Twilio's Seed Pitch

http://avc.com/2016/06/best-seed-pitch-ever/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+AVc+%28A+VC%29

by mathattack • 10 years ago

319 73 10 years ago

patleeman2• 10 years ago

I went to an event once where a Twilio developer evangelist presented and he did the live coding exercise. Using flask he wrote a quick server, and started receiving text messages from the audience in about 5 minutes. Then he applied a NLP library to the text messages, all in all quite impressive.

Here's a copy of his presentation, it was pretty awesome to watch. https://github.com/RobSpectre/Talks/tree/master/SMS%20For%20...

jmsdnns2• 10 years ago

That was probably Rob Spectre: http://twitter.com/dn0t

jmsdnns2• 10 years ago

Rob also built http://trumpfilter.com/, built http://www.jeterfilter.com/, and sings in Adventure Capitalists: https://adcap.biz

patleeman2• 10 years ago

Yup! He's a pretty great speaker. Definitely sold me on Twilio.

josh_carterPDX• 10 years ago

Rob is a beast. Love that guy!

rattray• 10 years ago

Rob was a regular at PennApps, the hackathon where I cut my teeth. He was among the most helpful & friendly of any sponsors, helping debug code that didn't involve Twilio at all. He also provided valuable "hackathon strategy" advice like "don't build that feature" to young coders who needed it.

I'm sure Twilio's success is due in no small part to dev evangelists like Rob, I hope he's well rewarded for it.

manuelflara• 10 years ago

Reminds me of the whole "Just run this cURL request and a payment is made, it's that easy." messaging that Stripe used to have right at the top of their landing page in the beginning, showcasing not only how easy their payments API was but also that they were a company by developers for developers. Brilliantly simple :)

Bromskloss• 10 years ago

Developers, developers, developers, developers, …

atonse2• 10 years ago

I just realized what stripe has done is now I always tell clients "payments are the least of your worries" thanks to stripe. Hard to understate that sea change.

phillc732• 10 years ago

Which is true, unless your business falls in their "Prohibited" list [1]. It's quite a long and wide ranging list, which would appear to restrict many businesses from accepting Stripe payments. For example, 51. Personal computer technical support and many things to do with travel and tourism: 13. Airlines, 23. Currency exchanges or dealers, 27. Cruise lines, 49. Timeshares, 50. Centralized travel reservation services or travel clubs

[1] https://stripe.com/at/prohibited-businesses

wslh4• 10 years ago

It is based on "Show, don't tell" but it is not that easy to do. I think the Twilio presentation was impressive because automating SMS and getting a phone number was difficult and required slow back-end setup. It was a simple concept to understand but difficult to implement. Stripe example also simplify the work with payments.

The problem is: how do you follow these principles for less obvious applications? For example, how do you impress your audience if you sell a database engine? It is a good startup exercise to think about it. I would be impressed with a tool to quickly design a web application in the same way Visual Basic did 25 years ago instead of talking about Bootstrap, Foundation, AngularJS, React, etc.

atonse2• 10 years ago

Regarding impressing the audience with a database engine, I think it was rethink who did the demo of a cluster of a dozen Mac minis and they'd start unplugging them and whatever steam of data never ceased.

I found that quite impressive. Was it Rethink or MemSQL or some such?

Anyone else remember that video?

jacquesm• 10 years ago

That's a direct clone of the Tandem demo of the mid 80's.

mrkgnao• 10 years ago

I'd be interested in a link, too.

mstade• 10 years ago

I heard about a demo like this from a DataStax employee not too long ago, maybe it was Cassandra then?

Edit: or it's just a common demo. :o)

meredydd3• 10 years ago

I would be impressed with a tool to quickly design a web application in the same way Visual Basic did 25 years ago

Me too! So we built one - https://anvil.works

The "Hello World" app takes 45 seconds (there's a video on the homepage).

The "Display a slideshow of images from Google Drive" app takes a whole five minutes, because I talk through it slowly (video at https://anvil.works/learn - scroll down).

If you want to demo (eg) a DB engine, you'll want the "uplink" that lets you call code on your workstation from your app. (There's a three-minute demo of us controlling a Raspberry Pi that way: https://anvil.works/blog/uplink).

wslh4• 10 years ago

Great! What features are you planning to add in the near/long term? I think it would be great to have ready to use access to web APIs, separate the front-end from the back-end, and target other popular programming languages like Node.js.

I recommend to do a "Show HN" to get invaluable feedback from HN users.

I know it can be painful but listing your competitors will be useful.

mattmanser• 10 years ago

Overall it looks like a good tool, but a major part of the magic of VB6 is intellisense. Proper, full blown, everything you type, intellisense. And the modern version is phenomenally good these days, compared to C# and typescript it's painful programming in javascript, Ruby and Python as you have to remember so much more minutae and context switch a lot more.

You don't even seem to have basic auto-completion at the mo. Even hinting the names of your declared controls would be a start.

nulagrithom• 10 years ago

Interesting point. I think that's the first half of the presentation:

"we have taken the entire messy and complex world of telephony..."

Twilio _chose_ and solved a problem that sucked. If your product doesn't solve a tough problem, it will be almost impossible to get the same "wow" factor that Twilio does.

Maybe the answer is that less obvious applications will simply be at a disadvantage right out of the gate.

nbadg• 10 years ago

I think it's important to point out that not only did Twilio choose a great problem to address, it was (critically) also one that a large audience already understands is very difficult. There are plenty of equivalently "valuable" problems to solve, which aren't as easy to communicate effectively, because most people lack enough domain-specific knowledge to understand the difficulty of the problem.

This, I think, is the core truth behind the oft-repeated observation that you should "pay attention to the startups with a few customers that absolutely LOVE their product". Not all valuable problems are ones that a general audience is likely to comprehend, but when you narrow it down just to the audience that does, how do they feel about what you're doing?

Put differently: the Twilio demo is so effective not just because they have a very good problem, but because it's an exceptionally common one as well. They have an impressive solution to a tough problem, sure, but they laos did a very good job aligning "the people who have this problem" with "the people listening to this demo", and that's what makes it great.

strangetimes• 10 years ago

I would be impressed with a tool to quickly design a web application in the same way Visual Basic did 25 years ago instead of talking about Bootstrap, Foundation, AngularJS, React, etc.

It's called ASP.NET Web Forms. Version 1 was released in 2002. Demos of it back then were quite impressive.

wslh4• 10 years ago

I tried it circa 2007 with Sharepoint and it was a pain in the * to use the web components/AJAX. It was the first time I used Sharepoint for development so take it with a grain of salt.

Could you please point me to some modern demo?

anotherarray• 10 years ago

In my experience, minimalism and cohesion are also one of the best way to sell products.

Just show how it's done. Be simple and clear. Don't try to spin. Don't inflate the future or past.

harel3• 10 years ago

I competed in the telephony space between 2006-2009. Us and Twilio all launched at the same time approx. We lost, they won and I'm happy for that. Today I'm their customer (and they are non the wiser about our somewhat parallel history). Everything about Twilio is top notch, from the tech all the way down to customer service. I only wish them success and growth.

untilHellbanned2• 10 years ago

Curious to know of your company's experience. Why did you lose?

harel3• 10 years ago

People. Lethal choice of CEO. I'll avoid names if you don't mind. Our product was essentially like Twilio, to start with at least, until the company was dragged into a more social arena (with deals with then big, now defunct social networks). We had some pretty cool features like the ability to trigger calls, sms chats, voice blasts etc, via text commands ("call humpty, dumpty and numpty tomorrow at 5pm", or "text johnny, bonny and sonny: Hi guys"), so you could communicate with the system via IM, email, web etc. We then essentially took all that lovely stuff and instead of being the API behind Telephony, or even the Telephony behind the social, we did stupid marketing stunts for some singers and stuff like that.

The whole story is a fascinating tale of human nature more than technology. Maybe one day...

ilikerashers• 10 years ago

Twilio, like Stripe, should be commended for their fantastic marketing efforts. Looked to use Twilio as really liked their offering but too pricey here in the UK.

fitzwatermellow• 10 years ago

Great story! And congrats to Twilio on the IPO, 90% first day of trading pop, and creating a great (and essential) service ;)

patio11• 10 years ago

Twilio also had a very powerful stock demo, which is (IMHO) the best demo since the Mother of All Demos. You've seen it if you've ever seen a Twilio demo.

If you haven't: the presenter "live codes" a quick Twilio application in front of the audience, showing a server-side program which serves TwiML (Twilio markup) that does some trivia action, like "Say hiya to the caller." They then have one person call a number which connects them to the application. It says hiya to them.

People clap a little.

Then they ask the entire room to call the same app. It says hiya to everyone.

People clap a lot.

Then they say "We can get the list of numbers which just called our number from the API, in one line of code. Here, let me print some on the screen with the last four digits covered." Nervous laughter happens.

"And then I'm going to have it call all of you, and bridge you into a teleconference."

Presenter hits enter. Every phone in the room rings at once. Crowd goes wild.

I've seen this demo 15 times and it never ceases to be absolutely magical.

johns• 10 years ago

The biggest crowd this was ever done with was NY Tech Meetup and it was bonkers: http://johndbritton.com/2010/08/04/live-coding-demo-at-new-y... (too bad the video doesn't work...looking for another).

Fred Wilson also wrote about that one: http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/08/how-to-pitch-a-product.html

CPLX• 10 years ago

I saw this done in person at the NY Tech Meetup, probably around 2010 or so, and it was the most effective startup presentation I have ever seen.

at-fates-hands2• 10 years ago

"...my birth cry will be the sound of every phone on this planet ringing in unison."

crabasa• 10 years ago

Lawnmower Man?

dcgoss• 10 years ago

Does anyone have a video of this?

agildehaus• 10 years ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S50bqKrTBkY

I remember Twilio giving this exact demo in 2009, though I can't find the video. There were audible gasps from the audience back then, the moment people realized their web development skills suddenly applied to telephony.

caseysoftware• 10 years ago

I did that demo 2-3 times per week for over two years. It was fun.

The best time ever was when I presented to Bob Metcalfe's class and he heckled me: https://twitter.com/CaseySoftware/status/170301958727536640

I got him back in my closing though: https://twitter.com/CaseySoftware/status/170304358905425920

azeirah2• 10 years ago

I'm sorry, but while impressive, it's nowhere near the mother of all demos. There's only one video out there that impressed me as much as the mother of all demos.

pixelHD• 10 years ago

care to mention which one it is?

soneca• 10 years ago

This site was denounced as unsafe by my Windows Phone Nokia 930 IExplorer and it blocked my access. No idea why, this is the first time for avc.com

crystalmeph2• 10 years ago

This should not be downvoted. I'm getting "This website has been reported as unsafe" on IE11 on Win7 x64. Even if it's a false positive, it's disconcerting to see this on an article linked from the front page of HN.

voltagex_• 10 years ago

https://www.stopbadware.org/clearinghouse/search?url=http://... doesn't show anything.

Is there any further information on the warning?

dchuk• 10 years ago

What this boils down to is that they weren't really pitching anything in the traditional sense. There was no salesmanship going on, no grandiose statements or numbers tossed around about market potential or "even if we can manage to just get 1% of the market..."

Instead, they had something to show, and touch, and feel. They actually had a product. That is the key to a good pitch.

spinlock• 10 years ago

Ummm ... I'd call that salesmanship.

I also heard the CEO of SAP (I think) talk about a sales call he made while he was a JR sales rep at Xerox. It was also pure salesmanship but the end of the story was that he closed the deal without the woman who owned the company even turning on the copier or typewriters.

So, I think the thread that ties these two pitches together (one that was all demo and the other that was zero demo) is probably that the salesman got the decision-maker to trust him.

drdoom• 10 years ago

This.

I have given similar demos. You first explain what you are going to do. Before the demo, they go all go into "no, it is impossible. I have been in this business for 20 years. Blah blah." You demo it, and once in a while, they get it, their jaws drop and they appreciate it. But mostly, it is a suspicious disbelief, followed by adversarial challenges where they insist you disclose everything under the covers right then and there.

I have even heard this: If this was possible, why hasn't IBM done it?

Sometimes, it is pretty depressing.

api• 10 years ago

I've never thought of pitching like this. Demoing, yes, but pitching investors with a live coding demo? Wow.

Definitely going to dig up some of Twilio's demo videos and study them.

starikovs• 10 years ago

A long time ago I saw how my friend writes code. Since then I started to learn how to write code too ) Live coding has something special..

fapjacks• 10 years ago

Interesting. That's also how I felt the first time I ever used Twilio, having come from a background including telephony (including wrestling Asterisk). I can easily tell Fred has also been exposed to the hellish nightmare of telephony in his past at some point. You can't really imagine just how bad it used to be, even with the Asterisk project. For example I have a fairly large library of computer books (perhaps five or six shelves) in my office ("laboratory"). The thickest book in that place by far is the Asterisk animal book from O'Reilly. The next thickest book is Sendmail's animal book. Twilio really did do something totally amazing.

Twilio's Seed Pitch

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