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Twilio's Seed Pitch
- patleeman 10y agoI 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%20Humans:%20Using%20NLP%20and%20Python%20To%20Build%20Text%20Interfaces%20Fat%20Fingers%20Can%20Use https://github.com/RobSpectre/Talks/tree/master/SMS%20For%20...
- jmsdnns 10y agoThat was probably Rob Spectre: http://twitter.com/dn0t http://twitter.com/dn0t
- josh_carterPDX 10y agoRob is a beast. Love that guy!
- rattray 10y agoRob was a regular at PennApps, the hackathon where I cut my teeth. He was among the most helpful & friendly of any sponsors, helping debug code that didn't involve Twilio at all. He also provided valuable "hackathon strategy" advice like "don't build that feature" to young coders who needed it. I'm sure Twilio's success is due in no small part to dev evangelists like Rob, I hope he's well rewarded for it.
- manuelflara 10y agoReminds 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 :)
- Bromskloss 10y agoDevelopers, developers, developers, developers, …
- atonse 10y agoI 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 10y agoWhich 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
- contingencies 10y agoI stopped recommending Stripe when they stopped accepting my card. Despite me pointing this out to them, nobody at the company has done anything concrete to fix it. Sadly, they are no longer a company by developers for developers. In addition, they are pretty useless in some regions where they do not support locally dominant payment methods.
- tedmiston 10y ago
- wslh 10y agoIt 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 10y agoRegarding 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?
- anotherarray 10y agoIn 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.
- harel 10y agoI 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 10y agoCurious to know of your company's experience. Why did you lose?
- harel 10y agoPeople. 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 10y agoWow, 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 10y agoThere 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.
- ilikerashers 10y agoTwilio, 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.
- fitzwatermellow 10y agoGreat story! And congrats to Twilio on the IPO, 90% first day of trading pop, and creating a great (and essential) service ;)
- patio11 10y agoTwilio 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.
- johns 10y agoThe biggest crowd this was ever done with was NY Tech Meetup and it was bonkers: http://johndbritton.com/2010/08/04/live-coding-demo-at-new-york-tech-meetup/ http://johndbritton.com/2010/08/04/live-coding-demo-at-new-y... (too bad the video doesn't work...looking for another). Fred Wilson also wrote about that one: http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/08/how-to-pitch-a-product.html http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/08/how-to-pitch-a-product.html
- CPLX 10y agoI saw this done in person at the NY Tech Meetup, probably around 2010 or so, and it was the most effective startup presentation I have ever seen.
- at-fates-hands 10y ago"...my birth cry will be the sound of every phone on this planet ringing in unison."
- crabasa 10y agoLawnmower Man?
- soneca 10y agoThis 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 10y agoThis 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_ 10y agohttps://www.stopbadware.org/clearinghouse/search?url=http://avc.com/2016/06/best-seed-pitch-ever https://www.stopbadware.org/clearinghouse/search?url=http://... doesn't show anything. Is there any further information on the warning?
- crystalmeph 10y agoMicrosoft 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=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+AVc+%28A+VC%29 http://avc.com/2016/06/best-seed-pitch-ever/?utm_source=feed... that there's a problem.
- dchuk 10y agoWhat 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 10y agoUmmm ... 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 10y agoThis. 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.
- api 10y agoI'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.
- starikovs 10y agoA 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..
- fapjacks 10y agoInteresting. 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.