FounderPhone

A direct line for your top customers

Under 10 Employees
Multiple Founders
Founders Code
B2B
B2C
Bots
Communication
Productivity
Task Management

FounderPhone lets your team text with your customers directly from Slack. You give your customers your FounderPhone number, and your team can receive and send messages from your customers in Slack.

With FounderPhone, e

April 3, 2020 Rebranded and launched on Product Hunt!

We rebranded FounderPhone to Convey. We started FounderPhone for B2B founders to maintain a personal relationship with their customers via text, but the market just wasn't there.

BUT, customers were using us for marketing and support, and loved our Slack integration - being able to send, receive, and discuss text conversations with customers all from Slack.

So, we decided to rebrand FounderPhone to Convey, and just launched on Product Hunt. We're focusing on features to make it super easy to have highly personalized text conversations with customers at scale.

Check it out :)

https://www.producthunt.com/posts/convey-2

March 6, 2020 Hopefully the 3rd soft pivot will be the last :)

We've been releasing products in the customer success and support spaces for the past few months.

In early January, we released meettalkative.com, which let you see all visitors to your website or web app and video and text chat with them in app. We got a few customers but very low usage.

In early February, we released founderphone.com, which let you send and receive texts and calls directly from Slack. FounderPhone is going decently well and is at a couple hundred MRR with ~10 happy customers, but we realized there was a larger pain point in companies who communicate with their customers through Slack.

So, we just launched acrossapp.com, which helps companies who want to provide support and communicate with customers through Slack. We've built a ticketing system on top of Slack so you can manage open issues, automatically follow up with customers, and manage SLAs.

We have a lot more to build on our roadmap but the MVP is out, and we're working with a few initial customers to design a great experience in Slack. Hoping this one takes off!

February 19, 2020 Got to the front page of Hacker News!

We did a Show HN today and got to the front page with 91 upvotes and 40 comments! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22357517

The comments were mixed to say the least, which was tough to read...on the bright side, at least this showed that some people have an interest in using our product to communicate with their customers via SMS.

For those interested, this generated 2221 unique site visits and ~20 signups for free trials today.

We still have a lot to build, and are more excited than ever about our roadmap!

February 16, 2020 FounderPhone v3: Free trial and text campaigns

We've committed to a major release of founderphone.com every week and are continuing to build rapidly - well as rapidly a couple people can :)

This week we introduced:

  1. No CC required free trial for every customer
  2. Hubspot and Google integrations to pull your contacts directly into FounderPhone, as well as a CSV upload
  3. Automated text campaigns directly from FounderPhone!

As a reminder, FounderPhone lets you text and call your customers directly from Slack!

Kunal

February 8, 2020 Launched campaign to give away 20 free numbers

Hey all,

We need more feedback from other startup founders on founderphone.com, so we've decided to give away 20 free business phone numbers (U.S. numbers only) to other companies, along with 14 days of unlimited texting and calling. If you decide you don't want to stay with us after 14 days, we'll port the number to your carrier of choice!

FounderPhone is a VIP phone number for your top customers. We create a shared inbox for your team in Slack so that you can get back to your top customers asap via SMS or phone call. Give out your number to your largest customers, and ensure they always have a direct line to your team.

Please comment below, send me an email at [email protected], or text me at (510) 756-2522 if you're interested in receiving a number.

For more info you can also visit founderphone.com

February 5, 2020 Aiming for 1 release per week: FounderPhone v2

We just released our second version of FounderPhone (founderphone.com). We're trying to release a new version every week, which is really fun but also I suspect will become exhausting :)

Last week, we released our first version which allowed you to send and receive texts through Slack.

This release contains a lot more functionality, such as:

  1. Call forwarding - forward calls from your founderphone number to any other number
  2. Contact sync - sync your contacts from Google or Hubspot. Other CRMs are coming shortly
  3. Send images and videos - now supported!
  4. Auto-naming slack channels - we automatically name channels for your incoming texts by contact name
  5. Risk-free trials - implemented a 7 day free trial. If you decide to leave FounderPhone, we'll port the phone number to your carrier of choice, so you don't have to worry about giving out your number to a customer and being stuck

Coming soon: proactive alerts from Segment and Sentry so that you can communicate issues with your customer in real-time, WhatsApp support.

February 1, 2020 It's not much, but we have 5 paying customers!

We released FounderPhone (founderphone.com) last Tuesday, and posted a link to a bunch of places (IH, Facebook, Reddit). We also emailed a bunch of friends asking them to check it out!

And... we know have our first 5 paying customers! It's only $100 MRR, but at least it's something :)

For those who don't know, FounderPhone is a bat phone for your most important customers. If a VIP customer calls or texts the number, your team can respond with a personal touch as themselves or as YOU. The idea is to scale the "text the CEO" experience of an early startup.

September 22, 2019 Launched FounderPhone: a number for your customers

We just launched our latest product, FounderPhone: http://founderphone.com. We're getting faster at building / releasing with every new product :)

FounderPhone gives your most valuable customers a VIP hotline, a phone number for your top customers that your team can respond to in Slack.

We created FounderPhone as an internal tool to make communicating with our customers more personal, and decided to release it to the world in case its useful for other founders

Here's what FounderPhone does:

  1. Gives you a U.S. phone number to share with VIP customers, ensuring they have a direct line to your team

  2. Sends and receives text messages from that number directly from Slack

  3. Only messages after "@founderphone" in Slack get sent to the customer. Therefore, you can discuss responses / issues with your team in the same Slack channel as the one where you send and receive texts customer

  4. Forwards any calls directly to your personal phone number

  5. It's intended to be pretty cheap. 27 dollars per month for unlimited customers and 3 users at your company

About

FounderPhone lets your team text with your customers directly from Slack. You give your customers your FounderPhone number, and your team can receive and send messages from your customers in Slack.

With FounderPhone, e