Trext – Software that engages large groups in interactive texting

http://trext.me

by zekenie • 13 years ago

53 77 13 years ago

trext.me

sharmanaetor2• 13 years ago

This looks like an excellent idea!

larrys• 13 years ago

Site design is nice.

But points "1" "2" "3" need the language toned down a bit need something simpler to convey the point. Didn't pass the 1st read test of knowing what you are selling.

By the way don't forget to put effort into things other than YC. Not the only game in town or path to success in business life.

Doublon• 13 years ago

Cool! There is just a weird depth effect on the picture... Or is it just me? The left side of the screen is bigger whereas it should be smaller.

hnriot• 13 years ago

Sounds like spam in an Eco package. I like the site design, the photography and you all look like nice, talented people, but I just cringe at reading about sending txt's to thousands of people. The reason for those statistics you quote (98% being read withing minutes) is because txt message are personal, 1:1, not batch sent from this spam engine.

zekenie15• 13 years ago

Thanks for the feedback! A lot of the use cases we're looking at are reaching out to populations who want the messages. For example, high school students who've been admitted to a college and are looking for info on summer events; texting in for customer support... areas where bidirectionally is valuable.

daseong• 13 years ago

Hi, congratulations to the launch. A little bit of nitpicking on the site UI: The most prominent button is the "Get trexting" button. Once someone clicks it, there is no further info about the product and no way back. The logo won't take you back to the product page and the signup alone might be a blocker. Cheers

zekenie15• 13 years ago

Oops! Thanks. Just added a link back from the signup page.

jeremymcanally• 13 years ago

I really like this idea, but the pricing (to me) is astronomical.

I'm guessing I'm not in your target market, though. That is, someone who would use this for say, RSVPs to church events or something. Though, your demo would tell me otherwise. I'm a little confused about market fit, I guess.

wwwwww2• 13 years ago

How are you going to survive? I could build this in a weekend and be profitable charging a quarter of the price. If this catches on I imagine someone will do just that.

jmngomes• 13 years ago

Doesn't that apply, or was applicable at some given point in time, to the vast majority of currently successful startups? http://www.quora.com/Startups/How-do-you-make-a-new-business...

beat• 13 years ago

Anyone willing to put in the work to create a serious clone product and talented enough to succeed at it probably has ideas of their own they'd want to implement instead.

hackerkira7• 13 years ago

We've been getting mainly B to E interest and our major competitors in those markets have starting plans of $1000/month. But we're interested in feedback. How would you revise the pricing?

BWStearns3• 13 years ago

My issue with pricing isn't the lower plan really, 60 doesn't seem so much, but the 10,000 text max plan seems to be too low for a lot of useful applications of this software. If I want to reach a 10,000 person incoming freshman class at a university then I would need to buy multiple plans just to serve them a multi-question conversation. The other thing is that you could provide higher priced (i.e. well over 1k plans) with TONS of texts available, and maybe subsidize the lower plans to increase first time adoption and increase the odds of being used for a bigger project/campaign/effort.

avree• 13 years ago

I really don't get how this could be the case.

I built something similar to this for my startup; it didn't have a pretty UI we could let our marketing team use, but it also didn't cost nearly $0.10/text - it cost $0.01/text after we went into production, and was free while we were devving it.

I would charge a fixed rate per month for the pretty front-end; that's what startups/marketing teams/etc. would sub for. I'd then charge for the variable SMS cost at nearly what you can pay a Twilio/Tropo for them, and make it a unified, uncapped plan.

wellboy• 13 years ago

Good title of the post. :) Sms sounds ancient though, there must have been people that tried this 10 years ago. Why did it not work for them?

I would have thought this plugs into whatsapp though, but maybe the messaging market is too fragmented and it wouldn´t be worth for you building it for every single platform (Facebook, Gmail, sms, whatsapp ...)

makerops2• 13 years ago

"Texting for education, health, advertising, and much more. Start the conversation."

My mind kind of checked out after reading that; I assumed I would not find this interesting, but I scrolled down a bit, and saw the demo, which was really cool.

"Automate your Text Conversations" or something similar, really large, with your video right underneath should be the first thing someone sees on the site.

joshdance• 13 years ago

+1. Is your product for education, or health or advertising? Those are very different markets. Maybe pick one of those and highlight it. Or provide a use case for each if you really want to be in all 3 markets.

makerops2• 13 years ago

I don't even know if you have to highlight a market right off the bat? Automate Your Text Conversations, appeals to a ton of niches (including people with significant others who text them every night at the same time, asking the same questions!). Maybe develop several landing pages, and gear each text conversation at that niche?

vishalzone2002• 13 years ago

good idea. wrong pricing.

tonywebster2• 13 years ago

I think this is an awesome idea, and the implementation of the conversation designer is beautifully simple (although it should support collapsing threads of conversation for complex interactions).

At the risk of sounding a bit harsh, anyone dismissing SMS has their head too far up Silicon Valley. Only half of the adult population in the US has a smartphone, and SMS is the best communication method for low-income, rural, and elderly communities. On top of that, something like 95% of text messages are read within minutes of being received. For the given use cases, this solution is right on.

I think the pricing is dead wrong, and there should be more emphasis on instantly signing up for free. Also, I think you should tone down the eco imagery and messaging.

hackerkira7• 13 years ago

Thanks for the feedback. We strongly believe in the accessibility of SMS. We're actually working on the collapsing threads feature. We'll make the free trial more evident. Our initial customers haven't objected to our pricing, maybe we're getting lucky. Why should we revise it?

tonywebster2• 13 years ago

If you already have customer feedback, I think you need to first assess whether the customers you have now make up a strong segment of the types of customers you'd like to continue converting. Hopefully you have data about how you acquired those customers, and the effort and cost involved with that acquisition and whether or not it's something you can replicate at scale. If it's what you want, then that trumps anything you'll hear on HN. :)

My thought, however, is that there's a long tail pricing strategy that's being missed. Your plans right now are $60, $175, and $500/mo, which I feel eliminates a lot of folks in the sub-$60/mo region. I'm not sure what the low number should be, but I'd rhetorically ask if you think six $10/mo customers are worth more than one $60/mo customer -- the answer in my mind is no. Building six relationships means that as those companies or groups grow, they'll grow into your bigger packages. As someone at one of those companies leaves their employment and moves to a new job, they'll insist on implementing your technology. They'll tell their friends and colleagues. If you lose one of those six customers, you still have $50/mo coming in. That becomes even more clear when you start thinking about 50 customers at $10/mo versus one $500/mo customer. (I'm not saying $10 is the right number)

I'd also argue that there's a difference between a trial and a free account. If I'm thinking of using this service for some business use case, I personally am not going to let my mind be creative about really thinking how your service can intertwine with my needs if it's just a trial account. I'm not going to invest my time into something ephemeral. But, if there's a free service that I can actually test with a customer and use for a few weeks without that ephemeral feeling, you're starting that relationship building early. Free accounts will absolutely cause you to lose money, which is why it takes testing and analysis to determine the right balance. But if you're actually charging $60/month to send 650 texts, you're already making a profit of 90% after SMS fees and card processing charges.

jmhnilbog4• 13 years ago

SMS-based stuff is also wonderfully simple to develop alternate front-ends for. Twitter, email, web apps, or a command-line REST API.

BWStearns3• 13 years ago

Hey guys, I was looking for something like this for a while (search ended a few weeks ago, sorry), but the pricing does seem a little steep. I'm working for a small firm (<60ppl), and while we have a pretty good budget for tools, this'd be a bit much for the ROI. One application I can see as being really useful is polling. I'd reply to a text more readily than talk to a pollster. Also, it'd be really good for getting information from populations in the developing world since they're infrastructure poor but SMS penetration is increasing. Wicked cool site and best of luck. If we have another use case for you guys I'll see if we can use it.

jknightco• 13 years ago

Good job on the launch! I'll second what jeremymcanally said: the pricing seems absolutely out of control. Other than that, its an interesting concept. Best of luck to you guys.

A couple of UI problems I noticed:

I keep my secondary monitor vertical—which makes your banner image look like this: http://imgur.com/3MGDYel,sxRuvJY#0

Also, the text on the first section below the banner clips a bit: http://imgur.com/3MGDYel,sxRuvJY#1 (but only on my vertical screen).

zekenie15• 13 years ago

Good catch! How much do you think we need to worry about vertical monitors?

jaytaylor• 13 years ago

How is this different from SendHub[1]?

[1] https://www.sendhub.com/

hackerkira7• 13 years ago

We allow users to design an interactive conversation with branching logic. Sendhub focuses more on marketing through unidirectional texting. We focus on use cases where bidirectional information exchange is valuable.

VLM2• 13 years ago

I would propose a counterargument for those claiming the price is too high... for those still texting in 2013, less than 10 cents per text is a pretty good deal. Before I got my smartphone I was paying 25 cents per individual text, or I could have paid $15/month to have "unlimited" service but the real world limit was perhaps two or three per month for a cost of perhaps $5/text. These prices are why people don't use texting/sms anymore. Which is a problem for scaling...

dkrich2• 13 years ago

These prices are why people don't use texting/sms anymore.

Huh? I honestly don't know a single person (other than my parents) who don't use texting as their primary medium of communication between phones. It's easy, it's reliable, it removes the possibility of awkward or lengthy conversations.

What makes you think nobody texts anymore?

VLM2• 13 years ago

Must be come cultural thing due to local network effect. My wife exclusively uses facebook on her phone as do all her friends. For two way conversations I exclusively talk on the phone.

austenallred• 13 years ago

Forgive me if I'm hyper-critical about the marketing.

The first thing anyone sees about your company is: "Texting for education, health, advertising, and much more. Start the conversation." What does that even mean? I want to understand what your product does, and more importantly how it can help me. "education health, advertising and much more" are completely random use cases, and are confusing and distracting. This is the first thing a customer sees; a lot won't even scroll down past that line. It has to make sense.

I would say you should move up the "Software that engages large groups in automated texting" up, but that's a description of what you do, not how it helps me. It really should say something like "Engage your audience in automated, responsive texting conversations in "x" clicks." Something like that. It's still off, I don't know how you'd convey that you make it easy, but that's what you're getting after. The benefit to me as a user would be easily engaging my audience in automated, responsive texting conversations. In fact maybe that's it. "Easily engage your audience in automated, responsive SMS conversations." Massage it. Don't tell me what you do, tell me what you can do for me.

Just some friendly advice. I wish you the best of luck!

dkrich2• 13 years ago

Completely agree. I read through it all and it seems like a great idea but really bad copy.

I think services like this that have real but somewhat complex use cases can compress a large amount of info into a short, interesting message by using a use-case or ideally a short video that describes a sample use case and how the product solves the problem. Basically exactly what Dropbox used to have on their landing page.

zekenie15• 13 years ago

Thanks! That's awesome advice.

jonstjohn• 13 years ago

Agree, all I saw was texting for education (quick scan which most people do) and didn't really get it.

samstave2• 13 years ago

...a lot won't even scroll down past that line.

It really sucks that this is being reinforced. I read the tag line and was like "ok" -- but then I watched the demo movie of setting up the ITTT text tree and thought it was pretty bad ass.

People need to stop being lazy and actually expend a small amount of effort to understand something.

Its a sad state that everyone expects every single piece of information spoon fed to them.

leoedin• 13 years ago

Why should I (or anyone else) spend 5 minutes (or about 1/50 of my free time today) figuring out what someone's product does? I don't care about every web app. Most of them are entirely useless to me. The likelihood is, this one is as well.

Is it really, actually, sad that everyone who clicks a link on Hacker News doesn't spend 5 minutes watching a video to figure out what a web app even does? I think we should celebrate the fact that most people live busy lives doing things that matter to them.

If you force your potential customers to do research to figure out what you do you're going to lose most of the people who may actually use your service but couldn't figure out what you do in the 20 seconds they devoted to your site. It's the lowest of the low hanging fruit.

varunkho• 13 years ago

"a consultant hired to build an in-house CRM wouldn't pitch "Our CRM is going to be easy to use", they'd pitch "Your sales team will close more deals in less time when using our tool."

Sadly, we product people often get hung up on the feature set of our product. No matter how many times we repeat "Features do not sell software. Benefits sell software.", we often revert to implementation details when pressed for why customers should care about our apps. And when we start thinking in terms of benefits, we pick bad, non-specific, frilly benefits, like "Easy to use" and "Sleekly designed." Does anyone ever try to sell software as being hard to use and clunky?" "

- patio11

specialist2• 13 years ago

Agreed. This is a really neat idea with a compelling implementation.

But instead of trying to describe the service (tech), I'd choose a catchy name (textback, textpong, pongtext) and show by example. People will grok it once they see it.

Identify a handful of use cases. Hope that one hits the mark. Run like hell.

Here's some of the ways I could imagine people using it.

- My chiropractor, hairdresser, mechanic wants to confirm an appointment.

- My chiro, etc needs to cancel, resched, etc.

- I'm on a wait list for time sensitive goods like flights, concert tickets, restaurant reservations or close out of cupcakes and vendors needs to confirm transaction, first come first serve (first right of refusal) style.

- I have a periodic donation to my favorite charity (or campaign contribution) and they want to do another "ask" (for more money). I'd like to respond, something like "thanks for asking, here's $100, please ask again in 6 months".

- Real time ad hoc game shows. It's trivia night at the local pub. Send a text to the game host to join. (Hmmm. This is a great idea. Yours, for free.)

Any way. I'm sure there's zillions of use cases. And there's at least a few customers who will pay to scratch an itch.

Best of luck to the OP.

gyardley• 13 years ago

So, if I set up a back-and-forth conversation where I asked five questions and got sent five responses, would that count as one text or ten texts towards the monthly limit?

I can think of a case or two where the pricing might make sense. But if we're really being honest, I'd probably just use the service to test my assumptions and prove out the model. Then, if the numbers looked good, I'd do the Twilio integration myself to save a little money and remove the additional dependency.

This is probably exactly the wrong group of people to ask about pricing, though, because many of us know what Twilio costs and can do the integration ourselves. It's the normal business owners who'll think your product is black magic.

hackerkira7• 13 years ago

I think you're absolutely right about the HN audience. In terms of your question, it would be ten texts, so we count texts bidirectionally.

Hopefully you're right about business owners. We anticipate that they'll see the value. Trext is designed to make SMS app creation accessible to non-programers.

ajiang• 13 years ago

I like these types of businesses. Simple, useful technology for which the success of the business depends almost entirely on the grit and hustle of the team. Your greatest asset will be a killer sales team. All the comments on this page about pricing and "oh I could do this in a weekend" are not as relevant to your business because for the majority of your sales, your customers won't even KNOW the product they're looking for. They have a problem for which there are many kinds of solutions to. Your job is to sell them this type of solution. If this type of solution is less expensive compared to other types of solutions, you'll get the sale before your competitors (clones or otherwise) ever hear the letters RFP.

TL;DR: Get a great sales team

kamakazizuru• 13 years ago

not sure what it does..

k-mcgrady• 13 years ago

As others have said you need to make it much more clear what the product does. I understand immediately once I scroll down but the tag line "Texting for education, health, advertising, and much more. Start the conversation." tells me nothing.

> "Texting is already seen as more personal than email"

This is true but I don't think it's a plus for your product. Personally I despise getting texts from companies asking me questions and replying back to me, precisely because it's personal and unexpected. I don't want that kind of interaction from a business. It's an invasion of my personal life (ok a bit dramatic, I know).

Have you done much research on this? I'd be interested to know what you discovered.

zekenie15• 13 years ago

We don't have awesome data on this. But, we're working on it. Personally, I think it really depends if the texter wants the interaction. It can have great utility or be somewhat annoying.

volume• 13 years ago

I didn't read the copy in the first section and instead scanned over to the video/demo. Maybe lead off with that or place it higher on the page.

... or integrate the step 1/2/3 into the animated demo to save on web page real estate.

...but also not something that's just a video capture of your desktop.

Also, this sounds cool for IT Operations like if you integrated with Nagios or PagerDuty.

matthewcford• 13 years ago

Having built an sms/web decision tree application for healthcare information (http://sxt.org.uk), my first question would be are there plans to build in any database searches?

I can see entring each option being tiresome for larger applications.

zekenie15• 13 years ago

We're thinking webhooks would be a good way to achieve this. A texter gets to a node which does a webhook to your server which provides the options or the response. Perhaps some sort of database could be built in the future if we see demand for it.

ForrestN• 13 years ago

Small typo in the phone picture. The text says "its fantastic" when it should say "it's fantastic". Not a big deal obviously, good luck with everything.

zekenie15• 13 years ago

Thanks!

lsiebert• 13 years ago

I think you need some strong narrative examples of use. Show us a user with a problem that you solve. Show us something that a user can use to sell this to their boss.

Alternatively, use testimonials from actual users.

jmhnilbog4• 13 years ago

The tree manager is beautiful. It's the much prettier interface I didn't want to have to build for my educational SMS-based text adventure. All it would need to be ideal for me would be:

* a way to assign 'expected words' in responses, with intelligent dictionary/thesaurus lookups to assist (so a free text response that asks 'where's the meat?' will be handled by the 'where's the beef?' path in the tree)

* a way to add nodes to the tree in real time as responses come in that don't have a valid mapping yet (so someone who attempts something completely bizarre like 'screw bear' can get a custom response)

* a simple way to handle game state, probably in another tree accessible in each node.

zekenie15• 13 years ago

Very interesting! Couple of things. We're actively working on SMS to live chat, which might take care of editing tree in live time.

We've thought about the thesaurus and are thinking of going in that direction in the future, but right now it texts back the possible options. Does this seem good for the moment?

I'm not 1000% clear on your third bullet. Are you interested in nodes that you can access from any point in the tree, or are you interested in nodes that transfer you to another tree?

jmhnilbog4• 13 years ago

If live chat responses were auto-saved as new nodes, that would meet my requirements. The goal would be that any new input could be either manually directed to an old node or auto directed to a new node.

Imagine a 'choose your own adventure' book that accepted arbitrary input and could create new paragraphs on the fly. If your input maps to an existing paragraph, you're texted it immediately. If the book never heard of someone trying your input before, you're told to wait a bit and get a response once the book writes it. A very few commands do something special. 'inventory' spits out your current inventory state.

There are a few levels of game state. Characters carry around a small amount of state (alive, healthy, ugly, etc.). Locations carry around some state. (on fire, dark) Other state might be held in a calendar (May 1st, 9:00 am, the world will end) or the world itself. Each 'paragraph' in the imaginary book should be able to look up and/or update any of those states when entered.

Ideally, any input that comes in would be autocorrected and analyzed for parts of speech. If a new noun comes in, it could be compared to nouns mentioned in previous 'paragraphs' to figure out what the user meant. 'get brown tote' and 'get brownish bag' should resolve to the same thing.

My third bullet boils down to allowing a user to:

    You are standing before a door.
    > open door

    The door resists your furious pushing and pulling. What's that thing people open     doors with? A....key?
    > get key

    Who said anything about a key? There's no key here.

...later, after finding a key...

    You are standing before a door.
    > open door

    The door rattles, but appears to be locked.
    > use key on door

    *click* The key fit, the door unlocked.

without having to add hundreds of similar nodes at different points in the tree. You'd just make the 'standing before a door' node check 'player.inventory.hasKey' and have it send you the correct 'paragraph'. (Also, 'use key on door' would update 'rooms.boring.door.locked'.)

jonaldomo• 13 years ago

This is cool. How does legal compliance work with people who do not want to be contacted?

hackerkira7• 13 years ago

We're working on some SMS best practices white-papers. Ultimately our customers are responsible for complying with rules and regulations. But, we advise them to provide an opt-out in the first message (text STOP at anytime).

sharmanaetor2• 13 years ago

I just signed up. One suggestion. Improve the "Phonebook" feature. Entering one contact per line? No excel/csv import? And no way to bulk add contacts after a group has been created? Not fun when I need to add 2000 contacts.

zekenie15• 13 years ago

Yes. You are right!

imissmyjuno• 13 years ago

The changing fixed background trend is on the rise.

zbush2• 13 years ago

What's the name for this style of background? I've been looking for how to do it, but I have no idea what to even search for. I'm undecided as to whether it's nice or distracting and want to play with it a bit.

zekenie15• 13 years ago

Do you mean the one behind the video of the screen? Its just the corner of a photo we shot. Its a little out of focus. Not sure what its called.

zbush2• 13 years ago

Sorry, I worded that awfully the first time around. What I meant is the section under "Why Trext" that slowly reveals a different part of the laptop.

Thanks and good luck! :)

TheMakeA• 13 years ago

Do a search for parallax javascript libraries.

zekenie15• 13 years ago

But note that we're just using css

twigger• 13 years ago

Nice to see someone using the free stock photos site posted a while ago.

http://unsplash.com/

Trext – Software that engages large groups in interactive texting

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