Interview with Ariel Poler, CEO Textmarks February 24, 2007
Posted by David Kaye in : Mobile, Business, Interview, SMS , trackback
Earlier in the week I profiled Textmarks, a user-generated SMS content startup who just launched a premium SMS version of their service targeted at bloggers and other small content providers. The TechCrunch crowd gave the product a bit of a kicking, so I had a chat with the company’s CEO Ariel Poler to ask some questions about the product and find out why he thinks there’s a market for it.
The TechCrunch crowd aren’t sold on your application. Why are they wrong?
There are a few separate issues. First of all, I think a lot of people misunderstood the product: we aren’t charging anyone for the free service. In fact, we’re eating the SMS message costs on the free service so we can get some traction and to see how people are using the application.
In the case of the premium service which was of interest to some of the bloggers and content providers we spoke to, it seemed to us to be fair and reasonable in that case to take a cut of the revenue. Obviously, because of the operator charges associated with premium SMS this is designed for high margin content: people who are creating their own content and can say, hey, I can get some subscribers paying some money as opposed to zero.
I guess the final level of scepticism was: is anyone going to be willing to pay for this? Again, I think there was a slight misunderstanding here: our intention is not that people will take the content that is already on the blog for free. This is for content that is more unique or more timely.
What kind of uptake are you seeing?
Well, we only launched the premium version a couple of days ago so it’s a bit early to say. However we’re already seeing some interesting use cases. Some of the more interesting things we’re seeing are not coming from bloggers, but other places. We just saw someone who created a bunch of SMS surf alerts, for instance. We’ll know more about the premium service once it has been around for more than a couple of days.
The free stuff has been around for longer, and there are a lot of varied examples. This weekend, for instance, an alarm went off because within the space of a couple of minutes we had 1000 people sign up to a single Textmark. As it turned out, a Jewish cultural organization was having a meeting in an auditorium and had said to everyone in the room, hey, pick up your phone and subscribe to this.
We’re also seeing some more sophisticated activity as well: recently, for instance, someone created a service which lets you text in the name of a movie and get back its IMDB rating.
How do you see the product developing?
We’re taking a “wait and see” approach. We started this with a general vision of creating a platform for smaller content providers; there are plenty of companies out there offering text alert content, but it’s not the long tail: it’s things like gossip, horoscopes and sports scores. We want to get the other stuff. So we thought, let’s throw it out there and see what people use it for. The widget is doing well, we’re also looking at making it more of a discussion mechanism, increasing the level of interactivity with things like polling.
There seems to be a bit of an SMS renaissance going on at the moment: we’ve just heard about your competitor Mozes getting funded, the Limbo guys recently closed a bunch of funding for reverse auctions over SMS, and so on. Why is this happening in 2007, when technology has moved so much further forward, even in the US?
Well, abroad there has been a lot more SMS activity for a while, but in the US we still hadn’t really reached a critical mass until last year. You could put this down to American Idol getting millions of people to use thier phones for text messaging. 2006 really was the year where SMS crossed the threshold into significance, as far as we’re concerned.
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