4 ms·

I'm a bit of a telecom geek (though josh2600 undoubtedly knows more than me, as he works in the industry), so I decided to check out your startup. I agree you

by agwa 13y ago

I'm a bit of a telecom geek (though josh2600 undoubtedly knows more than me, as he works in the industry), so I decided to check out your startup. I agree you should have nice, fat margins. Remember, you should be setting pricing based on how much your customers are willing to pay, not how much it costs you. For that reason, I think you should segment your plans based on max number of participants, even though this probably costs you nothing. I would think that this would be the best way to segment out customers willing to pay more: if I'm a small business or a freelancer, I'm not going to have many people on my conference calls, but if I'm a larger business with deeper pocketbooks, I'm going to have large conference calls and thus be driven to the more expensive plans. Even if your software isn't ready to enforce the limit, consider adding it to the pricing grid anyways to see if you get more signups on the bigger plans. Your lowest plan also feels too inexpensive to me, especially since those customers are probably responsible for a disproportionate number of support requests.

gridspy 13y ago
The grandparent runs (https://www.hipdial.com/ https://www.hipdial.com/) about which the parent and I are talking. Those plans are far too lean. Also, I don't understand what a "local line" is when I go directly to your pricing page. I also don't understand what a "toll free line" is. Specifically I don't know why I need 5 lines. I don't run a pure SaaS (http://gridspy.com http://gridspy.com) but $9 / mo? These people are not employees. They have profits. We had to fight the same tendancy to offer unrealistically low prices. Your typical "professional" will bill $80-$200 / hr while on the conference call. They'd swallow $40 + You probably don't need a free plan, though you might want to consider a prepaid one. Bill on minutes or something. I'd consider eliminating it entirely. Team should be about $200 and business you should be thinking $1000 / month plus. I also think that segmenting based on max people per conference makes a lot of sense. It would also be simpler to bill based on "number of conferences" rather than "number of minutes" and trigger a new "conference" when a call extends beyond 1 hour. Higher prices should support more marketing work. You'd be surprised - higher prices will make your clients think that your product is more valuable and thus more likely to try it out. You've also got a viral element. Your users are telling others about you (to invite them to the conference). Ask them to put each person's phone number and email addresses into the system so you can send reminders to each participant before the meeting. In those reminders, I suggest you offer a "coupon" for 1-5 free conference calls to that guest. You might only want to do so if the guest has an email from a different domain. Monitor for abuse. This will help you get natural viral marketing underway. Another alternative is to build a followup email after the conference ends that has details on who joined the meeting, how long they talked, a downloadable recording (?) and their contact details. I hope this helps. It looks like you have a nice product.
- josh2600 13y ago
  A quick note on how the conference calling industry actually works... 1) Most BIG conference calling companies are registered as competitive local exchange carriers. 2) As CLECs, these companies get to charge for inbound traffic. 3) Charge customers per minute in addition for insane profit. Companies like FreeConferenceCall.com are basically ignoring the subscriber revenue in exchange for only the inbound tariff (that's their industry disruption). Example: I setup a conference call bridge on FreeConferenceCall.com and I call in. One other person joins me. I call in on my cellphone and so does the other person. Neither one of us pays for long distance so we don't care, but on the backend, FreeConferenceCall.com is billing our cell providers $.30 per minute. That's the reason GoogleVoice blocks those numbers, because Google is already eating $.004/min for US numbers, they can't afford to eat calls that cost $.30/min; that's nuts. This is the same business model that powers MagicJack as well. Just a quick FYI. Paying people for inbound minutes is only for folks that don't have enough volume to get a CLEC-level agreement (you can get CLECs to sell you inbound for $0 or even to pay you for the traffic if you have enough volume). The beauty of Twilio's business model is that they get all of the aggregation benefits of your traffic. Does that help? Edit: Also the comment I'm replying to has a ton of great advice!
  - voltagex_ 13y ago
    Whoa, the US market is strange - Australians only pay for outbound minutes (mostly).
    - josh2600 13y ago
      You have no idea. When I first came in it was a common practice to bounce calls up to Canada because the intercountry rate was better than interstate.
      - voltagex_ 13y ago
        Can you elaborate here? ;)

by agwa 13y ago

gridspy 13y ago

The grandparent runs (https://www.hipdial.com/ https://www.hipdial.com/) about which the parent and I are talking. Those plans are far too lean. Also, I don't understand what a "local line" is when I go directly to your pricing page. I also don't understand what a "toll free line" is. Specifically I don't know why I need 5 lines. I don't run a pure SaaS (http://gridspy.com http://gridspy.com) but $9 / mo? These people are not employees. They have profits. We had to fight the same tendancy to offer unrealistically low prices. Your typical "professional" will bill $80-$200 / hr while on the conference call. They'd swallow $40 + You probably don't need a free plan, though you might want to consider a prepaid one. Bill on minutes or something. I'd consider eliminating it entirely. Team should be about $200 and business you should be thinking $1000 / month plus. I also think that segmenting based on max people per conference makes a lot of sense. It would also be simpler to bill based on "number of conferences" rather than "number of minutes" and trigger a new "conference" when a call extends beyond 1 hour. Higher prices should support more marketing work. You'd be surprised - higher prices will make your clients think that your product is more valuable and thus more likely to try it out. You've also got a viral element. Your users are telling others about you (to invite them to the conference). Ask them to put each person's phone number and email addresses into the system so you can send reminders to each participant before the meeting. In those reminders, I suggest you offer a "coupon" for 1-5 free conference calls to that guest. You might only want to do so if the guest has an email from a different domain. Monitor for abuse. This will help you get natural viral marketing underway. Another alternative is to build a followup email after the conference ends that has details on who joined the meeting, how long they talked, a downloadable recording (?) and their contact details. I hope this helps. It looks like you have a nice product.

josh2600 13y ago
A quick note on how the conference calling industry actually works... 1) Most BIG conference calling companies are registered as competitive local exchange carriers. 2) As CLECs, these companies get to charge for inbound traffic. 3) Charge customers per minute in addition for insane profit. Companies like FreeConferenceCall.com are basically ignoring the subscriber revenue in exchange for only the inbound tariff (that's their industry disruption). Example: I setup a conference call bridge on FreeConferenceCall.com and I call in. One other person joins me. I call in on my cellphone and so does the other person. Neither one of us pays for long distance so we don't care, but on the backend, FreeConferenceCall.com is billing our cell providers $.30 per minute. That's the reason GoogleVoice blocks those numbers, because Google is already eating $.004/min for US numbers, they can't afford to eat calls that cost $.30/min; that's nuts. This is the same business model that powers MagicJack as well. Just a quick FYI. Paying people for inbound minutes is only for folks that don't have enough volume to get a CLEC-level agreement (you can get CLECs to sell you inbound for $0 or even to pay you for the traffic if you have enough volume). The beauty of Twilio's business model is that they get all of the aggregation benefits of your traffic. Does that help? Edit: Also the comment I'm replying to has a ton of great advice!
- voltagex_ 13y ago
  Whoa, the US market is strange - Australians only pay for outbound minutes (mostly).
  - josh2600 13y ago
    You have no idea. When I first came in it was a common practice to bounce calls up to Canada because the intercountry rate was better than interstate.
    - voltagex_ 13y ago
      Can you elaborate here? ;)