It sounds very strange to start a company to do something you don't initially believe in (although it sounds like you are a believer now). If it wasn't about creating something you wanted to exist, what was it that drove you to create Boostly?
My guess: some combination of believing it could be a good business while helping restaurants.
Now that you know it works, do you plan on expanding beyond restaurants? Wouldn't you like to send text messages from car dealers, record stores, dry cleaners, grocery stores, clothing stores, taxi and ride share companies, landscapers, HVAC service companies, dog walkers, barbers, book stores, home improvement stores, electronics retailers, and so on? You could have phones buzzing with commercial messages a dozen times a day!
Feels like we've entered that marketing hellscape already.
I have to register for every other website if I want to purchase something, then get subscribed (without my consent) to some garbage spam mail. And god forbid if I abandon a shopping cart. Now I get some creepy email to come back and finish an order that I probably dgaf about.
And if I revisit some ecommerce site a year later, I get automatically re-subscribed to their marketing spam again.
I guess the next logical step is to migrate this nightmare to phones, where we'll all be forced to keep opting out of shit we never asked for in the first place.
I'm glad we're really using technology to make the world a better place.
Aye. Yeah I was not "scratching my own itch" as we say. Shane has a background in restaurant sales and we started in the industry with an assumption that SMB restaurants were underutilizing their customer data. Your guess is accurate. The game as YC likes to say is "building stuff people want" and that's we attempted and eventually meandered into.
Brick and Mortar retail is a big market with similar dynamics to restaurants. We do have non-restaurant customers already but believe there are advantages to carving out this niche. Some of the best customers who like us best are those that were texting with more generic companies prior.
My guess: some combination of believing it could be a good business while helping restaurants.
Now that you know it works, do you plan on expanding beyond restaurants? Wouldn't you like to send text messages from car dealers, record stores, dry cleaners, grocery stores, clothing stores, taxi and ride share companies, landscapers, HVAC service companies, dog walkers, barbers, book stores, home improvement stores, electronics retailers, and so on? You could have phones buzzing with commercial messages a dozen times a day!