TellFi (YC W11) Is Google Voice For Companies | Hacker News Reader

TellFi (YC W11) Is Google Voice For Companies

techcrunch.com

95 pointsjmorin00738 comments

In what way is this better than any of the other hosted PBX solutions out there? I don't see the novelty here. Even the "advanced" stuff, like voice mail transcription, have been standard features at virtual PBXs for years now.

We've used existing hosted PBX systems to run our phone systems in the past, and found them bulky and difficult to setup. We're targeting ease of use and quick setup - we aren't advertising that we have new features at our core, but the method of getting to those features and setting them up is a snap.

I'm not trying to be argumentative and I don't want to talk too much about who we use (I wouldn't want to endorse or anything) but it took like 20 minutes to get up and running with them.

Have you worked out how you compare pricingwise to the RingCentrals of the world?

we're working with our telephony providers to keep the pricing as low as possible, and will also be adding a some new features soon to further differentiate.

How do you compete with someone like grasshopper.com ? They seem to have more features, are much cheaper for >500 minutes and I would imagine are just as easy to setup. Although, I haven't used either of you.

Then you look at something like OpenVBX, which would be significantly cheaper ($1/month for number, 1c per minute incoming) if you don't mind setting it up.

We're focused on usability as our primary offering. Setting up phone systems is major pain point for a lot of businesses, esp kinds that can't host their own VBX :)

grasshopper is easy to use and setup as well. set it and forget it. in fact, i actually forgot we were even using grasshopper until i saw this article.

if it is the same or better than grasshopper, you guys will do well in the smb space.

There actually are not too many good providersin this space. The only I can think of off-hand are Phonebooth and Grasshopper. Most of the others are much too cumbersome.

I can name at least 2 other independent companies doing this that are low-drama and easy to set up.

Their site says: More dependable & better quality than other services TellFi works with the phones you have. So, unlike VoIP, you still receive calls if your Internet connection is down. Which seems to happen to everyone from time to time. Plus, call quality is always great. This answers the main objection to virtual PBX that our business had.

Uh... we get calls when our Internet is down too. Always did. We're not using Vonage or something. I think the verdict is that there have been companies doing exactly what TellFi does for many years now, and many of them appear to be significantly cheaper.

I wonder if this is a sign that YC is admitting too many startups and that the company-advisor ratio has fallen out of whack. This space is extremely crowded, and a lot of companies are already doing it very well (and cheaper).

It's not their fault that TechCrunch wrote an article begging people to make these comparisons. It's perfectly fine to launch a Grasshopper competitor; it's just a dumb idea to pitch it as "Google Voice for Companies", as if companies didn't have this stuff long before Google had Voice.

I chatted with their support, and out of the box(*) they don't allow you to call out from the company phone number. So if you make an outgoing call and the callee decides to return it, it will be returned to your personal cell phone during lunch time with the family, not to your business phone with voceimail etc. In detail, they said it's case by case, and that it might be illegal if not done right(!?), so they have to "handle it with care". Obviously, I wouldn't have the patience for it.

I actually do not mind the pricing that much, but they have to deliver on convenience 100%, and exposing a private phone numbers is an inconvenience.

Also, the additional external line pricing is not posted on the site - support said it will be about $8 in most cases.

Hi, I handled your support question. Sorry for any confusion. Your specific question pertained to 'caller-id spoofing', which is where I believe the confusion occurred. Spoofing of a phone number which you do not own is illegal, which is the case I was referring to. Outbound calling from within the web application is not currently supported.

Well, I didn't ask you to spoof the number I don't own, I asked you to spoof the number I do own. It's the phone number you (would have) sold me! Wouldn't I own it after handing over the money and becoming able to receive calls on it?

Sounds like there was some confusion earlier. We are chatting with 20 people at once right now on Olark, it's easy to get lost. Please email us at support@tellfi.com and we'll figure everything out for you.

Other than instant startup, how does this differ from Phonebooth.com?

We've been very happy with them, at $20/month unlimited calling.

We (Convore Inc) were an early beta user of TellFi. In about 5 minutes we were able to get a phone number and have that phone number go straight to voicemail and email us the voicemail. Perfect!

My company got a sneak peak using TellFi, and I'm pretty excited about it. We don't yet have a physical location, but using their service we were able to get a business number and setup menu systems ("for such-and-such, press 2") with appropriate forwarding to our cell phones. This gives us a legitimacy we otherwise wouldn't have.

Just as I personally don't see the point for a land line now that I've got a cell phone, I likewise don't see why I would want to worry about getting a real phone system when we have TellFi.

I did a review for RingCentral [1] which offers similar features to TellFi, and honestly so far i have not been impressed by the features offered by these hosted PBX services.

I have found that many have clunky interfaces that were not easy to set up and configure AND once configured it was hard to go back and change something.

It certainly is nice to have a service that allows ringing multiple phones, and has better support for multiple lines unlike Google Voice, but for now I will stick with Google Voice for my business for the one or two calls I get, as it is simple to use and free.

RingCentral was nice in that it provided an iPhone application and made it extremely simple to dial-out using your 1-800 number from that application, but the iPhone app did not provide access to contacts that were already on the phone [2] and required setting them up through their system with no easy way to sync them (all of my business contacts are stored on my business'es Google Mail account, I don't want to duplicate that).

[1]: http://www.osnn.net/submitted-news/99624-ringcentral-virtual... (A site I am an administrator on) [2]: I reviewed their services in March of 2010.

How does this improve, or differ from, Toktumi (http://toktumi.com/Whytoktumi.aspx)? At first glance, they appear quite similar, with perhaps Toktumi edging ahead on features.

One of our main focus points is usability, building something that anyone can sign up and use immediately. we actually removed a number of features pre-launch, just so it make the core functions as simple as possible.

that is the saddest looking screenshot.

New screenshots added to the article.

Are they using twilio/ tropo on their back end? Just curious

It looks like a rebranded OpenVBX which runs off of Twilio. If anyone has an account, it'd be easy to check... search for an available number in TellFi for a given area code and also do the same search in Twilio. If you find the same number in both places, there's your answer.

You think Twilio owns all of those phone numbers? They are most likely just using another API as well.

It's not. We built this from the ground-up.

Can you talk at all about your infrastructure then? Is it powered by asterisks, FREEswitch, something else, ?

That's kind of steep pricing IMO as far as the minutes are concerned. I can get an OOMA for $200 + $100 / year with 2 lines, 5000 minutes and lots of other features.

As I posted on the other thread (saw that one first, but this has more comments): How is this different from Phone.com's virtual office, which has been out for at least a couple years now? http://www.phone.com/products/virtual-office/

We had an early beta of this. It literally takes 2 minutes to set up a phone for your business and take call routing, voice mail,etc.

Congrats on the launch Jason + Conor!

Oh! Look what I found: http://inumbr.com/features

$6.99/mo, 120 minutes, control outgoing caller id. Cool!

any services like this available for the uk?

Unfortunately right now we only support US and Canadian numbers.

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