Twilio powered communications

Sunday developer stories. After a nice break to bring our camp to Burning Man, we’re getting ready to onboard users and start collecting feedback from a broader set of users.

To launch it seemed important to have SMS and WhatsApp capabilities, we want to print stickers for popular areas and personally invite people to sign up. Being able to respond to inbound SMS, and to offer authentication by phone number will reduce friction.

What we build

We released today a webhook endpoint that replies with a default message and the structure for the future enhancements

We tested some code examples to review sending plain sms and templates

We bought a twilio phone number and applied to be be able to send messages with that number

Process

The whole thing was surprisingly easy

initially I wanted to get a short code (5 number identifier) because it seems more fancy, but it is really expensive starting a $3k every quarter

Our phone number was only $1.50 a month, plus about $20 on verification fees. You have to fund your account to start

To verify the numbers and accompany our applications we used our LLC information, to connect the WhatsApp api we used an existing Facebook for business profile

You can send us a message using sms or WhatsApp and receive a default response (+1 518 629 1830)

Coming up

Next up we’ll add an endpoint to securely send messages, so that authorize clients can offer custom communications

Additionally we’ll start working on extensions to parse inbound messages and offer a variety of personal responses about purchases or events associated with their number

Thanks for reading! 🧚🏼‍♀️