Comment by agwa | Hacker News Reader

Comment by agwa | Hacker News Reader

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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.

The grandparent runs (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) 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.

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!

This practice of creating a lot of traffic on rural lines is known as traffic pumping. AFAIK the FCC has closed this loophole, stating that termination fees may not be collected for VOIP calls. IIRC this new rule will take effect in 2014.

BTW, FreeConferenceCalls know their model is doomed and are expanding as fast as they can into countries with phone systems modeled after the US one, where the loophole still persists. It's pretty clear, though, that their business isn't sustainable. My guess is that somebody will soon gobble up FreeConferenceCall for their customer database.

I always bet on Intercall when it comes to audioconferencing consolidation.

The real question is: Who's gonna get more spam, The old Acme Packet customers who are now getting spammed by Oracle or the soon-to-be-potentially-sold FreeConferenceCall.com clients?

Whoa, the US market is strange - Australians only pay for outbound minutes (mostly).

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.

Can you elaborate here? ;)

Not much more to say. At one point it was much cheaper to proxy media to Canada and back into the US than it was to route it straight state to state.

It has to do with treaties and international tariffs versus state to state. When you hit a certain scale, say Verizon scale, you get to have your traffic carried for free by the other major telcos. It's all a volume game.

In short, people without volume maximize the rules of the system in order to increase their margins. One such method was to pretend calls were coming in from Canada when they were actually state to state.

Another odd fact: Calls Intra-state (from one county to another) are just about universally more expensive than calls Inter-state. The reason is, when you call out of the state, more often than not, someone is paying for receiving that call, but when you call intra-state all of the cost is born by the local operator.

Cute, right?

there are also some further strange things in the US voip marketing. e.g. routing calls through specific states to get some grants,...

Thanks for looking into it, I really appreciate it and will mull over this for a while. A revamp of the pricing is pretty high on my list anyway.

I don't have any data to suggest that larger companies have bigger conference calls, but it may still help the value perception of more expensive plans to limit by number of callers. In fact, most of our $9/month customers aren't Professionals that charge $80-$200 per hour, but people that would otherwise use FreeConferenceCall et al and are already stingy about spending that much. A lot of "randos" signing up from Google or ads are very small companies, non profits, organization committees for various things etc. I like those customers and don't want to lose them, but I agree that I should find a way to separate them from the lawyers that sometimes get the $9/month plan as well.

The reason you'd need multiple lines is if you're multiple people. The premise of HipDial is that each person has their own, dedicated conference line and phone number. E.g. sales teams with a few people will sign up for the Team plan.

The viral mechanics actually work out pretty well like you said. That's the reason we have the free plan, too. On the free plan we used to even send text messages to the participants after the call, asking them to use HipDial as well, but those converted so badly and gave us such a bad rep that we canceled them.

A common way of separating people who can't afford to pay more & people who can afford more but currently aren't paying it is to introduce some form of inconvenience into the cheaper version.

The obvious thing to do is have a announcement to each person who dials in which advertises your service, and pay to allow people to customize/avoid that.

Alternatively, you could limit the length of calls on the cheaper plan. Poorer customers will just redial, richer ones will pay more to avoid it.

Is this similar in any respects to Speek (http://www.speek.com)? That company is killing it right now with a totally awesome product.

Very hard for me to tell. The nomenclature suggests use of the SpeeX codec, but I can't tell.

These companies break down into a few broad categories:

1) it's new technology (this is the holy shit category)

2) it's cheaper (IMHO boring)

3) it's higher quality (think uberconference)

4) It's a different experience (Grouptalent using conference bridges for interview screening)

Most of these services are of category 2 or 3 and aren't that interesting. The 1's and sometimes the 4's have the potential to be really cool.

I don't know where speek fits but I think it's a 2 or 3.

Edit: not to say 2 or 3 businesses can't be hugely profitable but they're less interesting to hackers. There are still Multi-billion markets for businesses in category 2 or 3. I happen to love the guys at Uberconference and think they have a great product as a sidenote.

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