We have been and are involved in many phases of start-ups over the years. These range from serious development of the back-end of voice based apps or networks to security and fraud prevention to voice and messaging enabled social media. Some projects that come into our office we join some we are not able to work with. Some have gone to find the big payout while others faded away.

Our philosophy when evaluating a telecom related start-up is different. Normally, people look for a business model and market potential. We don’t look into those at all, the only reason we care about the go-to-market strategy it because it has the tendency to show how original the team is and “worse case” scaling considerations.

We usually dig into the projected operational structure of the business. Telecom business is based almost in its entirety on operations. Under this category the main components are fulfillment, support, billing, customer-care, etc. Customers have different expectations for a telecom product than they do a game app, and we take this into account and plan for it.

It’s more than OK to use cloud infrastructure, as long as it’s a IaaS.  It’s a telecom service, not a web-site or web-based service. You need to monitor ASRs, ACDd, MoS Scores, monitor packets – the fact that your host pings, doesn’t mean everything is OK.

Most importantly, if you are an Internet guy making your first steps in the Telecom industry – be ready to step out of your comfort zone. While using existing tools like Adhearsion, pyAsterisk, PHPAGI, Asterisk, FreeSwitch, Kamailio may look totally alien to you – this is your new world – learn to like it and deal with it. Don’t super-impose your existing skill set into this world – it won’t hold water. Unlike the web, where anything is possible, telecom isn’t like that – both technical and business.

If you need help defining, developing, building, supporting, or growing your telecom idea we can help.
We provide development for:
a. WebRTC development
b. Telecom Development
c. Voice Services
d. Telecom related mobile apps (Android and IOS)
e. Integrating Voice into Word Press or FaceBook apps

Contact us if you want more information or to bounce ideas off of us, we are willing to listen and give a bit of advice, also keep an eye out for VoIP on Tap meetings where we discuss start-ups.