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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

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!

dkrich 13y ago
Completely agree. I read through it all and it seems like a great idea but really bad copy. I think services like this that have real but somewhat complex use cases can compress a large amount of info into a short, interesting message by using a use-case or ideally a short video that describes a sample use case and how the product solves the problem. Basically exactly what Dropbox used to have on their landing page.
zekenie 13y ago
Thanks! That's awesome advice.
jonstjohn 13y ago
Agree, all I saw was texting for education (quick scan which most people do) and didn't really get it.
samstave 13y ago
>...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 13y ago
  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 13y ago
    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 13y ago
      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).
varunkho 13y ago
"a consultant hired to build an in-house CRM wouldn't pitch "Our CRM is going to be easy to use", they'd pitch "Your sales team will close more deals in less time when using our tool." Sadly, we product people often get hung up on the feature set of our product. No matter how many times we repeat "Features do not sell software. Benefits sell software.", we often revert to implementation details when pressed for why customers should care about our apps. And when we start thinking in terms of benefits, we pick bad, non-specific, frilly benefits, like "Easy to use" and "Sleekly designed." Does anyone ever try to sell software as being hard to use and clunky?" " - patio11
specialist 13y ago
Agreed. This is a really neat idea with a compelling implementation. But instead of trying to describe the service (tech), I'd choose a catchy name (textback, textpong, pongtext) and show by example. People will grok it once they see it. Identify a handful of use cases. Hope that one hits the mark. Run like hell. Here's some of the ways I could imagine people using it. - My chiropractor, hairdresser, mechanic wants to confirm an appointment. - My chiro, etc needs to cancel, resched, etc. - I'm on a wait list for time sensitive goods like flights, concert tickets, restaurant reservations or close out of cupcakes and vendors needs to confirm transaction, first come first serve (first right of refusal) style. - I have a periodic donation to my favorite charity (or campaign contribution) and they want to do another "ask" (for more money). I'd like to respond, something like "thanks for asking, here's $100, please ask again in 6 months". - Real time ad hoc game shows. It's trivia night at the local pub. Send a text to the game host to join. (Hmmm. This is a great idea. Yours, for free.) Any way. I'm sure there's zillions of use cases. And there's at least a few customers who will pay to scratch an itch. Best of luck to the OP.

dkrich 13y ago

Completely agree. I read through it all and it seems like a great idea but really bad copy. I think services like this that have real but somewhat complex use cases can compress a large amount of info into a short, interesting message by using a use-case or ideally a short video that describes a sample use case and how the product solves the problem. Basically exactly what Dropbox used to have on their landing page.

zekenie 13y ago

Thanks! That's awesome advice.

jonstjohn 13y ago

Agree, all I saw was texting for education (quick scan which most people do) and didn't really get it.

samstave 13y ago

>...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 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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 13y ago
    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).

varunkho 13y ago

"a consultant hired to build an in-house CRM wouldn't pitch "Our CRM is going to be easy to use", they'd pitch "Your sales team will close more deals in less time when using our tool." Sadly, we product people often get hung up on the feature set of our product. No matter how many times we repeat "Features do not sell software. Benefits sell software.", we often revert to implementation details when pressed for why customers should care about our apps. And when we start thinking in terms of benefits, we pick bad, non-specific, frilly benefits, like "Easy to use" and "Sleekly designed." Does anyone ever try to sell software as being hard to use and clunky?" " - patio11

specialist 13y ago

Agreed. This is a really neat idea with a compelling implementation. But instead of trying to describe the service (tech), I'd choose a catchy name (textback, textpong, pongtext) and show by example. People will grok it once they see it. Identify a handful of use cases. Hope that one hits the mark. Run like hell. Here's some of the ways I could imagine people using it. - My chiropractor, hairdresser, mechanic wants to confirm an appointment. - My chiro, etc needs to cancel, resched, etc. - I'm on a wait list for time sensitive goods like flights, concert tickets, restaurant reservations or close out of cupcakes and vendors needs to confirm transaction, first come first serve (first right of refusal) style. - I have a periodic donation to my favorite charity (or campaign contribution) and they want to do another "ask" (for more money). I'd like to respond, something like "thanks for asking, here's $100, please ask again in 6 months". - Real time ad hoc game shows. It's trivia night at the local pub. Send a text to the game host to join. (Hmmm. This is a great idea. Yours, for free.) Any way. I'm sure there's zillions of use cases. And there's at least a few customers who will pay to scratch an itch. Best of luck to the OP.