753 karma · joined April 27, 2014
My friend handed me a tin of Japanese green tea, which I opened slowly and then inhaled very intentionally.
It instantly transported me back to being 14 and in Japan for the first time. Will always remember that feeling of smells blending with nostalgia, adventure and discovery. :)
Everyone thinks everything is dying when their favorite whatever closes down or changes something.
Such is progress - there are plenty of "third places" - both commercial and non-commercial. And those places may shut down! And new ones will open up!
My current thinking is there are too many ways in to protect yourself with 100% security, so better to spend time figuring out how to reduce the blast radius, and what your recovery protocol will be when you get hit.
They are all preludes, however, to agreeing to liability amounts/indemnification in the actual contract.
This is why, as an example, most healthcare orgs end up moving away from Google. Google (to my knowledge, which includes large deals at F50 level), will not contractually agree to any kind of financial or legal liability for data breaches, hacks etc.
Microsoft (and to a lesser extent Amazon) will agree to such terms if you're a big enough account, and generally already have some kind of framework in place with your procurement dept likely that simply needs to be amended.
This is also why larger healthcare orgs are reticent to work with smaller, less well capitalized startups in the ecosystem. The liability alone should something go wrong would potentially vaporize your company, and would definitely lead to uncomfortable conversations with your investors (who maybe, might also have large holdings in the larger healthcare orgs and be incented to not do stupid things that would create massive liabilities!).
Status: Restored AT&T FINAL, Service Degradation, Global Smart Messaging Suite AT&T Global Smart Messaging Suite
Event description: FINAL, Service Degradation Impacted Services: MMS MT Start time: 02-21-2024 22:00 Eastern, 21:00 Central, 19:00 Pacific End time: 02-22-2024 11:00 Eastern, 10:00 Central, 08:00 Pacific
Downtime: 780 minutes
Dear Customer, We are writing to inform you that Global Smart Messaging Suite is now available. The MMS MT service has been restored and our team is currently monitoring Thank you.
AT&T Business Solutions Kind Regards,
The AT&T SMS Service Administrator
Buyer beware :)
Remember the hype around Deep Blue and later Watson?
I’m sure no lessons to be learned there :)
I work in the industry and in general you see high margin (50-75%+) in areas like outpatient surgery centers, senior primary care ACO groups (ie providers getting paid by CMS to fully manage Medicare Advantage patients), etc.
PBMs and health plans generally have lower margins (in the 5-15% range), dictated largely by state and federal MLR regulations.
Watch who the large medical insurers are buying and you will get a good feel where there is margin to be had. They can use this to generate cash flow for other activities, drive savings within their insurance book, offer more competitive group pricing to their clients(ie employers, state govts, etc),drive affordability directly to consumers or some combo based on what business goals they need to hit that quarter.
Oh right, it's not that type of efficiency :)
Have seen that bring the Exchange Server to its knees a few times :)
Generally the scalpers over buy and will start to panic and unload tickets at very good prices the closer the show gets.
Is anyone still actively maintaining this effort?
I've found Comcast/Xfinity has all kinds of odd telemetry end points going on (assuming some is ads, some is for in-product observability) that gets blocked on many DNS blocklists and causes all kinds of weird glitches when using their services.
Might be something to double-check.
It's what most biz folks use (eg therapists, massage, etc) in their office to ensure privacy.
We've used one for like 9 years with my son and it helps him sleep really well too.
My son and I had the idea that we should just organize a block party. I think this was in early 2021 after covid was letting up a bit. He was 7 years old and said we should get a food truck to come.
So that's what we did. Made homemade invitations and handed them out to a couple blocks around us and sent out emails to friends.
I think we had like 75 people show up to the first one! It was great. Had a taco truck come, and the local fire station rolled the engine by for the kids.
Blocked off the street so everyone could sit together and the kids could run around without worrying about traffic.
We've been trying to do this every 6 months or so since then. Great way to meet tons of folks in the immediate vicinity and strike up some new friendships - highly recommend it.
In BigCo land there are multiple attack vectors to the top execs.
I was literally in a convo today where our CFO and his EA are now virtually unreachable due to this type of stuff. Our IT team gave everyone burner phones above a certain grade level.
Strange days!
What an abomination of something seemingly so simple made into something so horrendously complex and bloated.
I was trying to explain to some new ServiceNow AE why we wouldn't be buying more product from them. Literally everyone who uses the product hates it - developers, admins, end users.
It behaves like it is constantly broken.
People talk shit about it all day, every day.
Maybe one day, some time a long time ago they had a good product, and that's how it got embedded all over the place, but now, what a pile of junk!
I've been in this space for 15+ years now, worked with most of the main players that have on-prem and SaaS solutions, and deployed and run solutions at scale at a few of the largest companies in BigCo land for multiple years now.
I would be cautious on focusing too heavily on the 'developer as the customer' here. Most buying decisions in this space are not made by IT, they are made by CMOs, CXOs, CDOs, etc as that is who owns the budget (and results) tied to this type of solution.
At almost any scale, when you look at total cost of ownership, licensing from one of the main solution providers is usually quite a bit cheaper than building out a whole proprietary stack that one then has to maintain in house via their IT org that likely is not an expert at this kind of stuff.
There are farms there with 1,000+ year traceable, verifiable histories.
I think we often end up at the end of logical thought processes back at the original question - how can we observe and describe a system that we are inherently a part of?
When folks run out of ways to make money, they productize smaller and smaller chunks of the overall stack to attempt to extract more value/rent/payment out of their customer base.
They will bring in ever more increasingly crazy sounding architecture experts to justify this (often times these folks get planted as FTEs in the very orgs they are selling to!).
When you find yourself asking 'is this complexity for complexities sake', know that you are being sold vaporware :)
Catch all the LinkedIn scraper spammers this way since 2010, yo!
No AI needed, lol.
Everything from online, in person, video call, etc. They summarize all the findings and give you detail too if you want it.
I think most of the outreach/lead gen happens via LinkedIn. I'm fairly knowledgeable in my industry vertical and get hit up by these companies literally every day - usually try to do 1 or 2 live interviews a month. Generally they'll pay in the $800-$1200 per hour range for this type of expertise.
Check out Adobe's similar product if you want to consider additional features for your roadmap:
https://experienceleague.adobe.com/docs/journey-optimizer/us...
Pricing wise you're going to need to figure out a different model long term is my guess, especially considering this is a layer on top of the message channels (eg email, SMS, push) that require their own setup/contract/pricing. Your per message pricing is orders of magnitude more expensive than the downstream channel message pricing most folks pushing any kind of volume are paying.
Good luck with this - following your github repo now, excited to see where you guys take this in the future. Definitely a need for more open source in this space.