[necubi]

> Twilio resells commodity product (SIP/SMS) at Saas margins by offering good developer experience and - by this point - major brand recognition. It’s not a defensible business long term, they just had a huge head start, and they still compete terribly for service outside North America.

You would think! I was one of the first interns at Twilio in 2011, when they were about 20 people. When I was deciding whether to go back full time, this was exactly my concern. The product was great, people loved it, but it was ultimately just a SaaS layer on top of open-source PBX software. Already they were starting to attract lower-cost competitors. I thought they didn't have much of a future.

And now, 9 years later, that tiny startup is a $30B company.

This was a great lesson for me on how facile this sort of business model analysis is. It turns out by radically simplifying a hard, important problem (programmatic communication) and providing a great product around it is worth a lot! It doesn't really matter if someone can hack together some of the pieces that make up Twilio in a weekend. Many, many businesses will pay a premium for a good, cohesive product that works well.