We have been working in Promos Treino with a single WhatsApp number so far, but in September 2nd we got our number banned.
Luckily were able to recover the number in one or two days, but after that we decided to add one more number to our ecossystem to avoid this kind of scenario in the future.
As soon as I started to set up the second number I noticed that it would be a mess.
Context
To explain what was the mess, first I need to give you a little more context.
To integrate with WhatsApp we’re using WAHA.
As we were using one single number so far, everything was pointing to this number. By everything I mean all these three responsabilities:
- Receive new promotions from the other groups;
- Send promotions to our groups;
- Be the bot for our administration (generating reports, notifying about new orders and etc)
In order to receive the promos from the other groups we need to setup some webhooks in WAHA, like the following one:
The first (and so far the only one) number we got was both receiving these webhooks and sending promos to our groups.
By adding the second one and make sure we would add more resilience as well in case the number one gets banned, I would need to duplicate the webhook receiving and would have to deal with the duplication in the automation.
I couldn’t leave this only for the number one obviously cause if it gets banned, than we would stop receiving new promos and would need to make a hot fix to use the number two or number whatever ASAP – not good.
By that, me and my partner we agreed we would need to have at least three, and not two numbers anymore.
This way we would be able to segregate those responsabilities I’ve listed above in more elegant way.
Now
Now we have one number to do both receive new promos and act as our admin bot, and the other two numbers only to send promos to our groups.
Why add two responsabilities in a single number, instead of splitting equally between the three ones?
Cause WhatsApp doesn’t ban because you received a message. It only bans when it understands you’re spamming (sending).
This way, the receive number wouldn’t never gets banned.
To keep the costs down, it was a great move to add one more responsability for this same number: be our bot.
Why?
It sends a very few messages a day (like, less than 10), in a very small group (only me, my partner and the bot).
The chances of getting this number banned very, very very low.
So we decided to go this way and then we ended up with 2 numbers exclusively to send promos, which is great cause that’s the only responsability that may ban a number, so all the following numbers we may add, they will all be for sending promos and in case one gets banned, the other one is still alive and won’t break the opration, also will give us some time to add one more number to start sending promos (resiliency).