Turn Transactional SMS Into a Revenue Channel – Triple Buyers for Free

01 /The Concept

Companies send their customers SMS messages and push notifications all the time – and the vast majority of recipients ignore them or mark them as spam.

Smobi set out to make those messages genuinely interesting and engaging, so more recipients actually respond the way the company wants.

The startup's focus is SMS specifically – the channel most people still actually notice. To transform flat text into rich, interactive conversations with buttons and images, Smobi uses Rich Communication Services (RCS), the next evolution of the SMS protocol.

With RCS, businesses can send appointment reminders, videos, surveys, product carousels, delivery tracking updates – essentially anything a marketing team can dream up.

Message logic, format, and content can all be automated through Smobi's visual builder, which integrates with corporate platforms to automatically pull in recipient-specific data – orders and payments, bookings, delivery status changes, product recommendations.

The platform includes analytics that track recipient responses, so companies can optimize timing, format, and content over time. It also supports all carrier protocols designed to prevent messages from being flagged or blocked as spam.

According to Smobi, switching from SMS to RCS increases recipient engagement by 5–10x, drives 4x more clicks, and triples purchase intent.

Real-world client results: one client achieved a 73% message read rate; another saw 3x more clicks; and the platform's clients average 115% revenue growth.

In the US, RCS is now supported by virtually all major mobile carriers.

Smobi went through Y Combinator accelerator in summer 2023. At the time, it was building a marketplace for small and medium businesses – and through that work, stumbled onto the problem of companies' messages being ignored. The startup announced its RCS platform launch on the YC site a few days ago.

02 /Why It Matters

The real insight here isn't about RCS. It's about something more fundamental: any interaction with users – even a routine service notification – is a marketing opportunity.

Startup Slip ([covered here](/review/prostaja-mehanika-dlja-vozvrata-i-doprodazh)) built a platform for offline retailers to send digital receipts instead of paper ones, delivered via the Slip app. A plain receipt becomes marketing real estate – space for displaying other products the buyer might want, plus a direct channel for the retailer to surface offers, new arrivals, and sales.

Another set of startups took a counterintuitive observation and ran with it: shoppers check their package delivery status page an average of 4.6 times – making that page a highly engaged, highly targeted placement for cross-sell and upsell ads.

Malomo ([covered here](/review/zhizn-posle-prodazhi)) built a platform that turns the delivery tracking page into a marketing tool and raised $8.3M. Wonderment ([covered here](/review/1-5-rynka-ne-prodazhi-a-naoborot)) raised $6M in its first round on a similar platform before being acquired by Loop Returns. Route ([covered here](/review/dobav-vsego-odnu-fichu-i-stan-milliardnym-startapom)) raised $288.5M for a package insurance platform whose delivery tracking module also serves as an ad placement for relevant merchant offers.

03 /Opportunities

The real problem with marketing messages isn't that they're dull – it's that they arrive at completely irrelevant moments.

This was the key theme in a [recent review](/review/rekomendacii-drajvjat-prodazhi) of Hypt, a platform that prompts buyers to share recommendations about products and services they've just purchased. The whole system is designed to catch people while they're still riding a wave of positive sentiment.

The companies covered today operate on the same logic of relevance timing. Service notifications – digital receipts, delivery status updates, renewal reminders – are messages users already consider useful. That makes the moment of receiving them inherently relevant.

But most companies treat those messages as purely functional – dry, to-the-point, nothing more. That's a missed opportunity. A useful service message is the exact moment when a user is primed and receptive. Adding something visually compelling and contextually relevant turns a transactional touchpoint into a marketing lever.

Here's one more unexpected angle on relevance timing: startup Arcube ([covered here](/review/staryj-psihologicheskij-trjuk-dlja-novyh-programm-lojalnosti)) raised £1.2M (~$1.5M) in its first round for an airline loyalty platform. The platform's angle: offer users a way to convert their loyalty points into a relevant reward at the most relevant moment – for example, converting miles earned on a just-completed flight into an upgrade credit for their next booking on the same airline.

The directional takeaway: build platforms that help companies deliver marketing offers at the moments most likely to land positively – ideally by piggybackin on service communications that users already want to receive. The moments, the channels, and the exact right message are where the real value (and the money) sit