Hello, I'm writing a business plan (as a project for my business school) of a service where a person could send an SMS question to a short code number or email and receive an answer from a human operator. Examples: www.aqa.63336.com, www.chacha.com, www.mosio.com, www.texperts.com, www.ansanow.com, etc. My question (yes, ironic) is about getting the SMS from user's phone to the content provider through the wireless carrier's networks. Business would be based in U.S. I know that separate contracts have be signed with each carrier. But what concerns me is that apparently the carrier takes a very significant share (up to 50%) of the SMS revenue if it is Premium. I've thought about it and decided to make the SMS free of charge to the user, but the answers would include advertisements. So, it would be an ad supported business. This is the question: does the wireless carrier take any cut off of an SMS sent to a short code number if SMS is not Premium, but is free and supported by ads? I will have revenue from advertisers, but not in SMS per se. And what if the SMS is sent not to short code, but to an email address and the answer is returned in a similar fashion (for example it's mailed to <usersphonenumber>@sprint.com)? Is this legal? And what happens if questions are emailed back and forth in large volume (lets say, 1 million a day). Will the carrier complain? Do I need a contract to do that? If you could point me to any resources on the web regarding this I would greatly appreciate this. Thank you!
I am really impressed with the idea you are working with. I am implementing same technology in INDIA with a service provider . If you are really interested , i Would like to support your bussiness plan , Going forward we will work as a strategic partners to each other and build a bussiness successfully. If you exactly provide me the helpful resources then I would like to work together.
Well, I'm not sure if I'm going to build an actual business, so far it's just a school project and it's not even done yet. The issue with mobile carriers with vital to the concept and direction the business model will take...
First off, I'd start with clickatell. That way your contract problems etc. are all solved. They won't take any advertising revenue and they won't complain about a million texts (billions upon billions are sent daily). Everything is pretty much unregulated except for getting your own shortcode (which costs $500-$1500 per month). If you've got any more questions shoot me a PM. I looked into this deeply myself but did not have the capital. Thanks Mike