Idea: short-term unified group messaging enterprise

I was driving for 6 hours the other day and my wife was asleep, so what does one do: work out the details for a new kind of hosted communication service in my head.

If you are a user of AirBNB, you might have noticed that when you get messages from your hosts in the app, you also get an SMS/text with (the first 140 chars) of the message. The number you get it from, is not the phone number of the host. In my case it was more often a US number. So I started thinking: how does this work? Obviously this is not a phone number per customer, since that would be impossible/unaffordable. If they use N phone numbers to send these messages, when someone replies, how do they know who to forward the message to? It’s not rocket science.

A typical user has one ‘current’ transaction with AirBNB (i.e. ‘where do I sleep tonight?’). If that user (whose phone number we know) sends a message, we know it is concerning that transaction. In the worst case the person stays in a different AirBNB place every night, and you want the group chat to be available 2 weeks before until 1 week after the transaction. That can be managed with 21 different phone numbers. For the hosts that manage several apartments or rooms, they might have up to 100 group chats that are active at the same time. Still, 100 different phone numbers, that’s still doable.

So then I thought, what if you would have a service that allows any company to do this? They want to set up a temporary group chat with different channels (their own app, email, SMS, WhatsApp, Messenger, …) but not manage the details. So that idea crystallised into a short-term unified group messaging enterprise – STUGME.

So this is how it works:

This kind of service would be handy in the following cases:

  1. a company service has a large number of stand-alone transactions, each one with 1 or more ‘normal’ people.
  2. the conversation traffic is temporary, with a clear end date.
  3. the different members of the conversation do not want to share their contact details with everyone. They prefer a sort of ‘semi-anonymity’.

Examples: AirBNB, obviously (since they are using this already), Uber, classifieds, events, …

Since I don’t have time to develop this as a startup, I’m just throwing it out there.

💬 idea 🏷 smartphones 🏷 Web2.0 🏷 airbnb 🏷 communication 🏷 idea 🏷 messaging 🏷 phone 🏷 saas 🏷 sms 🏷 text 🏷 uber