[caseysoftware]

At one of the early TwilioCons (second, I think?) we had a competitor set up in front giving away coffee and donuts. It was amusing and showed how desperate they were.

If you're targeting competitors' customers after they've spent the time, money, and effort to come to a conference, they're probably not a good prospect. They're deep and unlikely to switch easily or quickly. There are much better targets elsewhere.

* Early Twilio evangelist here, circa 2011-2013

[tyre]

That's not desperation, that's literally sales.

Twilio and MessageBird have the same customer. Someone who is using Twilio could reasonably convert faster than someone who doesn't use any api-based telephony integration. You skip the step of convincing internal teams that you should do this in the first place.

At ZenPayroll we didn't just ignore people on ADP, Paychex, Intuit, etc. That would be nuts!

If you're trying to reach "people who integrate with telephony APIs" the Twilio conference is…the perfect place to find them!

re: spending time/money/effort to come to conferences:

1) They are networking events.

2) They are paid for by companies so employees aren't by default that invested.

3) It's not a lot of effort. Employees like going to conferences. You meet people. It's paid for. You don't really have to do anything. It's a workation for most.

As for retention, much of Twilio is mostly a commodity. MessageBird came to the US and started a price war, which is really what you're competing on. Switching SMS APIs isn't the same as, say, switching off of SalesForce.

[caseysoftware]

A few good points but the market stage was wildly different.

In payroll processing, there are a handful of major entrenched providers. Going (almost) directly at them is the only approach. Yes, you have to differentiate yourself but odds are there's a rip & replace coming.

In 2012, outside of SMS aggregators, sending and receiving text messages was still novel. Add in automated calling and there were some options with Asterisk (worked on that many times) but still novel. Going after that tiny market may have been cheap but probably not effective.

If MessageBird started a price war, that's a weak value prop by itself but could work so followups:

- How much have they driven down pricing across the space since they've come to the US?

- If that value prop is the main motivator, how much share have they taken?

- Are you going in on their IPO?

(I don't care either way, I don't own any Twilio shares anymore.)

[toast0]

> How much have they driven down pricing across the space since they've come to the US?

Prices to the US are already super cheap. I think twilio was at or close to a penny when I first saw them. Prices elsewhere could use some lowering though, and it's a lot bigger deal if a 50 cent call becomes a 40 cent call than if a 1 cent call becomes a 0.8 cent call.

It kind of depends on what you're doing though. At my last job, I was a high volume customer, and we never went to the conventions, because everything worked / it was essentially a commodity for us; we had several vendors and directed traffic towards best results and price. I guess we would have met message bird earlier, instead of when they aquired one of our vendors.

[robertvis]

Mostly a US issue. Api’s on messaging have been in europe and asia since 2002. The main value prop is easy api’s and global connectivity for our SMS API’s as more and more businesses go global. Also we didnt start any price war. Our pricing is a bit cheaper than Twilio 0.0075 T vs 0.005 MB. That said - welcome any messaging users to email me and we can talk about the price war :-)

[rubber_duck]

>If you're targeting competitors' customers after they've spent the time, money, and effort to come to a conference, they're probably not a good prospect.

You are informing a self-selected set of power users about a direct alternative - you can't get cheaper exposure than this.

How much money they would have to burn on advertising campaigns to get comparable exposure on such relevant audience ? Even if it leads to 0 conversions the awareness inside of that group is very valuable.

[ThomPete]

when we launched zecco back in 2007 we gave out free hotdogs on wall street under the banner of “There is such a thing as a free lunch”. Thats marketing