When Did Twilio Find Product Market Fit?

Jeff Lawson says Twilio saw developers sign up, enter a credit card, and build useful things with Twilio for themselves and for the companies they worked for on the day the company launched. He frames the idea that Twilio skipped a long stretch without product market fit as something you could argue, and he frames five-, six-, and seven-figure contracts with companies and enterprises as another point where someone might argue the company found it, once developer use turned into scaled commercial contracts. A usage-based model does not always give predictability. He places that later contract stage not very long into the company.

About two or three years in, around 2010 or 2011, the office a few blocks away was still sparse. In the very early days he was under the impression Twilio would not need salespeople. He is a software developer who wanted to pick up an API and go, and he assumed developers everywhere felt the same way. Developers largely do not want to talk to salespeople. The miss was that the relationship with their company had to go well beyond the developer, past a self-service adoption model.

He and the other co-founders were still doing all the customer service for Twilio in Zendesk when a product manager at Intuit emailed. A developer there had built two-factor authentication on Twilio so a QuickBooks login would call the person and read a pin. In 2010 and 2011, two-factor authentication was not commonly used.