In this episode:
- Why Still Early and the Phone.inc vlog are two different shows, and who each one is for
- Phone.inc has 15-20 companies live on their own infrastructure, and the inbound is getting hard to keep up with
- The two kinds of partnership Niklas thinks are actually worth doing (and why most aren't)
- Niklas hired a head of engineering in about a day
- Peter got orbpilled: three days on Amp, a form builder and a kanban board, none of it built on a laptop
- Nanoform's entire interface is a prompt you paste into an agent
Phone.inc has started letting people onto the platform, slowly, and it's all running on their own infrastructure now. 15-20 companies so far, a mix of people with a real need and friends of the house who are good at giving feedback. The whole team ran the signup flow and did a friction log, which produced 20-25 issues in Linear, and Niklas had Cursor agents fix the ones he agreed with (watching cards move across the board by themselves was apparently pretty great).
The pull is different this time. Random people calling Niklas's private phone because they heard about it, 55 unanswered LinkedIn messages, an inbox he gave up on and archived. Lea pulled him aside to point out they never felt anything like this in all the Firmafon years.
Partnerships too, which Niklas would normally tell founders to avoid (usually all motion, no customers, and Peter got burned this way with Branch). But two categories look real: vertical SaaS platforms where the customer data lives, so a call can come in with context attached, and incorporation platforms where you catch a company at day one and never get switched out.
He also hired Marcel as head of engineering. They'd worked together at Trustpilot and Whimsical, the whole team met him the same day, signed eight minutes later. Thomas made the first Android call too, with the business logic shared in Swift and the apps still native.
Then Peter, who has had a slightly unhinged week. He tried an OpenClaw-style setup, didn't click, and then Adam told him to try Amp's orbs. He's now completely orpilled. The point isn't the agent, it's not needing a dev environment at all: spin up an orb, get a URL, comment directly on the thing, review it later. He built a hosted version of Nanoform this way, where you never touch a form builder (you paste a prompt with a link to the agents file, the agent builds the form, you click claim). He also added JSON bodies and kanban boards to Memo, which agents can update by patching JSON. All of it from his phone, including one session from the corner of Max Burgers.
They also get into where this breaks down: iOS builds, push notifications, FreeSWITCH. Niklas thinks Phone.inc will have to build those runners themselves.
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Still Early is sponsored by
Phone.inc: a business phone number, welcome greeting, call routing, and opening hours, all from an app on your personal phone.
