Twilio
I was talking with someone yesterday about some of my favorite startups. One that I mentioned was Twilio - I recently used it for one of my small projects and because they appear to have gotten quite a bit of press at SXSW. In addition to what I think is a really cool product, I think Twilio has a very solid business model.
As what I’m going to call an “API-as-a-Service” (along with SimpleGeo and others), Twilio’s main goal should be to attract as many developers as possible and make them dependent on Twilio’s service. I think there are two things that Twilio is doing that do this very well for them - first is their free (but completely functional) trial and second is their aggressive developer relations.
Twilio offers a credit of $30 to any developer who signs up to use Twilio - without providing a credit card or anything. This is good for 3,000 minutes of inbound calls, 1,500 minutes of outbound calls, or 1,500 SMS/text messages. For my little project, I’ve only used up 7¢ so far. So a developer can write, test, and start their service without even giving Twilio a credit card number. By the time a developer nears this $30 limit, they should have a functional service with quite a few users already. The developer will essentially be forced to start paying Twilio to continue offering their service to their users. And Twilio has a business model from the get-go - charging the developer per request to their API. Twilio won’t have to go through the same pain other free web services are going through in trying to find a revenue model after amassing a large userbase. They have the revenue model in place already.
Twilio also has a really solid developer relations team (person?). I received at least three emails from Danielle at Twilio offering to help me with anything I needed after signing up. This obviously took some time and effort and was very nice of them to offer me so much help. Additionally, Twilio’s website a lot of sample code and even a gallery of apps built using Twilio complete with case studies from some pretty big names. As you can probably tell from all this flattery, I really like Twilio - as a service and as a company.
