Hi, I've been working for the past year on this app to make conference calling multiple people as simple as a making a regular phone call.
With conference calls you need to dial a number and then a PIN. It can get pretty costly if you're based outside the US/UK and have to dial internationally.
The app leverages Twilio to handle calling people in 280+ countries. It uses the cheapest rate and allows you to setup calls immediately or schedule them in the future.
When the call time arrives the app rings everyone and drops them into a conference room.
The landing page is entirely dedicated to sign up. I'm lazy. I won't sign up unless I have to. The landing page has no information about the product that makes me want to sign up. There's more information about product in your comment than on the page. In fairness if the information in the comment was on the page, I wouldn't sign up because the product does not solve a need I have. For me, most products don't...I don't use Uber either.
Yeah, conference calling is a niche industry, but a fairly big one. I'm hoping the app can find a place. What we're trying to do is literally change the way people make phone calls so you never need to remember or enter a phone number.
If you change your mind and fancy messing around with the app feel free, I've coded it so that anyone who signs up this month gets $5.00 free call credit (about 4 hours of US/UK calls).
We support up to 250 participants per call (start with 10 though) so if you fancy going nuts, making the app fall over or something do :)
Marketing isn't a bad thing on Hacker News. There are behaviors associated with marketing that HN deals with efficiently. These include getting attention by an annoying number of posts. I think you're probably far from that. A few posts a few days apart is unlikely to be considered spam. If you're concerned about overstepping HN norms, maybe contact the moderators using the |contact| link.
Show HN is explicitly designed for people like you to market their projects. It seems like you value HN, but are maybe erring too much on the side of caution.
For what it's worth, your conclusions about what a large market means may be causing you to avoid finding customers one a time. Big established markets mean that most potential customers already have something that lessens the problem. They're not out actively looking. The recurrent cost -- a $5 credit -- is often not the major cost. Time spent figuring out if your product meets their needs is more important...I mean, five bucks is nice, and consumers may switch for it. A well run business spends more money in salary when an employee looks at the landing page. Deploying a new app at scale means changing a business process. That's where a new app fits into the ecosystem.
Hi everyone, I am a developer on this cool project. Will be glad to answer any question you might have regarding the functionality, payment integration, etc. Keep playing with the app and make fun calls with your friends and why not make serious calls as well :)
Looking forward to help you to get familiar with the app more and more...
Sadly the cost of making phone calls internationally or even locally isn't free. Our prices are amongst the lowest. We want to drive them down far lower once we hit volume and scale for market share rather than profit.
For example our biggest competitor in the UK charges 5.8p/min just for UK landlines. A call using your example of 9 participants for one hour would cost a whopping £31.32 and that assumes all UK participants. It would cost far north of that if the participants were US and India based.
Feel free to give us a spin - there's no credit card required or any kind of hard sell tactics - we even made it easy to delete your account too once you've used up your introductory credit :) We launched a few months ago and getting useful criticism at this early stage is invaluable.
With conference calls you need to dial a number and then a PIN. It can get pretty costly if you're based outside the US/UK and have to dial internationally.
The app leverages Twilio to handle calling people in 280+ countries. It uses the cheapest rate and allows you to setup calls immediately or schedule them in the future.
When the call time arrives the app rings everyone and drops them into a conference room.
Any feedback or questions appreciated!