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I'm Voxeo's CEO. Thanks for the summary of what Twilio makes possible. What nivertech (who you responded to) knows and was trying to say is this: With Voxeo

I'm Voxeo's CEO. Thanks for the summary of what Twilio makes possible. What nivertech (who you responded to) knows and was trying to say is this: With Voxeo (and others) a competent web developer has been able to create a telecom company in six weeks - or add voice features in less than a day - for ten years now. Voxeo delivered and has grown a completely free web-based telephony developer program since 2000. And since 2000 over 200,000 developers have used Voxeo to do just that. This is the Voxeo developer site in the wayback machine archive from August 19, 2000: http://bit.ly/voxeo-dev-2000 http://bit.ly/voxeo-dev-2000 Quoting that site: "our mission at voxeo community is to make it as easy as possible for web developers, service providers, and enterprises to create and deploy applications for an existing market of 1.5 billion telephone users. existing web developers & services use technologies like Perl, PHP, Cold Fusion, Microsoft ASP and Java Servlets to create web applications for traditional web browsers via HTML. we make it just as easy to use those technologies to create web applications for telephones, using phone markup languages such as VoiceXML, Microsoft WTE, and CallXML." Here's the juicy part: "if you have experience creating web applications, this site will help you create and test your first phone application in less than an hour -- without any new hardware or software." Sound familiar? :) What Twilio has done that's new is use marketing and hype to convince developers they invented something that was invented by others and available for a decade now. The power of hype never ceases to amaze me. To be fair, Twilio also did a great job creating more modern developer documentation and refocusing on simplicity. These are things Voxeo had drifted away from as we grew into "the man". In short, we got distracted by million dollar deals with enterprises and carriers. We've continued to invest in our developer community but things got increasingly complex as we added more and more features and options over time. Our new Voxeo Labs group - and it's Tropo.com service - was created to fix that. We're behind on the evangelism but way ahead on the technology. And I dare say we're getting better at evangelism every week. ;) -Jonathan

mgkimsal 16y ago
If it was really that easy a decade ago why was there no marketing done to reach people like me? Show me pricing lists and contracts from 10 years ago indicating it was cheap as Twilio was 2 years ago. I can't see anything at http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://voxeo.com http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://voxeo.com :( I suspect the infrastructure was there for the 'big boys' and that indie devs and 2-3 man shops who wanted this sort of functionality were ignored in favor of 'enterprise' development shops and projects. OK - rereading your post here - yes, you got 'distracted' by big deals. But it's the focus on getting the basic fundamentals as easy for people to use as possible which has created the Twilio loyalty and fandom they have relative to voxeo/tropo. Twilio has (imo) about a year to add some more features that people are asking for before people jump ship. They should not waste that goodwill and rest on their laurels. But it's going to be easier for them to grow their success with smaller shops and indies in to something larger as those smaller shops and projects grow to larger needs than it is for 'enterprise'-focused groups to prove to the smaller players that they 'get' the independent developer market. You can suggest that this is 'just' marketing/evangelism. I suspect it's a bit more - a focused simplicity on getting a few core things down first rather than trying to offer multiple services on day one. That doesn't appeal to everyone, but I think it's helped more than hurt in Twilio's case. Simply by having more options up front you're forcing people to have to learn a lot more about stuff on your terms when making an evaluation. For example, Tropo's APIs - 'webapi' vs 'scripting'. Huh? What are the differences? I don't find an adequate explanation of the strengths/weaknesses of each model. Both services have their place, but developing a rabid fanbase will serve Twilio better longer term as opposed to pure technical superiority.
- diggz 16y ago
  >> If it was really that easy a decade ago why was there no marketing done to reach people like me? I can speak fairly knowledgeably as I headed up all of Voxeo's developer community and support in the early part of this decade (and as employee #1 and co-founder Voxeo). In a pre-social media world, marketing involved a lot of face-to-face contact, primarily at conferences for developers: Cold Fusion, PHP, ASP etc. We held app contests, live coding demos making people's phones ring, sponsored meetups and conference after parties. (sound familiar?) We were out there...just apparently not at the same ones you were at (sorry). >> Show me pricing lists and contracts from 10 years ago indicating it was cheap as Twilio was 2 years ago. I honestly don't think any exist...not because they were lost, but because we never charged anything back then..nor have we ever charged developers. For production apps, there's no doubt that the cost of transporting data has dropped dramatically in the past 10 years. What we can do for pennies now, cost dimes 10 years ago. Of course, we also had to walk 10 miles to school, in the snow, uphill, both ways ;-) >> But it's the focus on getting the basic fundamentals as easy for people to use as possible which has created the Twilio loyalty and fandom they have relative to voxeo/tropo. You are absolutely correct. There are some things about Tropo that are still overly complex. We're working on that. Fortunately it's easier to simplify features than to add new ones. >> Twilio has (imo) about a year to add some more features that people are asking for before people jump ship. I'd tend to agree. By my estimation (based on how long it took them to burn through their first round of financing) That should be right about the same time their latest round of funding runs out. No time for resting on laurels. :-)
  - mgkimsal 16y ago
    Thanks for the reply :) Whether you charged developers or not, at some point you charged someone for something. While free dev accounts are great, I'm still not going to learn a tool and recommend it to clients without knowing if it's something that they can actually afford. Twilio has made it known from day 1 what the pricing is - whether people liked it or not is a different matter! :) <i>Fortunately it's easier to simplify features than to add new ones.</i> Possibly in tropo's case it may be. That's not always the case - I would say not even usually the case with software. Witness MSOffice - much easier to add new features than to simplify the interface. The 'ribbon' effort pissed off as many people as it helped. :) Don't give us a tropo 'ribbon' equivalent please!

mgkimsal 16y ago

If it was really that easy a decade ago why was there no marketing done to reach people like me? Show me pricing lists and contracts from 10 years ago indicating it was cheap as Twilio was 2 years ago. I can't see anything at http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://voxeo.com http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://voxeo.com :( I suspect the infrastructure was there for the 'big boys' and that indie devs and 2-3 man shops who wanted this sort of functionality were ignored in favor of 'enterprise' development shops and projects. OK - rereading your post here - yes, you got 'distracted' by big deals. But it's the focus on getting the basic fundamentals as easy for people to use as possible which has created the Twilio loyalty and fandom they have relative to voxeo/tropo. Twilio has (imo) about a year to add some more features that people are asking for before people jump ship. They should not waste that goodwill and rest on their laurels. But it's going to be easier for them to grow their success with smaller shops and indies in to something larger as those smaller shops and projects grow to larger needs than it is for 'enterprise'-focused groups to prove to the smaller players that they 'get' the independent developer market. You can suggest that this is 'just' marketing/evangelism. I suspect it's a bit more - a focused simplicity on getting a few core things down first rather than trying to offer multiple services on day one. That doesn't appeal to everyone, but I think it's helped more than hurt in Twilio's case. Simply by having more options up front you're forcing people to have to learn a lot more about stuff on your terms when making an evaluation. For example, Tropo's APIs - 'webapi' vs 'scripting'. Huh? What are the differences? I don't find an adequate explanation of the strengths/weaknesses of each model. Both services have their place, but developing a rabid fanbase will serve Twilio better longer term as opposed to pure technical superiority.

diggz 16y ago
>> If it was really that easy a decade ago why was there no marketing done to reach people like me? I can speak fairly knowledgeably as I headed up all of Voxeo's developer community and support in the early part of this decade (and as employee #1 and co-founder Voxeo). In a pre-social media world, marketing involved a lot of face-to-face contact, primarily at conferences for developers: Cold Fusion, PHP, ASP etc. We held app contests, live coding demos making people's phones ring, sponsored meetups and conference after parties. (sound familiar?) We were out there...just apparently not at the same ones you were at (sorry). >> Show me pricing lists and contracts from 10 years ago indicating it was cheap as Twilio was 2 years ago. I honestly don't think any exist...not because they were lost, but because we never charged anything back then..nor have we ever charged developers. For production apps, there's no doubt that the cost of transporting data has dropped dramatically in the past 10 years. What we can do for pennies now, cost dimes 10 years ago. Of course, we also had to walk 10 miles to school, in the snow, uphill, both ways ;-) >> But it's the focus on getting the basic fundamentals as easy for people to use as possible which has created the Twilio loyalty and fandom they have relative to voxeo/tropo. You are absolutely correct. There are some things about Tropo that are still overly complex. We're working on that. Fortunately it's easier to simplify features than to add new ones. >> Twilio has (imo) about a year to add some more features that people are asking for before people jump ship. I'd tend to agree. By my estimation (based on how long it took them to burn through their first round of financing) That should be right about the same time their latest round of funding runs out. No time for resting on laurels. :-)
- mgkimsal 16y ago
  Thanks for the reply :) Whether you charged developers or not, at some point you charged someone for something. While free dev accounts are great, I'm still not going to learn a tool and recommend it to clients without knowing if it's something that they can actually afford. Twilio has made it known from day 1 what the pricing is - whether people liked it or not is a different matter! :) <i>Fortunately it's easier to simplify features than to add new ones.</i> Possibly in tropo's case it may be. That's not always the case - I would say not even usually the case with software. Witness MSOffice - much easier to add new features than to simplify the interface. The 'ribbon' effort pissed off as many people as it helped. :) Don't give us a tropo 'ribbon' equivalent please!