[cjbconnor]

Unfortunately, this sort of thing is a big turn-off for me. The thing that keeps me coming back to a restaurant is the quality of the food, not their marketing. What I've experienced is that as the quality of the food goes down, the number of marketing notifications goes up. I've gotten an email from chipotle every 2-3 days for the last month, but the last time I went there the food was terrible.

Also, your privacy policy isn't very confidence-inspiring. Sharing name, phone, and physical location with third parties shouldn't happen. I'd never use your services for that reason alone.

I wish you the best of luck, but I can't say your services are for me.

[mikeylikey]

A hacker after my own heart (Mikey here, Technical founder ). Thanks for you diplomatic critiques.

This was/is the sentiment of myself and a majority of our developers from a consumer standpoint. It's a curious experience being your product's chief skeptic. It's also been interesting to observe the number of consumers eager to participate, along with the degree to which it works on behalf of our restaurant customers. A few months ago my skepticism decreased when one of my favorite local pizza joints became a customer and I found myself ordering a lot more with them despite my aversion to being "marketed to". Fortunately, food quality appears steady so far .

One of the things I look forward to with more bandwidth and runway is to craft the product in a way that may even appeal to the segment of the market that shares our preferences. In the meantime, thanks for taking time to share your perspective.

[criddell]

It sounds very strange to start a company to do something you don't initially believe in (although it sounds like you are a believer now). If it wasn't about creating something you wanted to exist, what was it that drove you to create Boostly?

My guess: some combination of believing it could be a good business while helping restaurants.

Now that you know it works, do you plan on expanding beyond restaurants? Wouldn't you like to send text messages from car dealers, record stores, dry cleaners, grocery stores, clothing stores, taxi and ride share companies, landscapers, HVAC service companies, dog walkers, barbers, book stores, home improvement stores, electronics retailers, and so on? You could have phones buzzing with commercial messages a dozen times a day!

[codalan]

Feels like we've entered that marketing hellscape already.

I have to register for every other website if I want to purchase something, then get subscribed (without my consent) to some garbage spam mail. And god forbid if I abandon a shopping cart. Now I get some creepy email to come back and finish an order that I probably dgaf about.

And if I revisit some ecommerce site a year later, I get automatically re-subscribed to their marketing spam again.

I guess the next logical step is to migrate this nightmare to phones, where we'll all be forced to keep opting out of shit we never asked for in the first place.

I'm glad we're really using technology to make the world a better place.

[mikeylikey]

Aye. Yeah I was not "scratching my own itch" as we say. Shane has a background in restaurant sales and we started in the industry with an assumption that SMB restaurants were underutilizing their customer data. Your guess is accurate. The game as YC likes to say is "building stuff people want" and that's we attempted and eventually meandered into.

Brick and Mortar retail is a big market with similar dynamics to restaurants. We do have non-restaurant customers already but believe there are advantages to carving out this niche. Some of the best customers who like us best are those that were texting with more generic companies prior.

[aml183]

Marketing works plain and simple. The people who think they aren't affected by marketing are the very people it works on. Nobody wants to admit that marketing affects them which makes product development so difficult.

[stevekemp]

I went to visit a doctor recently, and booked the appointment online. As a result of that I received:

- An SMS confirming my appointment.

- An SMS the day before reminding me of the appointment.

- An SMS the morning of the appointment inviting me to checkin.

- An SMS after I left asking me about my experience on a scale of 1-5.

That's four SMSs relating to one appointment/visit. The moment I read this post I could just imagine a similar situation - I make a reservation online for a table, and I'll get spammed indefinitely about offers, and invitations to leave a review.

[fasteo]

For a reason. Patient no-show is a huge cost for doctors; it can get as high as 50% in some cases.

They will do anything to fight this. And I am mostly at their side in this particular issue.

[TylerE]

This sort of thing can be done really well.

One specialist I've had to go to frequently has a very good system.

An SMS 3 days before as a reminder. Another the day of, which you reply to to check in.

When they're ready for you, they text back, and you go in, and the nurse meets you at the door. (Even ignoring Covid, I'd much rather wait in my car, my with choice of tunes cranked, etc).

That's all good in and of itself.

What makes it really good is that someone human actually reads those messages and dispatches them as appropriate. So whenever I've had a billing question, need a refill, have a question for my doc whatever... I just text that number, and if it's during normal business hours I usually get a response back within 5-10 minutes. (And actual response, not "You are very important to us, we will return your call within 48 hours")

[mikeylikey]

One of the greatest conveniences of my life has been my dentist utilizing texting and text reminders

[bombcar]

What'd I'd love for dentists and various things like that to offer is "waitlist" - where I can say "look, I'm available the next cancellation that appears, and I can be at the office in 15 minutes".

[codalan]

I've had doctors and dentists that, internally, would move patient's appointments up if they had a cancellation. It was pretty awesome.

[zbjornson]

Medical appointment reminders and other medical communications have a special cutout in the TCPA, including reduced consent requirements. They annoy me too though; they're redundant with my calendar reminders. The feedback SMS might not be included in the exception either.

https://blog.curogram.com/what-are-tcpa-and-traced-act-and-h...

[shaneliammurphy]

You're correct. The TCPA's opt-in requirements are specific to ongoing marketing related texts and treat "transactional" texts differently.

[codegeek]

Except possibly the rating SMS, why is this a bad thing ? Doctors have the problem of no shows and it is good to send reminders. I personally don't mind receiving reminders for something I have agreed to. I wouldn't call a Doctor reminder SMS spam.

[pluc]

You could say the same about virtually all marketing. A product should let its product speak. Marketing is the art of shoving a sub-par product down users throats despite better alternatives existing.

[shaneliammurphy]

Totally - a product has to be great. With that said, getting feedback from your customers is also vital to making real improvements in the product and many restaurants are blind to what their customers think. Not everyone is comfortable telling someone that their food isn't great, or that there was a service issue, and we've been able to provide a more comfortable way to give that feedback, which leads to real improvements.

I also believe that there is a difference between marketing something to new customers that they might not want and what we do here. The only people who will raise their hand to join a text club are the actual fans who like the place and the product. Then this serves as a rewards mechanism to provide additional deals and incentives to continue to purchase more. This is retention marketing--not new customer acquisition.

[missedthecue]

I don't know... Sometimes I like a restaurant, but it's not always at the top of my mind to go eat there. In this sense, the marketing is a reminder of how much I like the food.

[shaneliammurphy]

I hear you on the importance of food quality. If you don't have good food or service, no amount of marketing is going to save you. I also think that there is a fine line that you don't want to cross when it comes to the number of marketing messages that you send to customers. Every 2-3 days would annoy me personally as a consumer too. Anything more than once per week is way too much for such a direct channel

Since this is an opt-in program, only the people who really want to receive texts from a particular restaurant will participate. If that's not you, that's totally fine. Either way, we appreciate you sharing your thoughts!