Launch! 🚀
I love starting a new blog. Posting consistently has been a struggle for years, but I've managed with katona.blog where I'm documenting my boat rebuild. There's a delightful cadence to weekly updates, and the embarrassment of having to post on a Sunday if you've done nothing that week.
Documenting is the key, and inspired by Katona this blog will document my escapades in Business. Success is not guaranteed, but I'm excited. I've tinkered for years — and previously launched a mobile network with a few customers — so I'm not starting from scratch per se, but neither do I have laurels to lean on.
I don't consider myself a "businessman;" entrepreneur maybe, but actually I just love to build stuff. I've always found asking for money difficult, so there's one area to improve. But my current situation isn't dire: I'm employed by a US startup, and earn comfortably for this boat renovation. I have a tax bill due in January, but otherwise if everything went to shit I could stretch things out for a year at least.
First up...
Occasionly
I have to start by mentioning Occasionly, a side project of mine for the last couple of years. Nerd-sniped by a former girlfriend into working on it, and I love it. It's an app for hosting and inviting people to events that works across email, WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram.
One day I'd like to go full-time on this, and build phenomenal event search and the "Stripe for RSVPs," but it's a long road and I've decided to focus on something else for now...
Wondial
I was in the USA over the last couple of weeks, and had the idea for a 24/7 phone agent trained on your website. AI tools are getting better every day, and we're at the point where voice agents are actually useful beyond demos.
So I had this idea last week, and built it over the weekend. If you can call US numbers, demo it here: +1 (332) 249-3641.
That's trained on Wondial's website. Neat, right?!
That's the MVP, the quantum of utility, and so now I need to find some customers. I've priced it at $199/month per line + $1/phone call, which comes in cheaper than cheap call centres, plus it doesn't rely on a human picking up the phone, works 24/7, and has a configurable accent.
It's a standard Rails app (deployed with the new Kamal thing), and running on a VM in Virginia, USA. I've been using Fly.io for a while, so it's nice to try something new. Then some landing page polish (with AI generated images)...
Signing up takes you to a Stripe checkout page, and I'll get a notification for payments so I can manually set up the phone line and train it on their website, using Retell AI. To make the agent a little more useful, I've configured it to send contact emails to the site's owner when appropriate:
Resisting features
I have a bad habit of building: "ooh this could be useful!" I say, toiling away on features that nobody's using. It's fun, it's addictive, but it doesn't grow a business. There are so many things I could build, that I want to build, but I'm trying to be disciplined in focusing on what actually moves the needle: customers. I have enough of a product to find a customer — account management, fully automated sign-up, multiple phone lines... they come later, if at all.
Finding customers
Over 10 years ago I started a copywriting business by cold-calling a few hundred marketing agencies in the UK over a summer, and that's my plan here. No marketing, just raw dialling. I'm targeting the US, in particular service companies with a physical presence (think general contractors, welders, construction, maintenance, landscaping...). Ideally they have a call centre which kinda works, or they keep getting/missing phone calls when they'd rather be working. I'll hone the pitch and who I'm selling to as time goes on and I learn more. For now, experimentation.
I've signed up to OpenPhone for a US number, and Apollo to search for businesses. This is the difficult, uncomfortable part. It's so much nicer to sit and code, but I'm going to call a few businesses each day. Low quotas, in the spirit of the IBM sales team.
On milestones
I've never been one to celebrate much or set hard goals, but for this I shall, in vague multiples of 3, starting with $200 in Monthly Recurring Revenue:
| MRR | Reward |
|---|---|
| $200 | An eye test and new glasses. This feels weird, but fuck it. |
| $600 | A 3-month car lease for (hopefully) the winter. I have a van for the boat rebuild but the heating's fucked, and it's horrible to drive when it's freezing. |
| $2k | ??? TBD |
| $6k | Take a 1st-class flight. |
| $20k | Quit my day job. Truth be told I'll probably do that before I reach this, but $6k feels too low. |
I've low-balled it to start: 1 subscription by Christmas, because I just don't know where to start. I'm aiming for 3 though, I really want a warm car...
Reminds me of this quote by Jim Rohn:
“If you do something often enough, a ratio will appear. If you talk to 10 people and 1 says yes, the ratio has begun — 1 out of 10.
Simple, timeless. I don't yet know my average, but I soon will, and then it's a numbers game. Fittingly Rohn also said "Even if you are new in sales, you can make up in numbers what you lack in skills."
Market research
Say what now?
Finances
One thing I like about Wondial is how cheap it is to run. Pure software, I've spent less than $10 to set everything up (in fact I think it's only the server I've paid for, and that's $4/month). I'll have to pay for Retell, OpenPhone and Apollo as I grow, but margins should stay high.
Should — competition, yes. In a competitive market, margins trend to 0. That's actually fine — I'm only after a few hundred customers, not domination, and the market size for this is Big; plentiful for a lil' lifestyle biz.
Why not Occasionly?
What's up with this "long-term project" that I'm neglecting?
The main reason is money. I have a feeling Occasionly can be wildly, buy-an-island successful, but there's a haze in the middle of how that turns out. Wondial on the other hand feels like I can make it successful soon, I just need sales. A numbers game. The margins will be good, it won't take a herculean effort in comparison (I think!!), and there are no network effects to kick-start. I doubt it'll afford me an island, but with a few hundred customers it's enough to put me in the top 0.1% of UK earners.
Thoughts on money
It's not the goal, never has been, but it's useful. I just love to build shit, and that's all I want to do. Money lets me do as much of that as I want, without having to work on someone else's idea. I truly live by the words of Coco Chanel: "The best things in life are free. The second best are very expensive."
Until next... Sunday? That's my aim — rebuilding the boat is still #1, but this comes in close.
- Nick