Despite not raising significant funds, we decided to launch Twilio on November 20, 2008, and immediately started gaining customers who were willing to pay for our service.

After receiving positive feedback from potential customers about the Twilio API, I decided to drop everything else and focus on building it full-time.

When I started talking about the Twilio idea, I noticed that developers would initially seem uninterested, but then they would ask questions about potential use cases, indicating a latent need.

We brought in customers early to test our product, which helped change the minds of skeptical team members when they saw real-time reactions from users.

We launched the prototype in January 2010, and it took off by word of mouth, even before a public launch, surprising us as it was just an API for charging credit cards.

After we fully committed to Discord, we figured out how to make it work within four weeks, demonstrating the importance of focus and conviction in a startup.

In 2008, I struggled to raise funds for Twilio due to the global financial meltdown, and many investors dismissed our developer service idea as foolish.

Once you have a prototype and user interest, the next step is to build a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) that can be launched quickly, ideally within weeks.

Our goal was to launch at South by Southwest, inspired by Twitter's success the previous year, and we managed to get it ready in three weeks.