The GleepLog

Virtual Telephony Changed Today

What Happened?

As you might have heard, Twilio launched a massive new product this morning that’s going make a huge dent in the Virtual PBX market.  It’s called OpenVBX.

A little history

Twilio flew me out to San Francisco in March to get a look at an early version and I was very impressed.  We had a weekend hackathon and created plugins for it… but more about that later.

The advent of VBX changed the course of my startup, OtherNum, drastically.  We had been constructing, for almost a year, a platform very similar.  We had some features VBX did not but over the course of that weekend I was able to start filling in those gaps.

Jeff and the team at Twilio had wanted me to come out and see VBX because they knew about OtherNum and were aware of the overlap between the products.  When Jeff first told us why we had been brought to SF (we didn’t know until that first morning) I was a little stunned but as we learned more about the platform the more I realized this was a very good thing for us.

Some of the things we had struggled with or were about to tackle (like a drag and drop call flow editor) were already in VBX.  It didn’t make sense for us to continue building OtherNum anymore.  Instead I chose to pursue some sub-niches instead of primary PBX-like functionality and to work on plugins for VBX.

So what is VBX? 

VBX is an open source web application that interacts with Twilio’s API to implement advanced telephony functions normally found in expensive equipment.

It’s exactly the right solution for businesses with virtual offices, remote personnel and startups.

Here’s why:

1. It never goes down

If the power goes it in your office your $10,000 PBX is going to go offline.  You’ve got battery backup? Are you sure?  What if a construction worker cuts the phone lines? 

With a hardware PBX, your entire phone infrastructure depends on its physical environment.  With a virtual PBX

2. It never fills up

With a hardware solution, the memory available is finite.  Sure, you can upgrade it but that costs money and takes time. VBX uses cloud storage for recordings so you’ll never have to shell out cash to add extensions or voicemail boxes.

3. It takes 5 minutes to get started

You’ve heard of the famous 5 minute WordPress install?  Yeah.  It’s like that.

1. pull down the code
2. create an empty database
3. change permissions on two sub-directories
4. pull it up in a browser and enter your Twilio credentials.
5. done.

Plugins

So what else is so great about VBX? Plugins.

You want to have your PBX interact with your Twitter or FourSquare account or change its behavior based on time of day.  You want your PBX to interact with Chirbit, MyCaption.com or BART.  If you had a hardware PBX it would NEVER happen.

VBX makes it possible to write a plugin that does that and more.

My Plugins

I wrote the plugins for Chirbit, FourSquare and MyCaption during that weekend in San Francisco. The FourSquare plugin caught the attention of a bunch of people including TechCrunch, GigaOM, Albert Wenger and Fred Wilson.  My head was spinning all morning!

My Other Favorite Plugins

Mark Condon wrote a plugin that allowed you to define prompts in English and used Google APIs to translate your text into French, German and other languages and then speak it to the caller.

Jonathan Kressaty wrote multiple plugins, one of which allows you to change the behavior of your phone system depending on the time of the day.

In Conclusion

I’m very excited to have been a part of the VBX community from such an early stage and I look forward to working with it going forward.  I think it’s a great product in a really cool space and it’s going to push the virtual telephony world forward a few notches and in a hurry.

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.