Derrek Wayne Wins Our Valentine's Themed Developer Contest With Customer Song Sender

Derrek Wayne Wins Our Valentine's Themed Developer Contest With Customer Song Sender

For winning the Valentine’s Day contest, Derrek will get an Amazon Kindle 3G and $100 in Twilio credit to keep the kitty tunes going. Here’s what Derrek had to say about Custom Song Sender:

I started CustomSongSender.com after I made an important discovery while visiting the greeting card aisle. As I lingered in those rows and rows of humor and sympathy, empathy and celebration, congratulations and stupidity, I realized – these things are brilliant. The margin on a greeting card is enormous. Even after paying the in-house artists to produce them, the paper to print the art on, and the delivery and shelf space, Hallmark is raking it in. I mean, five bucks for a massed produced piece of cardstock with dumb comic slapped on it? Brilliant.

And then I thought: people have birthdays everyday; this is a business. What digital good might supplant this physical object? A song, delivered to you over your phone. That could work. So then I wrote some music and hacked a website together. Actually that’s backwards, I hacked a website together and then made the music – it seems to me that the smartest strategy in making a novel gift is to produce the marketing first, and then the product.

My future plans are to streamline the service after collecting feedback from customers. I also have some other Twilio powered projects in the works – so there’s more to come from me.