I will say I am the exact opposite of your market, I want absolutely nothing like this. In fact I'd prefer iMessage to allow ZERO programmatic interfacing.
While Blooio and Sendblue are more focused on B2C agents and sales, we're more focused on 2-way conversational business use cases such as customer service that require scale and stability.
A few ideas for you guys:
1. Apple already supports iMessage for Business which is intended to cover the use cases you are targeting. But the set up process is ridiculous (for example: https://help.webexconnect.io/docs/wxcc-apple-messages-for-bu...). It would be amazing to have "Vercel/Resend for iMessage for Business"
2. If you go the send blue route, please support iMessage app payloads. Send blue doesn't support that
How does this work? Do you have an agreement with Apple to connect to their iMessage service? If you do then kudos thats a real differentiator.
However if you're hosting your own mac mini farm and running bluebubbles or other such things that are not approved by Apple what is your plan to handle the case where you're sending enough traffic through Apple's services that they disable / ban / block you?
If its the former then awesome but if its the latter then Im not sure I'd want to depend on your service knowing that apple could ban you at any time.
Apple wouldn't ban us since we're not doing anything that would qualify as spam or abuse. Even if that hypothetical event does happen, we have SMS/RCS fallback systems in place so no conversations get stopped or lost
Much of what you mention in your post seemed spammy; messaging regarding cart abandonment, etc. I aggressively label messages like that as spam, and I suspect others do too. I also suspect after blasting out messages like that, your accounts will get burned.
Apple doesn't inherently prohibit programmatic messaging. In fact, they actually developed Applescript for people to do that. What they are against is spam and abuse. Therefore, as long as we stay compliant and prevent spam, Apple is not necessarily against this.
They developed AppleScript for people to do this individually, at limited scale.
Push notifications, attached to an application or website, and controllable by a user on that basis, are the solution for corporate messaging at scale.
This will get you banned. It’s not a question of if, but when. Users will hit the report spam button. Apple will shut you down.
People don't report our phone lines to be spam because the use cases that we focus on are either mostly inbound (e.g. customer service, the user is the one who texts first) or warm opt-in outbound (e.g. form-fill text back or follow ups). Businesses want a better medium to communicate with their users and users want something more conversational and native to their messaging behaviors.
I genuinely can’t tell if this is naivety or willful ignorance, but at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter.
This is in direct violation of the terms of service, and Apple invests a lot of money in keeping iMessage clean of this kind of misuse.
They control the servers, the client, certificate provisioning, hardware identification, and user identification. They can trivially trace a registered account to the point of sale and the card and PII used to buy the hardware on which the account was registered.
You will fly under the radar for just as long as it takes to annoy enough of their customers that Apple brings down a massive ban hammer.
We're not encouraging spam with this. We're mainly focused on existing conversational use cases that's currently done over SMS/RCS. They can be more human and expressive when done over iMessage.
what you encourage and what actually happens are two different things, though. gmail does not actively encourage spam, yet most spam emails i receive are from gmail addresses.
you have to actively fight against malicious uses, like spam. "not encouraging" is nowhere near enough.
what systems/processes/safeguards do you have in place to prevent abuse?
For iPhone only users, so right off the bat your product is targeting 50% ish of a companies customer base. And the non iMessage people get a worse experience?
As much as I want to applaud your progress here, as a user I want transactional stuff to stay in my email inbox. My iMessage is already starting to become overwhelming from spam and apps — I want fewer messages not more.
Yeah I agree. Our goal behind this is not to clutter up people's iMessage inbox with more transactional messages. It's to replace the SMS/RCS conversations that people are already having with customer service and scheduling agents with something more conversational and human.
My existence couldn’t possibly be any more digital, and I can’t remember a single time I’ve had a SMS/RCS conversation with customer service or a scheduling agent. I don’t want to have one either. My message inbox is already full enough.
My iMessages are for conversations with people that I actually want to talk to. The notifications are high priority because it’s with people that I want to talk to.
I can’t imagine my annoyance if I were to receive an iMessage notification while I’m expecting an important message, only to find that it’s more spam.
My email inbox is already a wasteland because of this. The absolute last thing I need or want is for the same thing to happen to iMessage.
That's why we're making sure that all of the use cases are non-spam and also of high importance to the user. As we've seen through our customers, an after-hour customer support agent for their apartment, as an example, could be a contact of high importance for the user and definitely not spam in their iMessage
1. Since we're not fully self-serve right now, we can choose to only partner with businesses with use cases that are opt-in and non-spam.
2. If we find that one of our customers is using this for spam, we'll reach out to them asap and determine next steps
3. Not necessarily. We support both inbound (user texts the phone line first) and opt-in outbound (we text the user first) use cases
This is a very simple integration and the fallback is also pretty straightforward to implement technically. What’s the differentiator? Why would companies use your product?
I'd say mainly scale and stability. While people can definitely do this on their own through Bluebubbles or custom Applescript, stability is difficult to maintain, especially at scale. For most businesses, iMessage is not the core product they want to think about and maintain. They just want a reliable API and support/team to talk to so that they can reliably integrate it as a part of their existing business structure.
> iMessage is intended for communicating with family and friends, and is not for conducting commercial activities or disseminating unwanted messages. iMessage misuse may result in service limitations.
We are not "disseminating unwanted messages". A lot of what we're doing (e.g. customer support or missed call text back) would be things that users would already be doing conversationally over iMessage.
It's good YC is funding you because it acts as a later of protection from legal threats by apple. Hopefully if/when Apple litigate this I hope you will fight and set precedent for commercialisation of adversarial interoperability (A digital human right).
I suggest you implement Baileys also to your service so it can also be done with WhatsApp so we can accelerate the inevitable litigation.
https://blooio.com/ https://www.sendblue.com/ https://www.lindy.ai/ etc?
I will say I am the exact opposite of your market, I want absolutely nothing like this. In fact I'd prefer iMessage to allow ZERO programmatic interfacing.
However if you're hosting your own mac mini farm and running bluebubbles or other such things that are not approved by Apple what is your plan to handle the case where you're sending enough traffic through Apple's services that they disable / ban / block you?
If its the former then awesome but if its the latter then Im not sure I'd want to depend on your service knowing that apple could ban you at any time.
Push notifications, attached to an application or website, and controllable by a user on that basis, are the solution for corporate messaging at scale.
This will get you banned. It’s not a question of if, but when. Users will hit the report spam button. Apple will shut you down.
This is in direct violation of the terms of service, and Apple invests a lot of money in keeping iMessage clean of this kind of misuse.
They control the servers, the client, certificate provisioning, hardware identification, and user identification. They can trivially trace a registered account to the point of sale and the card and PII used to buy the hardware on which the account was registered.
You will fly under the radar for just as long as it takes to annoy enough of their customers that Apple brings down a massive ban hammer.
I don’t need more iMessage spam.
what you encourage and what actually happens are two different things, though. gmail does not actively encourage spam, yet most spam emails i receive are from gmail addresses.
you have to actively fight against malicious uses, like spam. "not encouraging" is nowhere near enough.
what systems/processes/safeguards do you have in place to prevent abuse?
Would you mind detailing your reasoning why agents should feel humans, when they very obviously aren’t? Why should we want AI to impersonate humans?
I don't get the distinction you're making. I'm not an expert in mobile messaging so maybe I am missing something obvious.
And what about WhatsApp?
My iMessages are for conversations with people that I actually want to talk to. The notifications are high priority because it’s with people that I want to talk to.
I can’t imagine my annoyance if I were to receive an iMessage notification while I’m expecting an important message, only to find that it’s more spam.
My email inbox is already a wasteland because of this. The absolute last thing I need or want is for the same thing to happen to iMessage.
How do you ban bad actors so they can't spam again?
Does a user have to initiate contact in order to have messages sent to them?
https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/data/en/messages/
Seems pretty damn clear.
I suggest you implement Baileys also to your service so it can also be done with WhatsApp so we can accelerate the inevitable litigation.