Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Jeff Lawson, CEO of Twilio (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How big is your developer ecosystem? I imagine that part of your strategy is to unleash the whole creativity of the developer ecosystem on your platform.

Jeff Lawson: Yes, we have over 400,000 developers using our platform.

Sramana Mitra: Are these large companies? What’s the mix of that ecosystem?

>>>

Bootstrapping Using Services, Scaling Using Content Marketing: John Sundberg, CEO of Kinetic Data (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What is the ramp of the company? You said you did $100,000 and then $250,000 in the second year.

John Sundberg: We were doubling every year for about six years. Then it went flat for about five years during the economic slowdown. Last year, we did $7.5 million and the year before $5 million.

Sramana Mitra: You have not taken any financing? This is all bootstrapped, right?

>>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Jeff Lawson, CEO of Twilio (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: This is a very good discussion. Give me some more interesting use cases. What other segments or interesting creative ideas are you seeing in your developer ecosystem?

Jeff Lawson: We’ve got pretty much every sharing account including companies like Airbnb and TaskRabbit. In the sharing economy, you use technology to connect supply and demand using the Internet, and now more importantly, using mobile. Part of creating that market involves facilitating the transaction and communication between the buyer and seller. Twilio provides that to all these companies.

>>>

Bootstrapping Using Services, Scaling Using Content Marketing: John Sundberg, CEO of Kinetic Data (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What do you have in terms of the content team? How do you run your content production farm?

John Sundberg: We have consultants and developers. We have product marketing managers. Those are all internal people that we have. We probably have a handful of customers that have done a couple of things too. They might create a piece or we will work with them to create the piece. Then we have an external marketing group that does, quite frankly, a fair amount. When I say a fair amount, what I mean is we’ve been working with them long enough for them to be a part of our company. Therefore, they know our company very well. They know our situation quite well. It’s pretty easy for them to create content that’s relevant, on-message, and accurate.

>>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Jeff Lawson, CEO of Twilio (Part 3)

Jeff Lawson: What Uber has done is, take the communication part of calling a taxi and seamlessly integrate it into the whole experience. Communication used to be a standalone activity. Now communication just becomes part of the workflow that you have when you use Uber. We see this in many software companies. In the transportation space alone, you’ve got Uber and Lift. These are all customers of ours who are using communication to provide a great customer experience.

Sramana Mitra: This is a new category of applications. The call center is an old category. You’re replacing other players who have serviced the call center industry for a long time with a more modern architectural offering. >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services, Scaling Using Content Marketing: John Sundberg, CEO of Kinetic Data (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Unfortunately, that’s the problem with enterprise sales cycles. They are just so very long.

John Sundberg: Exactly. I did so many demos of the software to them. It was ridiculous. In one of the demos I did for them, they had people from all over the world call. I had given a 1-800 number. The phone bill alone that I had to pay was $3,000 for this demo. It was an interesting learning lesson for me. 1-800 numbers are not a good idea. If the company doesn’t have enough money to pay you to call, they don’t have enough money for software. I got rid of that 1-800 number six months after that.

Sramana Mitra: That’s a decision I made too.

>>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Jeff Lawson, CEO of Twilio (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Given that your primary positioning is that you are replacing hardware-based call center solution with a software and cloud-based call center solution, whom are you replacing in terms of vendors?

Jeff Lawson: It’s the typical hardware-centric companies like Cisco or Via. These are people who are trying to sell you a monolithic, typically hardware, but certainly on-premise stack.

Sramana Mitra: The primary functionality there is this call routing for call centers that needed hardware so far?

>>>

Bootstrapping Using Services, Scaling Using Content Marketing: John Sundberg, CEO of Kinetic Data (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How did you go around that problem?

John Sundberg: We took the product and we broke it up into a whole bunch of smaller pieces. That big suite application had a survey application, scheduling application, workflow application, and form generation system. We broke them into smaller pieces so that we could then add in a complementary way. They had their existing pieces and it’s easier for us to sell a survey capability to add to their existing system. We effectively made a whole bunch of applications that were add-on in nature rather than core in nature.

>>>