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they still support pure request reply, but that has become commoditized. there’s a bunch of sms gateways to choose from today. so twilio is finding the most val

they still support pure request reply, but that has become commoditized. there’s a bunch of sms gateways to choose from today. so twilio is finding the most valuable forms of sms and productizing them. this is classic growth steps for a 15 year old business. aws has been doing this since before twilio was founded

toast0 3y ago
SMS was highly commoditized before Twilio. In my mind, what made Twilio rise was programatic Voice with a better API and developer centric marketting (including examples, showing up at conferences, demos etc), maybe a bigger US focus than most aggregators helped too. Self-service signup is pretty handy. Disclosure: I was at WhatsApp from 2011 to 2019, and worked on SMS and Voice verification. We started using twilio as an alternative voice provider, and only later added them for SMS.
- moneywoes 3y ago
  Have you written any stories or learnings of your time at WhatsApp anywhere?
  - toast0 3y ago
    I'm not much of a focused writer, so other than comments on HN, and private communications. Not really. If it's on topic, I'm happy to answer questions. And my email is in my profile. On this topic, I guess the big learning if you use phone numbers for verification is to use multiple providers, and build a system that automatically chooses providers in real time based on success. They all have incidents, and they all have destinations that work better and worse. I don't usually mention suppliers by name unless it was clearly public, they put us in their SEC forms by name, so I think it's fair. My "favorite" incidents are when one provider has a major incident, and several others have minor incidents that correspond exactly. This is because most of the aggregators are interconnected, and sometimes it makes more sense for them to send through another aggregator than directly (they don't tend to have direct routes for all carriers, regardless of what they claim). If you use voice codes, I also recommend working to make the voice spacing sound good. Remembering 6 digits from a call isn't super easy; it's better if you make it sounds like two groups of three or maybe three groups of two. It's not totally obvious how to do that either; smashing audio files together doesn't sound great. You've got to adjust the silence between voice samples.

toast0 3y ago

SMS was highly commoditized before Twilio. In my mind, what made Twilio rise was programatic Voice with a better API and developer centric marketting (including examples, showing up at conferences, demos etc), maybe a bigger US focus than most aggregators helped too. Self-service signup is pretty handy. Disclosure: I was at WhatsApp from 2011 to 2019, and worked on SMS and Voice verification. We started using twilio as an alternative voice provider, and only later added them for SMS.

moneywoes 3y ago
Have you written any stories or learnings of your time at WhatsApp anywhere?
- toast0 3y ago
  I'm not much of a focused writer, so other than comments on HN, and private communications. Not really. If it's on topic, I'm happy to answer questions. And my email is in my profile. On this topic, I guess the big learning if you use phone numbers for verification is to use multiple providers, and build a system that automatically chooses providers in real time based on success. They all have incidents, and they all have destinations that work better and worse. I don't usually mention suppliers by name unless it was clearly public, they put us in their SEC forms by name, so I think it's fair. My "favorite" incidents are when one provider has a major incident, and several others have minor incidents that correspond exactly. This is because most of the aggregators are interconnected, and sometimes it makes more sense for them to send through another aggregator than directly (they don't tend to have direct routes for all carriers, regardless of what they claim). If you use voice codes, I also recommend working to make the voice spacing sound good. Remembering 6 digits from a call isn't super easy; it's better if you make it sounds like two groups of three or maybe three groups of two. It's not totally obvious how to do that either; smashing audio files together doesn't sound great. You've got to adjust the silence between voice samples.