I run BenkoPhone which is the only business mobile number app in Australia that supports voice, txt and picture messages, currently 211 paid users in 50 different companies and $100k ARR.
The very first version was an old Android phone sitting on my desk that I connected to Trello for messaging and Bria for voice calls, for a handful of clients.
We later launched an app, but we didn't build the app ourselves we licensed it from a 3rd party vendor who does white labelling, and we used their demo version to sell the first corporate customer, who's setup costs paid for the white label one-off licensing costs.
Then we developed a proprietary, scalable hardware platform to manage the connections so we don't have to use Android phones anymore, but we still don't have our own VoIP stack, so when customers express interest in a free trial, we have to firstly contact each one to make sure they're genuine (almost all free trial requests are from scammers). Once they have tried the product, they put their details into DIFFERENT TypeForm, then we have to manually enter those details into our VoIP reseller platform and create the users and devices in the PBX, then we have to email our mobile carrier to provision the numbers because we don't have a direct wholesale connection yet.
That whole process can be automated once we have a different VoIP platform and have wholesale carrier connections.
The very first version was an old Android phone sitting on my desk that I connected to Trello for messaging and Bria for voice calls, for a handful of clients.
We later launched an app, but we didn't build the app ourselves we licensed it from a 3rd party vendor who does white labelling, and we used their demo version to sell the first corporate customer, who's setup costs paid for the white label one-off licensing costs.
Then we developed a proprietary, scalable hardware platform to manage the connections so we don't have to use Android phones anymore, but we still don't have our own VoIP stack, so when customers express interest in a free trial, we have to firstly contact each one to make sure they're genuine (almost all free trial requests are from scammers). Once they have tried the product, they put their details into DIFFERENT TypeForm, then we have to manually enter those details into our VoIP reseller platform and create the users and devices in the PBX, then we have to email our mobile carrier to provision the numbers because we don't have a direct wholesale connection yet.
That whole process can be automated once we have a different VoIP platform and have wholesale carrier connections.