MessageBird rebrands as Bird, and slashes costs by 90% on SMS to tackle Twilio

Image Credits: TechCrunch

No, don’t suppose Bird Scooters. Think Bird, previously MessageBird. For the Amsterdam-based unicorn is now re-branding as such after reportedly buying the Bird.com area title a few years in the past, allegedly for a lot of thousands and thousands.

Founded in 2011 by Adriaan Mol and Robert Vis, the cloud communications platform for enterprises can be launching a spread of recent merchandise and a drastic pricing reduce to go up towards rivals resembling Twilio.

Vis informed me over the telephone: “Our thought process was pretty simple on this actually and obviously this decision was made way before Bird Group went bankrupt. I’m trying to build a legacy company that is going to be around in 50 years and in no way in my mind was the scooter company going to be around in 50 years.”

Bird CRM for advertising and marketing, gross sales, and funds on Email, SMS, and WhatsApp is being slashed with a 40-90% low cost and the corporate stated in an announcement as we speak that it will cost SMS at a 90% low cost.

A brand new advertising and marketing marketing campaign will quote Amazon founder Jeff Bezos with “your margins are my opportunity”. Twilio reportedly does $1.3 billion in revenue on SMS which Messagebird seems to be trying to deliver to zero with the value drop. TechCrunch sources say Vis talked about this intention eight years in the past whereas pitching MessageBird throughout his 2016 YC Demo Day.

The transfer is critical, since $100k on SMS or e mail with a firms like Twilio, Klaviyo or Attentive, may translate as a $10k spend. TechCrunch has reached out to Twilio for remark.

Vis stated: “We’re dropping prices considerably. It’s time to move away from the space of API providers on top of channels, which we could probably agree is a completely commoditized. That’s truly the differentiation between Twilio and us and probably 10 other SMS providers or WhatsApp providers. Our view is much more that the ability to do something with the channel is way more important than actually the channel in itself, so we’re basically giving away channel costs, which, if your only business as a channel provider, probably really sucks, which obviously is kind of our intention. But if you provide any type of convenience on top of the channel, then I think that’s what the next 10 years is going to be about.”

In a weblog submit co-founder Vis added: “It is no longer about the abstraction layer of API’s. AI changed the game and flipped everything – the next 10 years will be all about infrastructure + application – or how we like to look at it : what you can do with the channel versus merely access to the channel.”

Vis has additionally had a busy week after a his LinkedIn post saying he was searching for to purchase out firms with Electronic Money Institution (EMI) and/or Payment Institutions (PI) licenses went viral on the networking platform.

Meanwhile Bird, the perveyor of for-rent scoooters, just lately went bankrupt.