Building a startup using Twilio APIs
A Twilio Signal London Recap & How we build our company using Twilio !
tl;dr About a month ago, Rafaëlle and I crossed the channel to attend the Twilio Signal London, it was a great event as usual, I can’t wait to be in SF next October ! But in this article, I’d like to deep dive onto our special relation with this amazing company in which we trust and which trust in us !
Let our story begins !
When I started building Les Tontons Livreurs from scratch almost 3 years ago, David, my co-founder, gave me carte blanche on the tech stack and providers I’ll use to build the next billion dollar start-up.
Building a start-up, crafting a platform like our, is kinda like playing with lego. Every programmer, every software engineer, was, in his childhood, a big fan of LEGO, KNEX or even Meccano®.
We all loved this abiliy to build amazing things by assembling little pieces of platic or metal together. Well, building a start-up is exactly the same thing. We try to solve a problem by assembling little pieces of software together.
One of those pieces I love so much, is Twilio created by Jeff Lawson, John Wolthuis & Evan Cooke almost 10 years ago. An amazing US company who provides water clear APIs to leverage communication (from calls to SMS, through task routing and push notifications and even FAX !).
Discovering Twilio
Developers can change the world with a text editor
— Jeff Lawson, Twilio’s CEO and cofounder
Prior to Les Tontons’ amazing journey, during Spring 2012 one of my customer (I used to be an iOS & web consultant) asked me an SMS feature. While at WWDC (The Apple International Developer Conference / San Francisco) I remember this HUUUGE and red billboard about a company who allows to send SMS with ease. It was Twilio !
Few minutes later, I had my AccountSID and my Auth Token, installed the PHP wrapper and with few lines of code and less than 10 minutes coding I ended up with a cool, simple and efficient tool to send SMS. Brilliant !
Twilio’s goal : Make communication easy…
… as typing 10 lines of code.
OK, here if you don’t know how to code, it could be slightly complicated. But for us “coders” had you ever imagine that sending a text could be that simple ?
I don’t want to waste my time (and yours) in demos, to be cristal clear : Twilio is fu***ng easy to use, test them out, you’ll be delighted.
At Les Tonton, we use their APIs for almost everything !
Support & Emergency phone line
Using one of the numbers provided and Slack commands and depending if it’s a mover (we call them Tontons) or a customer, and depending on the hour of the day, we route all the call made to our support phone to the appropriate on-duty operator mobile phone, it allows us to be flexible and to work from home.
Verifying phone numbers
When users fill the phone numbers input, we definitely need to verify them (is it an existing number ?), using Twilio’s Lookup API, we check if the phone exists and if so, then we send a text message with a 6 digits code, in order to be sure that it’s the right user phone number. Clear, simple, easy !
Dispatching missions
Using those SMS, we can inform our Tontons that a Mission is available on their schedule in few minutes/hours. As our drivers are most of the time hitting the road, they can be informed — almost in real time — that something new has been posted and is available.
Keep customer informed
Even with smartphone, our customers may not have access to their email inbox all the time, so what’s the best way to keep them informed of the status of their order (their delivery in our case) ? SMS of course, we always have our cell phone in our pocket. Using Twilio Copilot (a feature which powers SMS delivery with phone number and content intelligence) we’re able to reach anybody from France to Spain, through Belgium, Luxembourg, or Switzerland at scale, with confidence and still with 5 lines of javascript !
Masked numbers (proxy number)
Privacy is one of our top priority, using Twilio, I’ve build a call/sms proxy system. Few hour before the beginning of the Mission, customer and Tonton receive by text a Twilio Phone Number so that one can call/text the other to be aware of detail (precise location, parking spot, truck loading informations…) without the need of sharing their personnal phone number, at the time I built this system, it was one of the most difficult challenge I achieved for this project, not for the algorithm itself, but the phone number’ pool optimisation. And guess what ? 2 years later, Jeff’s company launched this built-in feature.
Push notifications
Dealing with push notifications is really complicated to deal with (device token, SSL certificates, and so on…). Last year, Twilio launched Notify, an API which allows you to reach customers the way they want (SMS, iOS APNS, Android’s FCM/GCM, and soon more) with 8 lines of code, with a (soon arriving) auto-fallback service. Great !
One more thing ?
Twilio just released in developer preview Understand and Studio (see below), once we’ll get access to them, we’ll start to work on really cool feature we have on our notebooks, feel free to follow us on twitter and/or LinkedIn and/or like us on Facebook to keep track of our lastest releases.
Innovation driven culture
I’d like to qualify our startup as innovation driven, but gosh ! Twilio is one of the company I know who, IMHO, innovate the most. Their last tool Studio, allow non-developper to bootstrap a service with Twilio by addinf blocks to a blank sheet, like an IVR, in 15 minutes (It took 3 days to build mine). I can’t wait to test it out !
Last summer, during Signal Conf SF, they release Functions, a great way to host part of your communication script on Twilio’s own servers, this fall they add support for NPM packages, and THAT’S cool. You can now (by example and among others) send a Slack notification when you get a call, really handy.
The consecration : Hall of DOers 2017 (selfish part 🙃)
Twilio has several hundred thousands of customers, from big players (Uber, General Electric, Coca-cola and others) to start-ups (like us), and they filled their IPO, … kinda BIG company. So you easily imagine my surprise when Jeff told me, at their digital executive forum the day before Signal, that he knew our service. We aren’t a big customer with big bills… 🤔
There was definitely a squeletton in the cupboard.
And I was right, during his introduction keynote, our community manger tapped me on the shoulder and whispered me : “Hey ! He’s talking about us…”, What ? When ? Why ? Rafaëlle was right, Jeff introduced our start-up and myself to the Hall of DOers alongside Marc Quinn from CarFinance247, Tom Mullen from DEVLP and Kathleen Corr from NSPCC.
So thank you so much for this consecration, and thank you for what your company & teams allow us to do. Can’t wait to see what you’ll release !
Oh, and yes ! I got a signed Fax Machine ! Collector (less than 20 around the globe ! 😛)
Can’t wait for Signal.2018 ! And of course, I’ll be there !
Next conference we’ll attend : Slush 2017.
And if you don’t know us, at Les Tontons Livreurs we’re building the most innovative bulky item delivery service platform. Using an AI driven algorithm we compute the best price for such a service and we connect you with a Tonton whom help you to move your stuff. In order to thank you for reaching the end of this article, I’d like to offer you a discount ! The first 50 users who’ll use WE-LOVE-TWILIO code, will get 5 € redeem on their first Mission !
And if you liked this article, don’t hesitate to share it ! And spread your love by tapping on the applause 👏🏻 icon below !
PS : If you wonder, No ! I wasn’t paid a penny to make this article, my way of thinking is “delighted customers are the best evangelists you could find”
