Dear startups, stop being afraid to show a phone number on your website

A lot of the reason why a phone number isn't used is because of the unpredictable and immediate nature that comes with that channel of communication. Not every company has enough people or time to be constantly distracted by phone calls. That plus society has taught us that a ringing phone must be answered if you're around or it is considered rude, whereas an email can be left for a while, digested, and replied to at a later point in time without being rude. More simply, I can answer many more emails, more accurately than the time it takes to handle an unknown, untriaged phone call that will likely require another call or email to followup the initial conversation anyway.

That being said. For those that need a phone number, this is a nice-looking service! :)

Why don't we list our phone numbers?

Because our company doesnt pay engineers 6 figures to answer support calls.

edit =

but your product looks awesome :)

Says the business in the business of business calls.

You know what I miss for instant support? IRC. It combines with instant gratification of phone calls with the crowd-support of forums or community support portals.

IRC obviously isn't mainstream and lacks features that some other systems have, but whenever I'm working on something and want a quick question answered that I can't get via google, I look for an IRC channel first.

Agree with this on many levels, however:

* Right now (as with many startups) we don't have the bandwidth to take out a 30 minute gap to speak with an interested customer - even if we wanted to! We just physically don't have enough people and can't hire fast enough already

* The cost of senior developers doesn't work for support or sales calls. And we don't want to have junior developers on the team this early because of the management overhead

* Talking on the phone effectively and efficiently requires a whole different skillset to technical, and it comes with experience and training

* The temptation is to outsource call handling in the early days, but from first hand experience, I know how easily these sub-par 'virtual assistants' can kill your brand as an educated customer will quickly see through the veil of BS that these sort of people put up. This one is a total no-no for tech startups. If there was a virtual assistant who specifically worked with tech startups, and had great product knowledge across the industry and could speak the language, now THAT I would pay for

* The prices and margins we're talking about don't always make sense for a sales call. How can I justify a 1 hour sales call on a $9 /mo subscription service? Forgetting all customer acquisition costs, hosting costs etc. I'd have to keep that user for 10 months just to break even on that very first phone call

I personally think the different business model of SaaS means traditional sales methods like phone calls where the customer decides the time of the call just don't work. One-to-many methods like webinars and screencasts, and pre-scheduled Skype calls for BIG leads, are the only things that make sense.

For support via phone, that's something which we CAN accommodate but as an upsell incentive. For example, on our $299+ plan, yeah sure you get a private support number, because I can justify the $90 per hour it costs for that engineer to speak with you.

Sorry to disagree on as many points as I'd agree on. However, I'd STRONGLY suggest looking into the "Tech Startup Friendly Call Answering" service with your Beta users as a possible pivot. An end-to-end solution, rather than a sexy PBX solution, would catapult the relevance of this to startups in my opinion and puts you as a market leader rather than in a market with 10+ strong competitiors

I saw AirCall popup ProductHunt a few days ago. Any chance I could ask for an early-invite? We're using a big of a hacked-together Twilio + Google Voice solution right now to route calls to the right employee at the moment.

i set up a google voice # for sales and support inquiries, which gets routed to my cell phone.

if anyone cares enough to want to speak with a company rep, as the CEO i'm more than happy to be that person. in fact i should be, for as long as i possibly can. you need to know your customers, and how else can you effectively train your sales and support reps?

anecdotally: Adora Cheung learned the cleaning biz as a cleaner. after raising $30M, she posed as a secret cleaner on Thanksgiving as a way of expressing gratitude. literally got her hands dirty. ;>

The profile of the phone in the AirCall icon looks really unergonomic and disturbing to me. It's like the illustrator has never held an old-school phone before

I know it is still beta but did not see these information on the main site. Which 40 countries? Estimated pricing?

Way ahead of you.

http://www.fogbeam.com/contact.html

It's cool that they have a phone number on their website. But how about pricing and contact email as well?

awesome build