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Riley
p/rileyMailChimp for SMS
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Kat Manalac

Riley - MailChimp for SMS. Dashboard and API for triggering SMS.

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Dashboard and API for triggering SMS. No credit card needed, no contracts. Free for first 500 messages.

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Guillaume Bardet
Congrats on the launch, it seems interesting and well executed! Curious to know how you feel about spammers using the platform? Are you guys watching this and removing access if it needs to be?
Daniel Ahmadizadeh
Maker
@guillaumebardet We actually got hit with a spammer in the first few weeks! To mitigate against it, we're getting alerted via slack of each text in a campaign that is going out. This has helped both with reviewing to make sure all campaigns are legitimate but also offer users feedback on how they can improve their campaigns. Not a permanent solution to address spam but since the volume of campaigns daily is still small, this helps for now. Thanks for the question!
Guillaume Bardet
@danthevc That sounds like a good solution for now, glad you guys are paying attention to it. Wishing you both the best with this project!
Daniel Ahmadizadeh
Maker
@guillaumebardet Thanks man! If you have any feedback for the site and/or product, I'm all ears. :) Have an awesome rest of the week.
Nigel Figueiredo
Can you give me a one sentence, on why to use your product vs Twilio?
Daniel Ahmadizadeh
Maker
@nigelfig Sure thing! Thanks for the question, Nigel. In one sentence: Riley allows you to, unlike Twilio, easily create drip campaigns for different types of leads and a dashboard to reply back to them. In more than one sentence: Twilio is a great product, we think, for developers to trigger SMS into their applications workflow. We use them to fire off the texts within Riley as a matter of fact! We have a web and mobile dashboard to make it easier to continue to engage and organize the leads. Is that helpful? Thanks!
Daniel Ahmadizadeh
Maker
Hi ProductHunt family! :) 7 YC applications, a YC batch, huge growth, a raise, high churn, and we're here! The evolution continues. We're posting on ProductHunt today to test a hypothesis: Are small businesses and startups engaging with new and existing customers effectively enough? Are leads and tasks falling through the cracks? The problem that we have noticed is that automated messaging, without human intervention at the right times, gives minimal return. Example: If a lead replies to an email or a text, or calls your company, what is their journey? We're still trying to validate this thing so pumped to get your raw feedback! Our bigger vision is to build tools that will help small businesses and startups to guide their users towards the "happy paths". The road to acquiring them, to activation, to retention, revenue (they gotta pay yo!) and all the way to referral. Cool stat: We use our own product to cold drip SMS 400 real estate agents daily (to get them to use our product) and within the first hour of the text getting sent, we get over 100 replies! Of those, about 30 are interested to use our product (and this required almost no sales effort!). We're now starting to add logic to automatically categorize the replies and rules to auto-respond to certain replies. We also sent SMS to users who did not become "activated" users (AKA never created a campaign). We texted 295 users and +35% responded within the first hour and we were able to get over half of them to become activated that day. How can a small business or startup provide exceptionally personalized touchpoints throughout the customer journey across different "happy paths" as they scale? We're starting with SMS and keeping the product agnostic in terms of which part of the funnel you are looking to optimize for. Giving teams superpowers to handle more customers, at the right times, with less management overhead is a goal of ours. Rather than the linear growth of your sales team, what if one rep could do the work of 10? Rip us apart. Let us know what you think and I'll be 1000% transparent right back. :)
Shreyaa Ratra
@danthevc Hi Daniel, Big fan of YC companies :) Do you target only real estate and SaaS companies as of now ?
Daniel Ahmadizadeh
Maker
@shreyaa_ratra Hi Shreyaa! Thanks for the question. As of now, we're candidly still figuring out what industries find the most value of SMS. Our thought is that companies that target consumers (anything from a restaurant to a SAAS company that is in the insurance space) will be potential good fits. However, we have seen a few requests for SMS triggers for reminders to pay, surveys, etc. so still figuring it out. Hoping to use this ProductHunt release to learn as much as we can! Any applications that come to mind?
Kevin Henry
@danthevc I feel like you should already know this, but you should certainly disclose to potential customers that in order to send automated texts like this you are required by law (TCPA) to have written consent opt in to receive text messages. It seems like if you are using it yourself to cold message realtors in a drip campaign as you call it (which sounds automated to me) then you are violating the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA).
Daniel Ahmadizadeh
Maker
@kevinleehenry Thanks for the feedback! Will make things more transparent and all the best with your SMS venture as well.
Anna Martirosyan
Congratulations on the launch! It seems like a great product!
Daniel Ahmadizadeh
Maker
@anna_martirosyan Thank you for the kind words!
Ryan Bednar
What have you learned about targeting real estate companies as customers?
Daniel Ahmadizadeh
Maker
@ryanbed Individual agents are not a good market to focus on. We've learned that over 80% of them stop being full time agents within 3yrs of getting their licenses. Teams, particularly those with greater than 10 agents, with high ad spends are a good niche. Overall though, they have incredibly fragmented workflows.
Riley Walz
Nice name! 😃Also interested to see how you've pivoted from an SMS apartment search engine to actually sending texts as a service. Cheers!
Daniel Ahmadizadeh
Maker
@w Thanks, Riley! Your name rocks (though our Riley was named after Steph Curry's daughter, Riley Curry!). Will make a quick video to go into the evolution of the business in more depth. :)
Riley Walz
@danthevc Cool! Also just noticed a mistake on your landing page, on the phone iPhone conversation at the top right of the page, shouldn't the name be Mike not Jane? Otherwise she'd be texting herself... :)
Daniel Ahmadizadeh
Maker
@w Ah great catch! Will fix. :) Excited to see what you're working on as well! High school and grinding - love it!
Evelyn Yu
It looks like a cool and useful tool. Wish this tool existed when I was managing a 5000-people event.... Evelyn from Jobalaya
Daniel Ahmadizadeh
Maker
@evelynyu Hi Evelyn! Thanks a lot for the comment. How would you have envisioned using us for an event at that size? What was the pain or frustrating part of connecting with the attendees?
Evelyn Yu
@danthevc Hi! So our team was hosting a running event, in which a lot of the attendees were first-time runner. We did send out reminder email periodically before the event, but I think it would be super helpful to text the final reminder in the morning of the event day. (The event started at 6am so I think a lot of them didn't check emails in the morning and ended up forgetting to bring some stuff required for the event. I think texting serves better when it comes to remind them to bring stuff at the last minute).
Daniel Ahmadizadeh
Maker
@evelynyu That's really cool and helpful! Thanks, Evelyn. So sounds like it would have been great as a one-time SMS. Not something that would be super recurring.
Alexander Smekhov
Congratulations with the launch, seems like a good product for sms marketing
Daniel Ahmadizadeh
Maker
@bitrewards Thanks, Alexander! Are there any applications or examples of use cases that come to mind for you or others? We're still at the learning stage (though the product is live!). Thanks!
Michael Ahdoot
Upvoted. Looks great !
Daniel Ahmadizadeh
Maker
@mikeyahdoot Thanks a lot man! Really appreciate it and enjoy the week.
Afsi Parandian
Awesome company! Congrats!
Daniel Ahmadizadeh
Maker
@afsi_parandian Thank you for the kind words! Is there any particular time that you wish you could send a mass text to your students (example: a reminder) or to the parents of the students regarding anything? Or does your school use something like Classdojo?
Ish Jindal
Hey Daniel! Congrats on the launch. Would love to hear your story about this evolution of the product. On another note, how have you seen SaaS companies leveraging text for follow ups and conversion? We face a challenge that a good percentage of inbound leads don't pick calls even if you call them in the first 5 min. I feel its just because nobody wants to take a call from an unknown number these days. We have been experimenting with sending them a quick text if they don't pick and some of them are responding. So we are doing more of it. Still early but am just thinking if you have seen best practices here. Or may be having an sms drip would be useful here.
Andrea Salini
HI Daniel, I have some dubs about you pricing policy: 199$ for unlimited SMS looks really strange. It is possible to send SMS worldwide or service is limited to USA? thx