Launch Announcement

[VOIPoTim]

We are officially ready for a launch countdown.

If all goes as planned, here's what we're looking at...

Launch Timeline

We're wrapping up odds and ends and addressing staffing for CS and Level 1 support through the end of the month. There really is nothing major left to do outside of more hiring.

The first week of August, we'll be doing a limited softlaunch. At this point, we'll be taking orders from our VIP Launch Group, select groups of HostGator customers, and from referrals generated by existing customers. This primarily is time to get some real CS scenarios covered and have some "practice" in that area before the traffic starts coming in.

The first week of September, we'll be opening things up publicly and will be accepting signups directly.

We are expecting substantial volume from HostGator. Even though we will purposely not be active pushing the service initially via HostGator, there will be a lot of passive volume just due to numbers. Remember, we host over 1.2 million domains and are adding tens of thousands of customers monthly. HostGator also carries a lot of clout in the hosting industry which will lead to high-profile launch at least within the web hosting industry. We may or may not need to place limitations on orders, but depending on volume, if we need to stop accepting orders briefly we may do so at that point. It's a great problem to have, but getting 50K signups during the first month in production is NOT a good situation.

Once we're past the initial rush, we'll be slowly adding various partners to the mix....we've had a lot of time to work out some pretty decent deals in this area. As an example, VOIPo ATAs are going to be offered on Amazon.com.

From that point on, we'll slow ramp up marketing and introduce the reseller program. We expect to signup 100-200K customers from HostGator within the first 12 months based on projections.

Immediate Future

Next week, you'll see a new teaser site up.

We'll also be sending an e-mail to the VIP Launch Group list and posting various public information including plans, pricing, launch promotions, availability info, policies, and FAQs.

Founder's Club Plan

Currently we have over 1,000 phone numbers active. With that being said, some are HostGator employee accounts and many are in inactive accounts. Some are active, but the account holders have never even registered and posted.

We expect to clean up all accounts in July and will be contacting all account holders with options for keeping the accounts at launch.

We appreciate the feedback and encouragement that we've received from those of you that did post and participate. With that being said, we are going to offer a Founder's Club Plan. Anyone with an existing residential account in the beta will be able to convert it to this plan at launch.

The plan offers the same functionality as our standard residential plans, but will be priced at a flat $10 monthly or $99 yearly.

We're not making any money at all on that, so it will only be available for a limited time at launch primarily to thank those who are active and participated. This rate would remain in effect for the life of the account.

We also plan to still maintain a private beta group for you guys (and likely some new people as well) where we can get ideas and feedback for improving future versions of the service.


Of course this is subject to change, but we're feeling very good about launching within these timeframes. Thanks again to all of you for your help as we've prepared for this.