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Comment by lionheart | Hacker News Reader

So first I have to grow this to some decent amount of usage where it even matters really planning out the long term. :)

But, the current plan is to charge the businesses that want to receive calls from their international customers for tracking and control.

We can allow the businesses to have branded links that auto-dial their number that they can share on their website, email, etc. With these they can also track the source of the caller, do call recording, and route the calls how they want.

For travel businesses, for example, that do business with primarily customers outside their country this is a problem that we can solve for them. Most people would never dial an international number, but they'll click a link and make a free call from their browser.

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> So first I have to grow this to some decent amount of usage where it even matters really planning out the long term. :)

Eh, if you avoid Level 3 and Bandwidth.com directly, and go to a wholesaler like Endstream, you won't need any volume. Just throw $20 in your account every few months and you should be good.

> But, the current plan is to charge the businesses that want to receive calls from their international customers for tracking and control.

Mmm, you could totes do this, make sure to use Opus and pitch it as Full HD Audio (better than that tin can HD that carriers are pushing now). Grandstream supports Opus straight to their deskphones by the way, so you may wanna look at them. Their middling quality, but rock bottom price wise.

> branded links that auto-dial their number ... track the source of the caller

How do you plan to get the caller's name?

Also, travel businesses might be a viable model for this, I'd just encourage you to think outside the box, what other areas could use this kind of service?

Thanks for the advice!

I'll look into those providers and see what I can set up. If I can get the costs down by an order of magnitude that would obviously be amazing.

As for tracking the source of the caller, I'm not talking about their name but how they came to the website to that then generated the call. Whether thats though organic search, PPC, advertising, some random forum post, etc. It's a lot easier to get exact referral information when the call is a web event rather than an actual phone call.

So I can understand this. You're sort of offering an international 1800 number? Except instead of using a phone number prefix, you're using links and WebRTC? It does sound pretty cool.

Yeah, that's a good way to put it. Thanks!

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