| 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.) |
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.