Episode 63

Twilio / Jeff Lawson / Evan Cooke / John Wolthuis

Twilio Founders talk about starting up, staying lean, building community and driving the passion of your user base

 

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Twilio (@twilio) provides a REST-based web-service API to build out scalable, reliable communications apps that make and receive phone calls.

With Twilio you can easily make inbound/outbound calls. They have a surprisingly simple API. You can build to scale with their pay-as-you-go pricing model and have the peace of mind of no contract, and their pricing is just 3ยข/minute for domestic (US) calls.

Delicious Links: http://delicious.com/web20show/ep63

I spoke with their Founders:

They all come from a technical background and as you will hear in the podcast they developed the service to “scratch their own itch”.

Using Twilio’s simple API, customers build sales automation systems, order inquiry lines, CRM solutions, call routing apps, phone trees, appointment reminders, custom voicemail apps, and a whole lot more.

We talked about:

  • Their service and where the idea of the Twilio service came from
  • How they remain connected and communicate with their development community
  • Netbook Mondays, where they blog about the dev community and the weekly contest they support
  • How their LinkedIn Network for developers helps their devs stay in touch and get new business
  • Their Google Map: Apps on a Map
  • The various services they use to keep their business lean and agile
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  • Another (related) service that's worth looking at is Cloudvox (http://cloudvox.com). Their API is incredibly easy and they have great support and a bunch of examples with different languages.

    Anyway, just thought I'd mention it :-)
  • Good one. Thank you for mentioning and linking out to Cloudvox Ryan. I hadn't heard of that them. It's always good to have more than one option. Though I haven't had a chat with them like I have with the Founders of Twilio.

    One of the things that I liked best about Twilio's Founders was how important developer happiness is to them.

    Since I signed up, I have gotten a 2-3 very useful follow-up emails from both Jeff and Danielle on getting up to speed. I was pretty impressed with this, even though the emails seem to be canned (pre-planned). It makes me feel like they value me as well as their time.
  • Cool. Yes, developer happiness is crucial for a service that thrives on its API, and the guys at Cloudvox take that very, very seriously, too. I can't speak highly enough about them. They're super smart, nice, and down to earth. I know you already have this show that may count for the "telephony in the cloud" episode, but the Cloudvox guys are incredibly passionate about what they do. Might be worth looking them up.

    And thanks for pushing forward on these episodes. It's great to get insight into the minds of some successful developers and such. It's nice to have the show back :-)
  • Thank you for saying so. I'm glad to be back. Some awesome stuff in store for the new year.

    I'll keep my eye on Cloudvox and see if I can fit them into a future show. Maybe a panel show on "Telephony in the Cloud" with the folks at Twilio, Cloudvox and others...
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