Bootstrapping An Innovative Telecom Services Startup: Callture Co-founders Mamoon Rashid and Siva Sanmuga (Part 4)

Sramana: How do you feel about Skype being acquired by Microsoft?

Siva Sanmuga: They will probably use Skype to go after very large enterprises since that seems to be their primary focus.

Sramana: Microsoft has a huge presence in small businesses also. Does Microsoft using Skype in that space not scare you?

Mamoon Rashid: We have gone through a lot of ups and downs. We have always tried to look at it from a bright perspective and take opportunities when possible. Skype is a threat to several companies for long distance so we leveraged them in our platform to take advantage of it. We’ll see what Microsoft does and see if we can leverage what they use Skype for.

Sramana: How do you position yourselves against Grasshopper or RingCentral?

Siva Sanmuga: We provide the all the services that Grasshopper provides. There are several companies who are direct competitors in this space. One differentiation is that we keep our costs very low.

Sramana: What is the price of your virtual PBX solution?

Siva Sanmuga: Our average price is $9.95 per account.

Sramana: That is a comparative price range as Grasshopper and Ring Central.

Siva Sanmuga: The key is that we have an entry level product that starts at $4.95. We then try to sell people on upgrading their service to get additional features. The initial $4.95 product is a very basic toll-free service.

Sramana: How has your customer acquisition strategy evolved over the years?

Mamoon Rashid: Initially we did all of our customer acquisition via search engine optimization. Shortly afterwards we started an agent program and a reseller program. These programs helped us get a large agent network that provides business to their local markets. We still have those programs in place. We are trying to leverage other online media more.

Sramana: What kind of people were agents or resellers?

Mamoon Rashid: Agents are businesses that want to offer Callture service. They just refer customers to us, and we give them a percentage of revenue. We have a reseller program which is a white label program whereby a person can establish their own company name and identity and we do the entire development and integration. They market the product under their name as a white label program.

Sramana: Are these channels successful?

Mamoon Rashid: The agent program was very successful originally and it is still going, but we have not focused heavily on it because we are trying to gather clients ourselves via online marketing.

Sramana: The online marketing version of the agent model you are describing is tried and true, and it is known as affiliate marketing. It is a highly scalable marketing model, whereas keeping track of manual agents is not scalable.

Mamoon Rashid: They may do the work offline, but in order to follow our process they still have to come online. They get the client offline but then they have to enter their information on the form and the entire process from there forward is online. We call them agents internally, but it really is the same thing as an affiliate program.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Bootstrapping An Innovative Telecom Services Startup: Callture Co-founders Mamoon Rashid and Siva Sanmuga
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