SendHub (YC W12) raises $3M Series A, Launches Attachments for SMS

http://techcrunch.com/2013/09/04/sendhub-secures-3-million-series-a-to-be-the-mobile-alternative-to-business-phone-systems/

by ashrust • 13 years ago

48 19 13 years ago

techcrunch.com

jansen• 13 years ago

Fantastic, congrats to Ash, Garrett and team!

ashrust7• 13 years ago

Thanks Jan.

josh26002• 13 years ago

Great to see more investment in Telecom.

This space is red hot right now :). Congrats Ash!

ashrust7• 13 years ago

Thanks Josh.

omarish• 13 years ago

Great work SendHub team!

ashrust7• 13 years ago

Thanks Omar - waiting on hearing your news too.

colinsidoti• 13 years ago

Are you actually sending arbitrary files over SMS? How does that work?

My thought is it would be technically possible over MMS, but most default messaging apps wouldn't play nice with them. Also getting into the network is a huge challenge.

ashrust7• 13 years ago

MMS is coming soon but the network operators aren't always easy to deal with. Right now, we put a link in the sms, that way you can send any file type.

josh26002• 13 years ago

Getting an MMSC exposed from a network operator is a nigh-impossible task (source: I'm a telecom junkie).

The MMSC infrastructure is unnecessarily complex and, for some ungodly reason, is seen as a proprietary network advantage. Your best bet is to make an end-run around the carriers by partnering with an aggregator like Acision (or someone smaller if you lack the volume).

MMS is one of the most difficult things to get carriers to expose :/...

cristinamm• 13 years ago

Great feature!

chriscareycode• 13 years ago

Congrats SendHub!

ashrust7• 13 years ago

Thanks Chris.

sologoub2• 13 years ago

First of, Congrats on the round!

The article provides some interesting numbers to chew on: - 150,000 users - 15,000 business (let's call them customers) - $50,000 in monthly revenue - 6 lines average per customer.

Impressive numbers to backup traction! But they also tell the story of the freemium model very well.

Sendhub website lists cheapest paid plan at $25/month/line. This means that at most, they have 2,000 paid lines (based on $50k monthly revenue) and in the neighborhood of 400 paid customers.

These are still very good numbers and nothing to frown upon, but if you compare that to the massive adoption of the free accounts (150k users), it's very telling of how difficult it is to convert people from free to paid.

ashrust7• 13 years ago

Yep, pretty close. We used to offer individual accounts - those folks were hard to convert, hence the large number of free users.

sologoub2• 13 years ago

Thank you for validating the pseudo-math :)

And, yeah, converting any free accounts to paid is an achievement in and of itself. Best of luck in growing the company!

kolev2• 13 years ago

$25 is a way too much. I'd pay no more than $9.95/mo for it and with higher limits.

ashrust7• 13 years ago

We used to offer a $10 plan but we found the margins were very low. $25 allows us to provide great support and very few users need more than the limits on the plan.

old-gregg• 13 years ago

Woo! Congrats guys!

SendHub (YC W12) raises $3M Series A, Launches Attachments for SMS

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