Comments on: Part two: the business of SMS Couponing

By: Jonathan Wegener

Jonathan Wegener — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 00:32:35 +0000

Hey Paul,
Thanks for the comment. Glad to hear there's an upper limit to the amount a service has to pay for text messages.

I'd love to hear more about how you're scaling the obstacles and difficulties of being a hyperlocal company if you're willing to share dirty details

Thanks,
Jonathan

By: Paul Rosenfeld

Paul Rosenfeld — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 21:40:27 +0000

Jonathan I do love how you've thought deeply about this. We're fanminder.com by the way, all about mobile marketing. I also know the Mobile Spinach guys.

The one big miss in your analysis is the $.03. At about $25,000 per month paid to SMS gateways there is very little or no more variable cost for text messages, depending on the gateway.

And it's true local is tough!

Cheers,
Paul

By: Paul Rosenfeld

Paul Rosenfeld — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 16:40:27 +0000

Jonathan I do love how you've thought deeply about this. We're fanminder.com by the way, all about mobile marketing. I also know the Mobile Spinach guys.

The one big miss in your analysis is the $.03. At about $25,000 per month paid to SMS gateways there is very little or no more variable cost for text messages, depending on the gateway.

And it's true local is tough!

Cheers,
Paul

By: Jonathan Wegener

Jonathan Wegener — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 20:47:40 +0000

What you're missing is how to get anyone to care. How do you get couponees to your site? How do you get couponers to your site? Without a significant number of both there's no value to the site — getting over that critical mass hump would be brutal and take significant upfront investment in marketing efforts.

By: Jackson Stout

Jackson Stout — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 22:18:41 +0000

What about a service that connects businesses (couponers) and couponees. You provide an interface for both couponers and couponees to sign up. Couponers send their coupon to their couponees through your site and pay per sms?

I'm sure there is someone doing this – basically aweber for sms. Surely seems like it scales.

What am I missing? Thanks.

By: Jonathan Wegener

Jonathan Wegener — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 16:16:16 +0000

But could you build a scalable business on the back of it?

By: Ashish

Ashish — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 12:50:15 +0000

Why not use TextMarks.com? The user experience is a tad clunkier than email or using your own shortcode, but it's free.

By: Ron Gejman

Ron Gejman — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 20:13:01 +0000

Interesting. I wasn't running into any limits on AT&T and Verizon on my (albeit limited) reminders sent from http://www.proddr.com (not currently working - I've stopped developing it).

By: Jonathan Wegener

Jonathan Wegener — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 20:11:11 +0000

Hey Ron,
I found that the SMS <-> Email worked well the first time you send an email. But that's it. A second email attempt would be delayed for hours or days. So if there was an upper limit, it seemed to be about, well, one.

Either way, we're talking about a hack, not a true scalable solution. You can't build a VC-backed company on a technology hack like this.

One thing I find really interesting is companies using push notification on the iPhone as a way of getting around SMS fees: http://www.businessinsider.com/aols-aim-iphone-...

By: Ron Gejman

Ron Gejman — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 20:11:05 +0000

Ah, so the way you solve that problem is to only email your users from an email address that is traceable. By this I mean, say you need to SMS a user with user ID 10535. You SMS them from user-10535@yourdomain.com. When they SMS or email you back, the email will go to user-10535@yourdomain.com and you can see exactly who the user was.