The GleepLog

At A Crossroads

Image via CrunchBase

I sat down tonight to renew my hosting contract for OtherNumber with A Small Orange and I realized that it had been 1 year since I first got started.

I started originally with a concept I called SayHQ (pronounced Saitsh Queue) and it was going to be a collection of relatively trivial solutions for stupid things like automated reminders and such using the Twilio API. 

Somebody I talked to about it at the time told it was a shitty idea and I quickly abandoned it.  Iterate quickly.  Die quickly.

So now it’s been 1 year since that’s point.  I almost can’t believe it already.  The first version of OtherNumber was brutally simple.  Crude even. Ok it looked awful.

Walter and I have now been building OtherNumber seriously since last May.  We’ve been focused on building a Virtual PBX for small business and startups to the exclusion of anything else. 

We were comparing ourselves to Google Voice and GrassHopper all along the way.  I felt like we had a good value proposition for a variety of reasons.

Google Voice doesn’t work for groups.  You can’t have > 1 phone number and you can’t have a Toll Free number.  You’re limited to 1 option for transcribing your voicemail and it sucks.  Google didn’t buy GV to provide a telephony service.  They have no interest in making it work for small businesses.

GrassHopper was harder to differentiate from.  We offered a lot of the same features.  They did faxes, we didn’t.  We offer SMS and they don’t.  I instead thought we could position ourselves on pricing structure and flexibility.  I think, in retrospect, that may have been a mistake. 

I had assumed that business owners would prefer a solution where they only paid for what they actually used.  We structured the system so that people could pay $9 per month per number and $0.03 a minute for usage.  Period.  No tiers, no plans, no contracts.  You want to use a number for 2 months and then abandon it? Fine. 

I was convinced that I was a revolutionary or at least at the vanguard of a movement.  Follow me to freedom from paying for services you haven’t consumed!!!

But I think I was wrong.  I talked to actual business owners and they looked at me like I had a screw loose.  They liked knowing what their bill was each month, even if it was a little high.  The idea of getting a bill for $27 one month and $43 the next and then $17 after that was a non-starter.

I was crushed.  My revolution was a 1 man march.

So now we find ourselves at a crossroads.  We have a couple of hard choices to make.

1. Keep trying to build/sell the Generic Virtual PBX product that’s hard to differentiate in a crowded marketplace
2. Pursue a different product tailored for a vertical or niche market.  We were thinking real-estate.  I could write a whole blog post about that. I think I will.

Real estate isn’t the only vertical but I was looking for something with the following characteristics:

1. Users that need better inbound marketing tools to differentiate themselves in a crowded market.
2. Industries with large transactions
3. Users where productivity is key and workflow that automates certain processes can be a huge advantage

The choice seems obvious.  It’s definitely a pivot point for us.  I knew it was coming but it’s still strange that it’s here if it happens at all.  But that’s another story.