In this episode:
- Peter's first day at Phone.inc (office breakfast, a design sync, and half an hour picking Lea's brain about the customer journey)
- He didn't have to set up a local dev environment, and made his first PR through Amp
- Jesse Hanley from Bento tweeted that he didn't want to be on the waitlist, which turned into a bunch of new signups
- Phone.inc hit the September goal of 100 companies (124 now), with about 15% of free users converting to paid
- Niklas hired a VP of sales, starting November 1
- What does an activated user look like for a phone number that might never ring?
Peter started full time at Phone.inc on Thursday. He filmed the whole day for a vlog (the coffee machine, the car door, the drive to Copenhagen in his right-hand drive manual from 2012). Lea had ordered breakfast, then came standup, the Thursday design sync that Katrine runs, and a priorities call with Niklas (who was home with his kids after three days of travelling). After lunch he spent half an hour asking Lea where customers are right now.
The nicest surprise was that he probably doesn't need a local development environment at all. Everything was already set up in Amp, so he typed into a text box, got a tour of the app and the website, and had staging sites created for him. His first PR was adding the Bento logo to the website.
On Friday Peter woke up early and saw that Jesse Hanley from Bento had tweeted that he needed a number and didn't want to be on the waitlist. Peter had gotten admin access the night before, so he invited Jesse and a few others from Twitter. That led to a lot of tweets back and forth, new followers and a bunch of signups. Jesse asked how this can be free. His use case is simple, Phone.inc runs its own voice infrastructure so the cost is low, and him tweeting about it is worth more than what he would've paid.
Phone.inc hit the September goal of 100 companies and is at 124 now. Around 15% of free users convert to paid, and there are no gates yet (just an upgrade button). There are paying customers in the US, the UK and Finland, and the US has passed Denmark in the last 50 waitlist signups.
Niklas spent two days in Stockholm at a go-to-market meetup one of their investors organized. A revenue leader from a fast-growing AI company talked about running self-serve and enterprise sales at the same time (most of their early enterprise deals started on the self-serve side). Niklas also hired a VP of sales, someone he's worked with before who builds direct sales teams from zero. He starts November 1, and there'll probably be a sales team from January.
Peter is in the Copenhagen office two or three days a week for meetings, feedback and lunch, with remote days for deep work. He's still sorting out the logistics (a new electric car, a school carpool, the right train, and moving house in two weeks).
Peter is responsible for activation now, and it's hard to define for a phone number. Jesse might never get a call and still be an active user. Niklas wants one simple metric (weekly active companies that made or received a call), plus softer signals like whether the number is on the company's website. They talked about a test call button, asking people at signup why they need a number, and what to do with free numbers nobody has used for six months. Neither of them thinks there's a right answer yet.
Niklas keeps both his notes and his tasks in Linear, in a private team, and adds to it by talking to Claude in the car.
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.
