Blorp

Context

Small businesses run on text messages, but every tool built for sending them is priced for somebody else. Enterprise SMS platforms charge enterprise money and assume you have a marketing team to operate them. Doing it yourself through a raw provider means writing code, reading docs, and praying you don't accidentally text the same person three times. The result: the local clinic, the boutique, the trades operator, the small nonprofit, the people who'd benefit from organized SMS the most, end up using a personal phone, a spreadsheet, and a lot of copy-paste.

Blorp is business messaging for local shops: promos, reminders, and updates sent by text in seconds, built for restaurants, realtors, retail shops, and every local business in between. The pitch on the page is blunt: emails get ignored, social posts disappear, texts get read in minutes.

What I built

The product and its story. One clean place to send a message to one person or a thousand, an inbox that looks like a chat app, call forwarding without a telecom dashboard, and a marketing site anchored by a live-feeling conversation mockup with sends, open rates, and replies.

The features that matter

Two capabilities carry it. Bulk campaigns: upload a CSV, preview your audience, test on a subset, then send to thousands with real-time delivery tracking. And auto-replies that answer the questions every shop gets, HOURS, MENU, and BOOK, instantly. Around them the site stacks its proof: two-way conversations in one inbox, a 98 percent SMS open rate, five times the engagement of email.

The send path, and the path back

Two details in there are the difference between a demo and something a business can actually run. The first is that every business gets its own Twilio subaccount rather than sharing one pool, so usage is attributed per shop, each has its own number, and one business's sending reputation is not another's problem. The second is the ordering on the way back in: compliance keywords are handled before the shop's own auto-replies get a look, so a STOP is always a STOP even if the owner has configured a keyword that happens to collide with it.

Bulk sends have their own shape. Up to five hundred recipients go out in the request itself; beyond that the job is split into five-hundred-message chunks a minute apart and drained by a scheduled worker, which keeps a big campaign from hitting a serverless timeout halfway through and leaving nobody able to say who was texted and who wasn't.

Priced for a corner store

Pricing is pay as you go: no contracts, cancel anytime, first fifty messages free. Send without a plan and you pay per message; commit to a monthly allowance and the rate drops as the volume climbs, all the way down at the top of the ladder.

The shape matters more than any single number. A shop that texts fifty people a month never touches a plan at all, and a shop sending thousands buys an allowance where every message past it costs less the higher the tier goes. Overage is billed rather than blocked, so a campaign that goes better than expected does not stop dead at the end of its allowance. Six industry cards, from restaurants to realtors to tourism, translate the same product into each business's Tuesday. Log in, set it up in an afternoon, send. That promise holds because the person running the business can run the messages too, no developer required.

Copy that gets to the point

The conversation mockup does the selling: a pickup notification, an "On my way!" reply, and a weekend promo with a one-word opt-in. One accent color, plenty of white space, and no explainer video in sight. The companies that win their neighborhood are the ones that stay in touch with the people who already gave them money, and the page never asks you to read past that idea.

Under the hood

Next.js, React, Tailwind, and Framer Motion, with Firebase underneath for auth and data, and Twilio carrying the messages.