with messy tickets or being routed to 3 different people.

Isn’t that what happens here in the backend — some messy ticketing system in
Slack (which I gather isn’t a ticketing system) and several people handling
responses for the same customer/issue and a potential lack of coherence in
responses?

I don’t mean to pick on you. I really see value in providing a phone number to
customers and telling them they can text or call anytime. But somewhere your
marketing message seems a bit off to me, and doesn’t make sense on the points
you’re railing against.

All the best!

~~~
parthi
Thanks for the feedback!

A phone number is a lot more personal and immediate than email. We intend for
this to be used with your most valuable customers, where you want to give them
a direct line to someone senior at the company.

We started with Slack since it's an easy way to get your team on board without
them having to adopt a new tool. We've already started speccing out a web-
based tool to handle more complicated triage tasks.

The point on marketing message is appreciated. FounderPhone has worked well
for us and our customers right now, and we think it can work for keeping
account managers or founders close to their VIP customers, where you really
want to be on top of any of their issues. We'll think about how to message
that more carefully.

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usernamebias
Hey, man! I run a small web agency, and deal with A LOT of clients texting me
and my account managers.

Hate on here aside, I think this is a solid idea. Keep up the good fight.

~~~
parthi
Thanks for the support! Would love to chat to see if we can help or what you
would want. parthi@founderphone.com or 510 756 2522

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quartz
This is cool. You may already know this but Talkbin [0] was building this for
physical locations back in 2010/2011\. I remember them having a "text the
owner" sign in Coupa Cafe off of University Ave.

They were acquired by google 5 months into it [1] and after that I remember
seeing the signs in Crate and Barrels for a while, then google shut them down
after dwindling usage [2]. I always thought it was a cool idea.

This was all pre-slack and the focus was physical locations vs. other tech
founders so will be interested to see if now is the right time vs. then. I've
certainly noticed more and more companies relying on text to stay in touch
with me from a comms standpoint (HealthIQ comes to mind from recent
interactions, but even our doggie day care primarily communicates with me via
text now).

[0]
[https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/talkbin](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/talkbin)
[1] [https://techcrunch.com/2011/04/25/google-acquires-
talkbin-a-...](https://techcrunch.com/2011/04/25/google-acquires-talkbin-a-
feedback-platform-for-businesses-thats-only-five-months-old/) [2]
[https://techcrunch.com/2014/06/28/google-shuts-down-
talkbin-...](https://techcrunch.com/2014/06/28/google-shuts-down-talkbin-a-
feedback-platform-for-businesses-that-it-acquired-in-2011/)

~~~
parthi
Thanks for pointing those companies out! Really appreciate it. I actually know
two of the TalkBin founders

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mmastrac
I built something like this for my own texting needs, though it was app-based.
The biggest killer is that Twilio doesn't yet support group texting.

Unsure how many people will attempt to group text a company founder, but that
part ends badly. It's surprisingly good for MMS/etc handling.

~~~
parthi
Yeah, we're actively trying to figure out group texting. Right now it looks
like the individuals in the group are texting you

~~~
mmastrac
Yup. I ended up blocked in the same way. You might want to reach out to Twilio
and get another vote for this feature on their roadmap.

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sinak
We currently use Front to achieve something very similar:

A few questions:

\- Do you support MMS (photos and videos)?

\- Do you support creating auto-reminders to follow up with specific
customers?

\- Can you set up an autoresponder that responds when users sends a specific
key message? Eg if the customer sends "Start" then can you autoreply with a
canned message?

~~~
memn0nis
Yes on #1. We dont have auto-reminders or an autoresponder, but could
certainly build them!

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evantahler
Or, if you don't want to use Slack, but still want to use SMS to communicate
with your customers, check out
[https://www.switchboard.chat](https://www.switchboard.chat).

This use case really resonated with folks in the real estate and educational
spaces.

~~~
DailyHN
> you don't want to use Slack

Thanks, I was hoping someone would share something like this.

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veeralpatel979
Congrats on launching!

How does this compare to something like OpenPhone
([https://www.openphone.co/](https://www.openphone.co/))?

~~~
parthi
They're a great company competing Google Voice. We're really trying to focus
on customer support and success. We don't want to be a general purpose
business phone since other companies like OpenPhone are doing a great job
there already

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ycombonator
I still don’t understand the value in this. How is this different from Apple
Facebook Zendesk et al. contact platforms which provide certain level of
anonymity to the customer ? Also is this a matter of simple Twilio to Slack
hook integration ?

~~~
parthi
This assumes you want to build a personal relationship with your customer.
Think high value customers. You would want to provide a concierge like service
in that case vs making it anonymous and distant

It's a Twilio/Slack integration, but it's actually a fair amount of work to
get the nuance right. We handle calls, text campaigns, etc. We're also looking
into a web based shared inbox for teams not in Slack

~~~
startledmarmot
Have you taken a look at SignalWire instead of Twilio? Syntax-compatible XML,
less price gouging so might be able to help offset some of the costs to make
these products even more affordably awesome.

~~~
signalwiretrav
Hi Startledmarmot, I happened to notice this post. I’m Travis Stoliker and I’m
a VP at Signalwire. I don’t want to interrupt the thread but I wanted to give
you my direct email so you can get a hold of me anytime.
Travis.stoliker@signalwire.com. Thanks for the shout out on here. If you need
any credit to try out our service if you haven’t already done so, just shoot
me an email! If anyone else would like some credit just let me know. Take
care.

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vxNsr
If this takes off its gonna accelerate the sms app becoming a feature rich
email-like client with folders, send-later, fwd/delete rules, etc.

~~~
parthi
You're thinking a step ahead. Yeah, I think businesses are going to start
using SMS for marketing because it's not a saturated channel like email. We're
trying to do customer support which doesn't deal with high volume of spamming.
If SMS does take off, iOS and Android will beef up iMessage and Messages to
handle spam and separate business from personal texts

~~~
yocha
is support for RCS in the roadmap?

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pottertheotter
As a customer I would never use this. I'd much rather email someone than have
to chat with them. I always look for the email contact option.

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nolite
I like the idea alot.. but not in the US

~~~
parthi
We can technically support non-US. It just would be prohibitively expensive
right now. But we can keep you posted!

