Twilio lets a modestly competent web developer program a telecommunications company from their kitchen table in about, oh, six weeks or so. Alternatively, Twlio lets a modestly competent web developer take an existing app and add voice/SMS features to it in about a day. (Have a social site? Want to do SMS notifications when something important happens? You can implement that in four hours.)
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:
"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. ;)
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.
>> 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. :-)
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!
Hi - and thank you sincerely for the points you made.
I am writing this to provide context, not to disagree with you...
Relatively speaking, Voxeo was as cheap 10 years ago as Twilio and Tropo are today.
Everything about this business was more expensive 10 years ago though. The cost of bulk long distance was 8x higher, server costs were about 10x more, bandwidth cost about 10x, server hosting (nothing like EC2 existed) was about 3x more... all costs were much higher then they are today. However, Voxeo's pricing 10 years ago was much lower than every other option available. It was very disruptive.
We did market to reach people like you, that's why we have over 200,000 members in the Voxeo developer community today. And that community is growing faster than it ever has. We clearly didn't reach everyone though.
We have many customers with 100+ employees that started off as 2-3 guys and an idea 10 years ago. The developer focus worked and is the cornerstone of our business. It's how we became the largest platform in the world for telephony apps.
In short the service absolutely was for indie devs, 2-3 man shops and start ups. We had no idea how to sell to large enterprises and service providers back then. It wasn't our DNA. We are developers. I'm a developer. We built it for developers. It was entirely about developers ;)
We took a different approach though. We focused on making standards. We hate lock-in. We hate proprietary. That's why Tropo is an open-source platform. We hate the country-club mentality that you find from legacy vendors like Avaya and Alcatel.
So we lead both the W3C VoiceXML and CCXML standards. Along the way those standards got massive adoption in the enterprise and service provider markets, and the resulting large opportunities pulled us in that direction. We continued to focus on developers, just not at the 100% level we used to.
We created Voxeo Labs to have a new team that focuses 100% on developers. Not to try to "create" a developer focus, but to refine the focus we have always had. That effort is working out great. Like some of the posts here point out, we have our own rabid developers. And we're very quickly getting better at building the fanbase you mention.
Our biggest challenge when it comes to focused simplicity is what we know. We've lived through all the little features and gotchas that need to be addressed as developers scale from the small projects to the larger needs you mention.
When we built Tropo, we included things in it to address those needs and get past those gotchas. We couldn't help ourselves :) The problem is we're solving problems developers don't even know they'll have yet. The end result looks more complex... until it's exactly what you need.
To wrap up, I've never suggested it's just marketing/evangelism. It is also, as you point out, a focused simplicity. We've got some great improvements coming to improve our simplicity while we also continue to provide answers to the feature requirements and challenges we know developers will hit as they scale.
Btw I also hate the webapi vs scripting issue, and I let the Voxeo Labs team know that almost every week ;)
So what else can we do to improve our developer focus and bild that fanbase? How can we get better?
This is pretty disingenuous. It's the same exact two lines of code to do this in Twilio. Yes if you know ahead of time what those two lines are then you can type them in less than four minutes. Same goes for Twilio.
I think what patio11 is referring to is the amount of time it would take for a new developer who's never seen the Twilio API before to get up and running. This includes things like the time to understand the API and documentation. The actual writing of the code is always the easiest part of implementing something.
You make a great point, but it's also somewhat disingenuous ;)
It takes some time to learn how to use a platform.
It takes some time to code on a platform.
The actual writing of code is easiest when you are doing small applications. However, when you are writing larger applications the coding becomes the larger portion of time.
Today it's easier to learn Twilio than Tropo - largely because Tropo needs better documentation (that's coming very soon). However, I will contend that once you know the platform, Tropo is easier - and much more powerful.
I think that's what others are saying in this thread. We've also heard that from customers who have switched from Twilio to Tropo.
None of this should be surprising to anyone. Voxeo has been doing developer-centric telephony for ten years. Voxeo knows all the little problems and challenges that can come up over time and we've built a platform to address them.
Twilio is new to the industry, they came at things with a fresh set of eyes and were able to "re-factor" the simplicity and usability yet again with that fresh perspective.
I say "re-factor" because it's exactly what we did at Voxeo when we started in 1999. The experience reminds me of Battlestar Galactica: All this has happened before, and all this will happen again.
Fair enough. But if it takes 4 hours to figure out how to write these two lines of code, something's wrong. Documentation, complicated and confusing API, hard onramp to get started...
Our goal is to get a developer who knows nothing about telephony from signup to making their first phone calls and text messages in under 5 minutes.
Twilio lets a modestly competent web developer program a telecommunications company from their kitchen table in about, oh, six weeks or so. Alternatively, Twlio lets a modestly competent web developer take an existing app and add voice/SMS features to it in about a day. (Have a social site? Want to do SMS notifications when something important happens? You can implement that in four hours.)