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Hello HN, First of all, let me say that this community is a bit guilty that I left my job two years ago and launched a startup, so I wanted to share it with yo
by carlesfe 11y ago
Hello HN,
First of all, let me say that this community is a bit guilty that I left my job two years ago and launched a startup, so I wanted to share it with you :)
We are doing a soft launch of Puput, a service that lets you hear your emails (and more) for free when you have no internet, with a missed call. We've spent some time doing R+D in the telephony field and we saw that the "tone" that plays before a phone pickup can be changed from the server, so that's what we did.
After experimenting with email login, we decided to structure the product as an email inbox, where you can forward important emails using filters, and this address will misscall you when there is a new message. You don't pick up that call, but misscall back. Then the server will play a TTS (or a voice memo, if attached) with the email contents, and hang up... without picking up.
We decided to launch it for free to get feedback and see its acceptance. We plan to make money with custom integrations, basically doing consulting to integrate Puput with businesses. We have more complex products which we think aren't very attractive to end users, but can be interesting for businesses: slack integration (call everyone to make sure a message is received), broadcast audio messages with a single call, alert escalation like pagerduty, package tracking using GPS without a data plan...
It's difficult to find which uses are the best fit for a "new" technology, so we decided to tell hackers first -- data with missed calls is actually new, but it seems we are the first ones to use it in production.
Some friends already signed up, and nothing has exploded yet.
We’d really, really love your feedback. It’s a service built by hackers, for hackers, and we chose email specifically because it is scriptable and decentralized (read more here https://medium.com/@puput_io/email-will-not-be-killed-ce4387b27ae6#.kll4us1mr https://medium.com/@puput_io/email-will-not-be-killed-ce4387...)
It all started with a simple asterisk hack which sent data to a Postfix filter... and here we are today! I think it’s pretty cool.
Please share your feedback!
Carlos
- guinez 11y agoI see this as interesting tool to monitor our system. we are currently using pagerduty that has also phone calls (I personally prefer calls than SMS). I think calls are pretty cheap in US but they charge you more in Europe. . I definetilly will give a try. Good luck!