Hi HN! We're Parthi and Kunal from FounderPhone (<a href="https://founderphone.com" rel="nofollow">https://founderphone.com</a>). FounderPhone is a shared customer support inbox for SMS and calls in Slack.<p>We've built and shipped 7 products recently and if there's one thing we've learned, it's that your personal relationship with your customer is your secret weapon as a startup. Having customers email support@company.com or message a bot via Intercom doesn't feel personal. People are skeptical they will ever get a response. We've had a lot of success giving out our phone number to the top customers we really care about and telling them to text us whenever something comes up. Apparently, lots of great founders like Patrick from Stripe did this for their VIP customers while growing their startups.<p>The problem is that a single SMS inbox isn't sustainable at scale. So we hacked together a solution for ourselves where we made Slack a shared inbox. When a customer texts or calls me, our team can also see the messages and incoming calls. We can discuss how best to handle the issue in Slack and then anyone can respond via text. For calls, anyone available can redirect calls to their own number. From the customer's perspective, they're just texting a single number. They're not frustrated with messy tickets or being routed to 3 different people. They will always read your responses because it's in their SMS inbox instead of being lost amongst their 20,000 unread emails.<p>This is just the start! We're looking into building a whole suite of software to make customer support feel both personal and immediate. We're making an integration with Segment and Sentry to alert you when a customer has an issue so you can reach out to them about it before they complain to you.<p>Text our FounderPhone (510) 756-2522 with your name or email founders@founderphone.com if you have any questions. Thanks for checking us out!
I'm a <i>little</i> sorry to rain on your parade, but this seems like you're turning a personal contact back into a normal support system. "Hey, here's my direct contact info" works <i>because</i> it's not "our team can also see the messages and incoming calls. We can discuss how best to handle the issue in Slack and then anyone can respond via text". You've just reinvented a support phone number, and as soon as customers actually try to interact with it the whole charade will collapse.
I think this is a great idea. It seems like it’s getting a lot of resistance due to the dishonesty.<p>On the website it looks like the message is purposefully withholding the information that A) the text went to everyone, and B) the person who replied wasn’t ‘Richard”<p>But the value is the customer received a personal-feeling experience even though it wasn’t actually what they probably thought. And you showed that by having the customer say, “Yo Richard!” as to imply that they had their guard down and were being informal.<p>I could argue that even though it is dishonest (in that withholding information can be regarded as a form of dishonesty), it is still ensuring greater success by creating a perceived personal relationship. And that’s also psychologically beneficial to the customer and their success with whatever product is being supported.<p>It seems like you will have to be very careful in how this experience is portrayed, marketed, and worded to get around the subterfuge aspect.<p>A technology approach could be to have it automatically say, “I forwarded your text to John and he replied “I restarted the server for you. Everything should be working.”<p>You’re in a delicate position where the value in your startup is due to a psychological perception that’s based in withholding information. You’ll need to trot down that path very carefully so that you still can maximize the psychological benefits to the customer while minimizing the appearance of deceit.<p>But I think it definitely provides for a great customer experience.
Neat product, we rolled something similar to this using Slack where we manage the phone system, etc. I especially like how you can reply within Slack and text back the customer. Seems like your major problem with this startup is usage costs as text messages and phone calls can quickly add up. We are a small team of ~7 people and our monthly Twilio expense is twice your price here. I.e., not priced high enough.<p>I might prefer this product with a slight change: instead of trusting you my business phone number, maybe I could simply point my Twilio endpoint to your servers? That way you are not soaking up passthrough costs of customer usage; plus, I don't have to worry about getting my number from you after all my customers are familiar with that number. Anyways, it's a neat concept. I have provided our phone system to other businesses and can totally see the value in this product.
> We've built and shipped 7 products recently and if there's one thing we've learned, it's that your personal relationship with your customer is your secret weapon as a startup. Having customers email support@company.com or message a bot via Intercom doesn't feel personal.<p>Agree with the personal relationship with the customer part. But if the email is <realname>@company.com, wouldn’t that be personal? I do see giving a phone number as way more involved with the customer.<p>> From a customer’s perspective, they’re just texting a single number. They’re not frustrated with messy tickets or being routed to 3 different people.<p>Isn’t that what happens here in the backend — some messy ticketing system in Slack (which I gather isn’t a ticketing system) and several people handling responses for the same customer/issue and a potential lack of coherence in responses?<p>I don’t mean to pick on you. I really see value in providing a phone number to customers and telling them they can text or call anytime. But somewhere your marketing message seems a bit off to me, and doesn’t make sense on the points you’re railing against.<p>All the best!
Hey, man! I run a small web agency, and deal with A LOT of clients texting me and my account managers.<p>Hate on here aside, I think this is a solid idea. Keep up the good fight.
This is cool. You may already know this but Talkbin [0] was building this for physical locations back in 2010/2011. I remember them having a "text the owner" sign in Coupa Cafe off of University Ave.<p>They were acquired by google 5 months into it [1] and after that I remember seeing the signs in Crate and Barrels for a while, then google shut them down after dwindling usage [2]. I always thought it was a cool idea.<p>This was all pre-slack and the focus was physical locations vs. other tech founders so will be interested to see if now is the right time vs. then. I've certainly noticed more and more companies relying on text to stay in touch with me from a comms standpoint (HealthIQ comes to mind from recent interactions, but even our doggie day care primarily communicates with me via text now).<p>[0] <a href="https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/talkbin" rel="nofollow">https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/talkbin</a>
[1] <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2011/04/25/google-acquires-talkbin-a-feedback-platform-for-businesses-thats-only-five-months-old/" rel="nofollow">https://techcrunch.com/2011/04/25/google-acquires-talkbin-a-...</a>
[2] <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2014/06/28/google-shuts-down-talkbin-a-feedback-platform-for-businesses-that-it-acquired-in-2011/" rel="nofollow">https://techcrunch.com/2014/06/28/google-shuts-down-talkbin-...</a>
I built something like this for my own texting needs, though it was app-based. The biggest killer is that Twilio doesn't yet support group texting.<p>Unsure how many people will attempt to group text a company founder, but that part ends badly. It's surprisingly good for MMS/etc handling.
We currently use Front to achieve something very similar:<p>A few questions:<p>- Do you support MMS (photos and videos)?<p>- Do you support creating auto-reminders to follow up with specific customers?<p>- Can you set up an autoresponder that responds when users sends a specific key message? Eg if the customer sends "Start" then can you autoreply with a canned message?
Or, if you don't want to use Slack, but still want to use SMS to communicate with your customers, check out <a href="https://www.switchboard.chat" rel="nofollow">https://www.switchboard.chat</a>.<p>This use case really resonated with folks in the real estate and educational spaces.
Congrats on launching!<p>How does this compare to something like OpenPhone (<a href="https://www.openphone.co/" rel="nofollow">https://www.openphone.co/</a>)?
I still don’t understand the value in this. How is this different from Apple Facebook Zendesk et al. contact platforms which provide certain level of anonymity to the customer ? Also is this a matter of simple Twilio to Slack hook integration ?