We’re really an “internet search service” rather than a phone company
We’re not a traditional phone company at all. We’re basically the toll free search engine for all phone companies.
We only have two full time employees (Bill & Rita) and we do virtually no advertising at all, yet we have far more customers than anyone else in the vanity number business and do a far better job getting good numbers for our customers than any of the Fortune 500 telecom companies. We do a good job and we fill a real need within the industry.
The simplest way to describe our business is that we’re the “GoDaddy” of the phone number business. Virtually everyone else in the vanity number business follows a very different “SQUATTER” business plan, similar to domain name squatters that look for good names that they think someone will want, and then trying to sell (or worse yet to rent) them for as much as they can get. Squatters obviously don’t need to sell as many numbers as we do because they often get tens of thousands of dollars for them. We have to help an awful lot more customers than they do because most of our customers only pay a one time search fee of $49 for finding numbers from the spare pool.
We describe our business as an Internet Search Service because almost 90% of the thirty plus thousand dollars per month it costs us to provide this service, are internet, database and search related. The actual telecom costs associated with our service are nominal compared to our search related expenses. Regular phone companies are ultimately trying to sell the minutes of usage but we don’t sell that or even send any monthly bills at all. We only charge a one time “search fee” if we find and get someone a number. We’re also give them all end user and portability rights with no strings at all.
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Bill Quimby (678 comments.) says:
January 10, 2008 at 2:28 pm
Another way that I just realized you can tell this is an internet service is that, the only way to do searches, or to place orders is online. And it wasn’t until I was listening to Rita answer a couple calls that I also realized that the second question we ask is almost always, “Have you been to our website.”
The first question is “How can I help you?” and it’s funny that almost no matter what they say, the second question for any new prospect is almost always to ask if they’ve been to our website. That’s not as much the case for existing clients asking about how to transfer their number or other post sale issues.
This isn’t scientific or cast in stone by any means, but it does reinforce the fact that we are first and foremost, an internet service.