Slack SMS – Throw away your work phone
clerk.chatI've seen lots of posts about folks inquiring about enabling SMS inside of Slack. Sure there are tools out there which force you to create an account and signup but nothing has been built natively for Slack. That is, you guessed it - until now!
We've been building this native Slack app for the last year after we couldn't find an affordable SMS-to-Slack solution. The idea came when my friend who was looking for a way to leverage SMS for her clinic but didn't want a whole new platform to communicate with her patients outside of slack. Email was just not effective, especially given the fact that 98% of text messages are read and replied to within FIVE minutes.
Clerk was born from 4 simple premises:
1. If you have customers or team members out of the office, one of the best ways to get your message in front of them is through text. 2. Now that almost everyone has a smartphone, SMS and MMS are becoming consumers’ and employees’ preferred way of connecting with companies and brands. 3. But choosing a platform for this kind of service isn’t always easy. 4. We’re already logged in to emails, CRM tools, website backends – the list is endless.
I am shamelessly using Hacker News to ask for help for any Slack forums or outlets to get the word out. Places that would be relevant as I don't want to be spammy. Any help I get I will personally reply and see if I can help you along your own entrepreneurial journey :)
I see there are a lot of SMS extensions for Slack like Avochato and HeyMarket which seem to be much more robust platforms with their own web UI and interface - how is this better?
Clerk is built natively for Slack. You don't need to rely on a separate webapp for SMS functionality. Anyone from your team is able to communicate to clients directly from the Slack interface they use every day.
Can I host multiple numbers with this? We route lots of SMS through many client-specific numbers and would require a lot of different numbers not just one...
Yes. You can have as many phone numbers as you need. One phone number can be associated with one or multiple Slack channels.
This is great! From your website it seems you only support SMS now. When is the voice functionality coming out?
Voice is on the roadmap and coming out soon. We are running into some limitations with Slack UI and working around it.
Impressive product.
Thank you. Any feedback is appreciated!
Great work!!
Kudos for launching the product
Working hard on this. Do let us know if you have feedback or suggestions.