Show HN: Kill The Landline

https://www.killthelandline.com/

by sciurus • 14 years ago

34 66 14 years ago

zapt02• 14 years ago

sciurus7• 14 years ago

Hi, this is Brian, one of the Kill The Landline developers. We're working on this right now at Startup Weekend in Columbia, Missouri and really welcome all the feedback you can provide on our idea! We have a blog at http://blog.killthelandline.com/ with a short survey you can fill out as well as more details about the origin of the idea.

dsr_3• 14 years ago

"Contact us at [Email Protected]" does not inspire confidence.

Your pricing is too high for people who know what they're doing and probably too low for people who don't and really want it, so it's probably OK.

philip12093• 14 years ago

Sorry, Cloudflare prevents email scraping. It's contact@KillTheLandline.com

notJim• 14 years ago

Hey, your blog header links to http://killthelandline.com, which doesn't work.

philip12093• 14 years ago

Co-founder here: We are an active team at Startup Weekend Columbia. We pitch tomorrow afternoon here's more about our company:

http://blog.killthelandline.com/post/32529411766/about-us

We are using Tropo with Heroku for the MVP.

dsr_3• 14 years ago

Tropo is driving your costs up, compared to people with real servers running SER and similar call routers.

tylermenezes2• 14 years ago

Running their own servers is so far out of the range of MVP it's laughable.

sciurus7• 14 years ago

I work on the devops team for Voxeo Labs, the company behind Tropo, so I resent the implication that we don't have real servers. :-)

More seriously, I'm familiar with the Tropo API and know that no matter what direction this product goes, Tropo is a capable platform to build it on.

tylermenezes2• 14 years ago

Try Plivo instead - it's about a third of your current cost. $3/month is dramatically better than $10.

http://plivo.com/pricing/ (Disclaimer: I was in the same YC batch as Plivo. I do really like the service compared to Twilio or Tropo.)

mikenereson• 14 years ago

The header of your blog has a link without the www subdomin. It doesn't work.

sciurus7• 14 years ago

Good catch! We're fixing this now.

e1ven• 14 years ago

Interesting branding, good domain, strong message. Unfortunately, I can't say I like the product at all ;)

Google will let you port your landline (indirectly) to Google voice, and forward all you calls for free.

Alternatively, I could port my landline to a second line on my Cell plan, and get a dumb-phone, for the same $10/month I'd pay you.

I like the basic message, and the domain, and that you're trying to brand as a "mission", but I think the underlying product is flawed.

rhizome5• 14 years ago

Doesn't Google Voice allow this for free? Is the value in being able to forward to two numbers?

nanijoe2• 14 years ago

$10 a month just to forward calls from an old number? Why would I not just port that number to Google Voice, then forward my GV calls to my cell phone, all for a grand total of FREE?

masonhensley• 14 years ago

I dont think you can port a existing land line to google voice like you can with a mobile #. I could be wrong.

Google Voice FAQ- http://support.google.com/voice/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answ...

nanijoe2• 14 years ago

Fine, then port it to Magic Jack for $20 a year, and forward the calls to your cell phone

larrys• 14 years ago

"I dont think you can port a existing land line to google voice like you can with a mobile #."

Correct.

However you can (I did) do this:

1) Move the landline to your cell phone provider (assumes you have a family plan, if you don't convert to one for the time necessary to do the other steps).

2) Once the number is at the cell phone provider you can transfer it to google voice (and get rid of the family plan if you didn't have one). Took a few weeks.

3) You can buy an http://obihai.com/ device if you want to be able to hook up a traditional POTS phone to get the calls. Or you can just make and receive calls at the google voice website.

Note: I did this with the cell phone provider being AT&T. I would assume it will work with other cell providers but it does with AT&T.

maratd• 14 years ago

> I could be wrong.

You're wrong. Walk into any wireless carrier store, grab the cheapest pre-paid phone, transfer your landline # to the prepaid phone. Log on to Google Voice and now transfer your mobile number.

I did this for my parents who were still using Vonage. Works flawlessly.

w1ntermute• 14 years ago

Yep, this is a totally pointless product. It might've made sense a few years ago, but ever since Google Voice has been out, this has been possible for free.

fratis2• 14 years ago

I disagree. Nobody outside the tech community knows that Google Voice exists, let alone how to use it. This has solid branding (esp. the name) and good messaging.

The price might be a little high for what it's doing, but if the idea is to eventually phase out your landline number, this could be a good way of doing it.

ssharp• 14 years ago

You would do just that. I doubt, however, this website is targeted at the Hacker News crowd.

If my inlaws wanted to get rid of their landline and get individual cell phones and needed their old number to transfer out, they wouldn't port their number to Google Voice and then forward from Google Voice to their cell phone.

I'm also not sure if paying $10 / month is attractive to consumers, but that's just speculation!

sciurus7• 14 years ago

You're exactly right, we think the target market is older and less comfortable with technology than the Hacker News crowd. The most common reaction we get when we pitch the service to someone is "I wouldn't need that, but it could be great for my parents/grandparents/inlaws/etc". Ideas about how to best appeal and market to this demographic are welcome.

achompas• 14 years ago

I doubt a large portion of Kill The Landline's potential market (like, say, my parents with cell phones, an unused landline, and zero desire to mess with GV) would want to worry about doing this.

sciurus7• 14 years ago

We think there's value in creating a simpler, more focused user experience than Google Voice. I hope that focus comes across in the branding we've developed so far. As others have commented, porting your number to Google Voice and setting up forwarding can be a daunting process; we're trying hard to design a system that insulates customers from that sort of complexity.

mst• 14 years ago

Plus I would, generally, rather pay somebody to care about something like this; $10/mo gives me an expectation of at least the same class of customer service that a normal telco would - i.e. not particularly effective, but a great improvement on the yawning void of google's support for free products.

smokey_the_bear• 14 years ago

How is this better or different than Google Voice?

mrlase• 14 years ago

Why would I use this when I could use Google Voice at a much cheaper price and not even pay by the minute?

dewey• 14 years ago

just two things i noticed: - the blog background color is hard to look at - the "* Required" in your blog is red on orange background, not really easy to read.

bdunn2• 14 years ago

To those of you saying "But Google Voice does this!", realize that most people outside of HN/the tech community don't know this.

rhizome5• 14 years ago

Anybody who signs up for GV is asked if they want to hook up existing numbers to it. It's part of the signup process.

bdunn2• 14 years ago

The average person doesn't know Google Voice exists. This product is marketing to people who likely have never heard of GVoice.

subigo3• 14 years ago

Almost every single person I know uses GV. My 81 year old grandfather uses it.

jcampbell12• 14 years ago

You keep reposting the same comment. GV has roughly 1% penetration, thus your circle friends/family is statistically highly unusual. Given the technology profile of your friends and family you should not trust your instincts for estimating market demand.

avolcano• 14 years ago

Interesting. I'm trying to get my parents to drop their Charter landline - which, yes, is $40/mo, and yes, they both have cell phones - but they haven't wanted to because it'd be difficult to get everyone to change the numbers.

I think the biggest aspect of this is the "redirect to two numbers" - my parents would love that, since they would both be able to get the messages.

How does it handle voicemail, though? It can't send the voicemails to both phones, presumedly.

And btw, I'm surprised by the negativity in the comments here. This is a product targeting a segment of consumers who are not as technologically adept and probably feel "trapped" with their landline - an instant out as convenient and cheap as this is much more attractive than porting their landline number to a new mobile line or trying to figure out how to get a landline to Google Voice, which is a complicated and costly process (going by http://www.zdnet.com/blog/government/google-voice-a-step-by-...)

sciurus7• 14 years ago

In general the plan is for whichever phone answers first to win. How to handle voicemail is a great question! We'll have to look at what is possible for us to implement. How would you like to see it work?

mikeknoop• 14 years ago

My parents are in this exact same position. They have never heard of Google Voice but paying for an expensive landline.

I would immediately recommend a service like this.

WadeF• 14 years ago

This is the exact same problem my parents have. They pay $50/mo for a landline that rarely gets used but still need because no one will call them on their cells.

I can't imagine trying to explain Google Voice to my parents.

robbiea• 14 years ago

btw, killthelandline.com doesn't work. you have to put the www there. The blog links to the non www version.

BruceIV• 14 years ago

I was under the impression that Canadian telcos were worse than American ones, but a landline here usually doesn't cost more than $25/mo ...

_delirium• 14 years ago

Varies by area, but $40/mo sounds high for the US too. AT&T's basic landline (w/o caller-ID and other add-ons) in Texas costs $21/mo.

techsupporter• 14 years ago

The site looks good and the idea is useful to me. So useful that I wanted to sign up, but I really can't stand clicking "Sign Up Now" and being told "oops, we're not ready for you." If you're not ready, don't have a sign up button.

philip12093• 14 years ago

We're at startup weekend - hoping to have an MVP tomorrow for pitch. Working fervently right now!

webwanderings2• 14 years ago

Landlines have long been killed. Unless you didn't notice, Magic Jack killed 'em. It is much cheaper and it just works. You have to be really crazy to be paying $48 for the landlines.

xur17• 14 years ago

For people that use the phone a lot, and need something that just works, this isn't true. My parents use their home phone quite a bit, and the $25/month they pay for it is worth it.

I'd set them up with voip to save money, but I have tried voip setups, and even with qos I haven't been impressed with the audio quality when other people are on the internet.

webwanderings2• 14 years ago

When you compare MJ's cost to typical AT&T cost for landlines, I think a compromise is well worth it.

dylanhassinger• 14 years ago

Not bad for a Startup Weekend project! Congrats to Philip and team. It'll be neat to see if this can turn into something self-sustaining!

joshmlewis• 14 years ago

Everyone that's saying Google Voice: You can't port landlines easily to GV. It was my first thought too but did some research and turns out they don't support it directly.

Now: To pull this off you need to make it super simple and intuitive. I want to come to your site with inviting colors, a clean layout, and a very clear call to action and easy signup. This should be so easy and inviting that I will want to do it again after I'm done. This is where good design comes into play. If you make it hard, the copy hard to understand, a pricing plan that is confusing and not straightforward, then it will scare people off. Your biggest chance of success is a UI that is so easy to use it's mindless and "just works."

sciurus7• 14 years ago

Thanks Josh, we're not designers but we're seeking out help. We've already redesigned the landing page, and we'll be putting lots of careful thought and testing into the rest of the site.

brador• 14 years ago

I remember hearing a landline is useful in case of emergencies. Something about emergency services are able to connect it to an address quickly. Also a landline is less likely to get clogged and drop your call in case of mass emergency.

Are these still the case? i don't know but i keep my landline active. It's insurance I guess.

rhizome5• 14 years ago

One of the advantages of a landline in emergencies is that landline phones don't require their own electricity or batteries to operate.

JeffJenkins• 14 years ago

Interestingly, the Verizon FiOS landline that I got for free with my TV/internet package has a battery backup because it does require electricity. That is definitely true of traditional land lines, though.

jim_h• 14 years ago

The greatest strength of the landline is that fact that it will still be up during a power outage. (Just make sure to use a corded phone, cordless uses power.)

cincinnatus• 14 years ago

Cell towers are on backup power in a power outage.

anigbrowl• 14 years ago

Given the easy availability of alternatives, this feels extremely scammy. $10/month plus 8 centers per minute after 100 minutes? What a fucking ripoff. This project deserves to fail, it's nothing more than an attempt at exploitation.

orrenkt• 14 years ago

A few notes:

-I wouldn't worry about the GV question, but I would worry about understanding your target audience. If I were you I'd call up @mikeknoop's parents and show them the site to get feedback, since those are the kind of ppl who will use it. Ask them if any of their friends would use this too and talk to them.

-$10/month sounds like a lot and I wonder where you came up with it. I'd guess something closer to $20/year, but again, ask ppl who would want to use this.

-related to that, I don't understand what "$10 / month for the first 100 minutes, then $0.08 / minute after that" means. Are you gonna charge people by minute they talk for forwarding their calls? I wouldn't do that. If you want this to seem like a no-brainer, don't make people try to figure out how much they'll end up paying you. Just stick a nice pricetag on it and be done.

-your page has too many bullets, in too many fonts, colors and sizes. This is a really straightforward idea so make it simple for people - explain it in 3 lines at most, make them big, consistent and clear, and leave out the powerpoint bulletpoints.

sjg0072• 14 years ago

Why not port your landline to Google Voice and then forward for free?

com2kid• 14 years ago

When I first got a cell phone I ported my landline number over to it. It has been with me through 2 carriers now, without issue.

My grandmother did the exact same thing, again without issue.

I am thinking that the market for people doing this is finite and limited, but there is likely money to be made on making a clean experience (versus Google Voice) serving the ever dwindling population of people who actually have land lines.

Show HN: Kill The Landline

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