Technically it's pretty simple, as Twilio is doing the heavy lifting. I'd looked at building something similar (well - actually did build the basics - doesn't take long) but the big issue becomes monetization and such.
I guess I don't have enough business "wisdom" (guts?) to launch a pay service that offers unlimited texts for $10/month, when those texts have a real hard cash cost. $10 = 1000 texts, not counting the texts people would send back to you to say "remove me" and such.
Twilio have volume pricing - http://www.twilio.com/pricing/volume-pricing - at 500k SMS you get a 25% price break, and even at 30k messages per month, they're not breaking the bank so far on Twilio credits.
But... as this grows, what's the goal? I see 'freemium' on the TC article, but I've just signed up for sendhub, and it gave me a number, but it doesn't seem to work at all like the video described it. I've got no option to set a specific wordcode, nor is there any info on freemium pricing/upgrades.
EDIT - isn't this groupme all over again? What's the difference?
Pricing and upgrades are coming soon. You can create groups from the contacts page, click on new on the groups section on the left. From there you'll be asked to create a keyword for your group. Hope that helps - if not, please feel free to ping us support [at] sendhub.com.
TC pricing info: "Paid levels providing unlimited messaging are available for $10, $50, and $150 per month, with access to 1,000 contacts, 100,000 contacts, or 250,000 contacts, respectively."
This sounds like a gamble that the user will buy the service, but never reach the number of contacts: for $10 it's $0.01 per contact, for $50 it's $0.0005 per contact, at $150 it's $0.0006 per contact. For $50, they'd want the user to send/receive less than 5k messages to break-even on Twilio retail costs.
The main problem they will have if anyone tries to send to 100k contacts, is that Twilio limits the send rate to 1 sms per second. This batch will take 27.78 hours to send and 250k will take 69.45 hours to send. Not to mention that it will cost the company $1,000 and $2,500 respectively (although they will have a way better deal from Twilio than $0.01/sms at that point).
You're assuming they're only sending from one phone number.
Hrm... that's probably how it would work in most cases, as it would be confusing to end users to sign up from one number and get a text from one they don't know about (even if the footer text indicated who it was from).
This pricing issue is one of the reasons I could never justify pressing forward with my initial idea of getting in to this market. Someone will end up being the "constant contact of sms" - that seems a logical market to pursue, but I'm not sure how to get there with the current pricing models (I mean in general, not specifically sendhub).
This is the major disadvantage of using longcodes (regular 7 digit phone number) and is the reason that any company that is serious about sending out large quantity of messages, is using a shortcode (5-6 digit number) which can (with twilio) send up to 60 messages per second.
Heh, yep. There are many competitors in this space already and there will be many more thanks to services like Twilio. I actually learned about these services through my sister who is a high school teacher. I was turned away from the idea once she explained to me that lots of teachers use them but will never pay for it. They hop from one free account to another.
Agreed. There are a lots of companies tackling this problem, for all sorts of niche solutions (texting students to remind them of homework, restaurants texting customers that their table is ready, etc.)
As you said, there are a ton of niche companies that handle this. Just look at the attendee list at the Bar & Nightclub show in Las Vegas. I work for a company that provides a similar service, but we have a short code and work directly with the carriers. Lots of competition and not a whole lot of margin if you don't have the volume drive cost down. Good luck to the, but free isn't going to last too long.
