More at https://linktr.ee/EvanKirstel
More at https://linktr.ee/EvanKirstel
Hey everyone. Really exciting chat diving into the world of business messaging today with a startup that's doing a lot of very innovative work at Telgorithm. Aaron, how are you?
Speaker 2:Great. How are you doing, Aaron?
Speaker 1:I'm doing great I'm in Boston. I wish I were in sunny LA, but c'est la vie. We'll have to wait another month or two for spring, but excited to join. You've been in the telecom and mobile industry for a long time. Maybe give us a bit of the origin story of Telgrhythm and your sort of personal background or obsession with telecom.
Speaker 2:Totally. Actually, I started my career First of all. Thanks for having me. Greatly appreciate it, and I've been following you for a little bit and appreciate your audience as well and everyone joining today.
Speaker 2:Thank you Thank you for taking the time, everyone's precious time. I started my telecom career 20-year telecom career actually working for a lesser-known company called Verizon Wireless back in the early 2000s when there were these things called flip phones. I don't know if you remember, evan, there used to be a thing called a StarTAC phone or the Motorola V phone, and I actually started in the retail world in New York City. I don't know if you can tell from the accent, I'm originally from New York city. I don't know if you can tell from the accent, I'm originally from New York. And during that period of time there was obviously a lot of leaps in the technology world, particularly in wireless. And so you picture yourself even now it's not as much, but you go into a wireless store. You kind of have it more today in Apple than you'll have it at Verizon, but there were actually technicians there that would actually troubleshoot your phone, whether it be the physical portions of the phone or the softwares on the phone. And then, as time went on, the various different softwares on the phones and types kept changing. I mentioned StarTAC. I'm sure everyone's here remembers the LG phones and even the name, dare I say it, blackberry. I don't know if anyone recalls back in those days, consistently troubleshooting that and Teleco interested me a lot.
Speaker 2:I spent about six years at Verizon Wireless doing various troubleshooting, and actually the company that I worked for wasn't directly Verizon, it was a company that was hired to do technical work by Verizon. They had ended their contract after six years in and Verizon Wireless actually offered me a position on their quality assurance team to kind of quality ensure the latest phones that were going to be launched and come out, and so that interested me a lot. However, I had spent six years in the wireless world and telecom really interested me and I was looking maybe to try something a little bit different in communications, and so I ended up taking a role at this mom and pop startup kind of company in the East Coast that was selling VoIP, and I don't know if your audience is aware you're aware, evan, but VoIP technologies are based on solutions to the shortcomings of what's called TDM, which is what I like to call the worldwide web of analog phones, and so many folks in the dinosaur age like get a PBX with all these channels and all these wires running your system. You're kind of very familiar with that setup and VoIP was supposed to solve for that by virtualizing a lot of it, which it actually did, and so me coming into that portion. On the VoIP side, I understood I was able to learn VoIP quickly, but also understand the shortcomings of TDM versus the other path of TDM, then learning something that new, and at my time I spent about three years at this company. I learned a lot about VoIP, the VoIP protocol, but also a lot about carriers and how they work and how they correlate in the interconnected worldwide web of phones. How does an internet-based call make it to TDM and vice versa? Today, you know, one of the things I like to point out is many times people say, yeah, my call is not recorded, I don't use any VoIP. I'm like well, have you made a phone call outside of your own home? And so pretty much everything today, as everyone knows, is recorded in that regard.
Speaker 2:So I spent about three years there and I migrated out to the West Coast. My wife is actually out, was born here in the West Coast. We migrated out here about close to eight years ago, out here to sunny LA, and I was looking for a new role and I ended up finding a role at this company called Service Titan I don't know if that name rings a bell. It does. They are currently a leading CRM in the home services industry. I joined them back in 2015, just after they had raised their Series A from Bessemer Venture Capital, and what was very interesting about that particular role to me was is, first of all, in a tech startup, they kind of give you the keys and you get to run with it versus, you know, in a corporate world, which is something I was looking for. But I, what I recognized very quickly see, they're a crm.
Speaker 2:Everyone here, I'm sure, is familiar with a concept called a crm salesforce, being the most famous. Well, there's these things called vertical crms, right, um, a sales force is more horizontal, but if you have niche, specific things for your business you're're a plumber, you're a lawyer, you can go down the list You're going to need certain specific things for your particular industry and hence the advent of vertical SaaS or vertical SaaS CRMs, and ServiceTime is one of these CRMs that supports the home services industry, roto-rooter all the very famous companies you might have heard of in that industry. They service them. What's very important, particularly in that world, is having your communications. That's the lifeblood of your business, one of the things early on that ServiceTime actually had that.
Speaker 2:Many did not. They had this thing called call tracking, which is basically the idea of you break a faucet or you have an HVAC that goes out in the summer. You're going to call up Roto-Rooter. Roto-rooter is using ServiceTime. Well, servicetime is able to pop this call, is able to record this call, but then had to forward the call back out to Roto-Rooter's dinosaur phone system. It wasn't part of the CRM, but at least it was able to track and manage these calls inside of where the rest of the place they're running their business, where they're booking jobs and everything else that's going on in the CRM. And the same thing for text messages. Right, I book a call, I get a text message as the homeowner that a tech is on the way with their picture so that I could track them, kind of like an Uber, to see when they're going to arrive. And so these are very basic in some senses, very basic features and functions that are needed for the lifeblood of the business.
Speaker 2:And what I found at Service Titan was is they had I'm not going to mention the name here, but a very famous cloud communication API company that everyone's heard of was integrated with them. Why were they integrated with them? That's just because they did a good job branding. They were one of the first and that's all they knew. But no one knew what was going on. So calls were failing. When they connected, it would be one-way. Audio or a text message wouldn't get through, and when you would call support support people didn't know themselves what was going on. By the time you got something resolved, this issue was resolved.
Speaker 2:Now you have another issue, and so it kind of forced me to kind of push behind the layers, behind the scenes. So you have a cloud communication API company. Well, what is it that they're actually doing? And what is it that they're white labeling or they're reselling that they're not actually doing? They're kind of trying to find out what will it take to simply get a simple phone call across or a text message across? And I started to dig and dig. It wasn't very easy. There's no, even till today. There's no ebook on this stuff. Unfortunately, there's so many people rely on and I was starting to uncover many very interesting things Like what is a DC? What is an actual aggregator? What is a carrier? What is a platform? What are all the components need to make a call happen?
Speaker 2:Now, me at Service Titan. I should never have to worry about this. I should just be able to go to the provider and not worry. But that's just simply not the status quo. That's not the case. Many of these providers additionally and I hate to say it don't even care. They look at it as a commodity. And I get that business side of things. What do I mean? They don't care. So let me give a very simple.
Speaker 2:Everyday in the middle of the summer, you call up Roto-Rooter. Roto-rooter is using Service Titan to manage their business. What they're going to say is Evan, can you give me your phone number so that I can have a text sent on your way with the information about the technician and you'll be able to track them? Sure, they start to give you the number and it's a very crappy call. At the end of the call, instead of hearing a nine, you hear a six. What's going to happen is they're going to hit the save button and then they're going to go to the dispatch board in ServiceTitan, look up a technician that's available and hit dispatch. Now the logic in ServiceTitan says when you hit dispatch, send a text message with this technician's information to you, the homeowner that's having an emergency right now.
Speaker 2:Now what happens if I mistype that number? You're never going to get such message. You're going to get frustrated. You may try to call back in. They may be too busy to answer. You didn't get a message. You're going to call the competitor. What if it happens at AAA? Aaa uses one of these types of CRMs and you're caught in the side of the road.
Speaker 2:But let me tell you the crazy part about this what's actually gone on behind the scenes? So ServiceTitan is sending an API call to their cloud communication provider. Now your cloud communication provider instantly knows that this number is not real. They will never send out this text, but here's what they will do they will bill ServiceTitan for the text, including a carrier pass-through fee, even though there isn't even a carrier. It's not a real number. Who, then, is going to jimmy this fee across to Roto-Rooter? So not only did Roto-Rooter lose a customer, potentially cause a frustrated situation, they're now paying for a text message that wasn't even real, including a carrier pass-through fee. But I made money and I don't care about that. And this is one micro example of what goes on in the telco industry versus.
Speaker 2:Let's paint a different picture. What if there could be a process where you can identify prior to sending a text well in advance. Is this number not only real? Is the number in service with the registrar, known as net number, for all of messaging, and is it in service right now to receive a message Now? Is it a guarantee? No, but if I had some integration, meaning service time, had some integration with a cloud partner that had that set up, here's how that could play back.
Speaker 2:Again, I call in, you call in Evan, saying you have an issue with your faucet or your HVAC system. You tell me I hear a nine instead of a six. I you call in Evan saying you have an issue with your faucet or your HVAC system. You tell me I hear a nine instead of a six. I hit the save button Instantly. There's a pop-up in Service. Titan Number doesn't seem to be valid. Please clarify with customer. I'm sorry, I might have misheard you. Can you repeat that again? Oh, it's a six. Save Boom. There's a lookup right here and guess what, no one gets misbilled, somebody gets their message on time and that's all being proactive about things.
Speaker 2:And a lot of the way, unfortunately, cloud communication has been is very reactive, and when that reactive thing does start to happen. It's usually very delayed, leading to or noticing other issues that come about before your initial issue is even resolved itself. And so, with this experience I had at ServiceTitan, being that customer and picking back all the layers, I actually got two patents while I was there building redundancies, and a product there called Phones Pro, which is the concept of not having to download or connect, no CTI. Today, servicetitan is one of the few CRMs out there. You can get rid of your entire phone system nothing to download, nothing to install, no integrators.
Speaker 2:Servicetitan has your phone, virtually part of ServiceTitan. They are your full phone provider, which is shocking today because if you look around the whole industry, you pretty much don't see that anywhere. Salesforce has a bunch of connectors, but even if you have a connector with some company, what if it fails? Do you call the phone company or do you call ServiceTitan? Servicetitan tells you to call the phone company. The phone company tells you to call ServiceTitan. Good luck. And it's an integrator. It's not fully meshed as part of that UI and that really doesn't exist today for some reason.
Speaker 2:So, with the issue of transparency, along with many of the things that are missing in the industry, is what led me down the path, including my co-founder, who I worked with for many years at ServiceLine. I'm building a company, a cloud communication company, beginning with text messaging because of all the new regulation which is very confusing for a lot of people, and it's obvious that that would be the case to try to actually build a product and technology with understanding that cares about your true bottom line, truly getting your message delivered. That puts us into the trenches with you, not just as a sales pitch, but in every day-to-day service, both on again technology front side and the service side of things, and also provide education. One of the biggest things that we get all the time many people ask is are you a compliance layer or consulting agency that we could plug into Twilio? And while that is absolutely not the case, we look at that as our biggest compliment, because that should be the default for any provider that's offering you that, so much so that you believe they are in the trenches with you. They're educating you on this stuff properly and not hiding things behind the scenes.
Speaker 2:You know, one of the things we've done is I've interviewed the vice president of the campaign registry multiple times. We're very close with them and they're part of this new ecosystem. I actually you know there's a company called Cineverse out there. I don't know if your customers are aware of this, but Cineverse is the largest aggregator, the largest text messaging aggregator in North America the largest. All the major companies you've heard of are not aggregators. They are using Cineverse behind the scenes. Well, why do they hide that information? What's wrong with that? Many of them? Oh, they don't want to reveal what's behind the scenes, but that's not accurate. If you wanted to buy a can of Coke, evan, you're not going to call up Coca-Cola corporate. They're going to tell you, go to your grocery store. There's different players in this ecosystem.
Speaker 2:For a reason, we did a webinar last month with the director of all of 10 DLC at Cineverse. We had to. My team had to work a month on building this webinar because they were never asked to do a webinar before with anyone in the industry. Well, why would that be? What are they trying to hide? And so a lot of what we're trying to do is trying to pull the curtain back on what's going on behind the scenes, provide transparency, provide guidance, be proactive with our customers, truly own up to what's going on if we fail, and make sure that businesses are ultimately successful. If you've been following us recently, we're now three years in.
Speaker 2:On the messaging side, we've built a lot of unique technologies that are crucial for A2P, 10, elc that many people don't understand, and we recently just announced the partnership last month with Constant Contact, who's partnered with us at this early stage because they are not able to get the help with some of the big name providers that you would imagine here, and we're, thank God.
Speaker 2:We've also never had a churn in our history ever, which is insane to even think that we've never had an outage in our history ever. So we take these things very serious. We have hundreds of million messages a month rolling through our platform with none of these issues. Now there are kings bugs, which we do address, and we're always listening to our customer, but this is fundamentally why Telgorithm was built and what we're all about and what we're going to continue to do, one channel at a time. We're starting with texting. With texting, we're going to then go from there to phones as well and make the proper and necessary changes and make availability to different tools and products to make things more available for particularly vertical. Saas is where we come from, but the industry at large and sorry for the long winded answer here.
Speaker 1:Wow, that was a mic drop moment. How much coffee have you had this morning, aaron? You may need another couple of esp expressos to kind of bring yourself down a little bit, but I kid, no, it's very impressive. Your passion and knowledge, wow, of this space goes so deep and I love your peeling back the onion here, because so much of telecom is still a black box. It's very mysterious, and even with the rise of APIs box it's very mysterious. And even with the rise of APIs, that's not enough. You need to know what's going on behind the APIs. Let's dive into that a bit. Because you raised so many interesting questions. Maybe talk a little bit about how you do some of this magic that's not obvious, to ensure things like higher delivery rates for SMS and reliability and transparency. I mean, what is your platform like, sort of behind the curtain?
Speaker 2:Totally so. There's a lot of areas we can go down because it is complex. But again, if you're breaking it down you kind of get hey, this whole ecosystem makes sense and I know we're short on time here no, we're good.
Speaker 2:We're good, we can go as long as you can, but I think number one is there's a big confusion about what A2P 10 DLC actually even is in the first place, which is where it all kind of gets started. Texting protocol as we know it, as I was talking about when I had my flip phone um, that was created back in the early 90s by the various different wireless carrots and the network operators. There was no internet like we have it today. There was no cloud communication as we have it today. The protocol that they created, which is what's called the smpp protocol, was known as P2P, or person to person, because that was the only use case that existed. I am going to use my physical fingers to type out a message on maybe an alphanumeric phone possibly, and send you a message Good times.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly. And so I don't know about you I don't know how good you've gotten at typing physically with your fingers, with your thumbs, on an alphanumeric phone. But the network operators thought wait a second, what type of throughputs would we need to offer for this use case? And they thought about it and they gave 60 TPM or 60 texts per minute. I don't know about you, evan, I don't know that many people that could type out physically 60 messages on an alphanumeric phone in one minute, physically, 60 messages on an alphanumeric phone in one minute. And, by the way, even if you could do it, I doubt you could converse with somebody in that fashion. And so hence that's what they gave, and this worked for a while, and that was the intended use for person-to-person protocol that was intended for.
Speaker 2:Now you have the advent of technology. You have the infrastructures behind messaging becoming virtualized, net number aggregators becoming virtualized, and then you have cloud communications platform, many of them famous today. They figure well what it became so personal. No one wants to talk to anyone on the phone anymore. From that regard, everyone answers a text. I don't have to install something differently. Even until today, everyone likes to use text. What better path would it be for a business to tap into this channel Again, remember, this channel was never intended for that use case.
Speaker 2:And what ended up happening is the cloud communication providers that figured this out, along with the businesses paying them hand over fist for the support, started sending messages and this started to cause problems. Well, what sort of problems? Well, number one, as we mentioned, 60 messages in a minute will work. For me and you, evan conversing, maybe, but if I want to run a Black Friday sale where I have millions of end users, I'm sorry, 60 messages in a minute, it might take 3,000 years to get there and it's just not going to work. Same thing and, by the way, that's for marketing. What about an electric company? What about an electric company that has millions of users that wants to send out a text, emergency importance? 60 messages in a minute, per number, is not going to work. So what do they do? They start to think wait a second, one number 60 messages a minute, I'm just going to procure a hundred numbers, I'm going to procure a thousand numbers and I'm going to start blasting it. And indeed, that's what started happening. Again, not the intent for this protocol, it was not created for that. And so what ended up happening over that time is people said, hey, this is starting to work. And then people started spamming people, particularly in T-Mobile's case, which led to class action lawsuits on T-Mobile. Anyone listening here today that's familiar with the ATP 10 ELC T-Mobile, anyone listening here today that's familiar with the A2B 10 ELC T-Mobile is the toughest and it's not by coincidence. It's because they really got the hammer big on this front here.
Speaker 2:And actually what ended up starting happening was is before this turned into a change, it turned into a physical fight between a when I say physical, I mean a technical fight between the network operators receiving those messages and the providers on the other side enabling these messages to go out. So they would be like I sent this message, I didn't want it stopped. Okay, every third message, it seems. My number is going to get blocked, so I'm going to create a number rotator, known as snowshoeing, and I'm going to keep refreshing the numbers. Then this one did this and this one had that filter and this one had to come back from that filter and this URL got blocked, and back and forth, and back and forth, and about seven years ago all the network operators essentially got together and they said enough is enough. We need to do something about this.
Speaker 2:Number one they recognized with the advent of technology. There are legitimate businesses that have customers that legitimately want to receive messages from those businesses, and there should be a path for them to receive those messages. The current path P2P was not meant for that. So therefore, we need to create a new path for business-to-consumer type messaging, and the biggest differentiator would be throughput. Here's the key. Many people lose this. They think it's about compliance. It's not about compliance. It's about throughput. I need higher throughput as a business to communicate with my customer than a person that is communicating with another person privately, and so each individual network operator, beginning in February of 2020, verizon Wireless launched their A2P, or what I like to call business to consumer messaging path. But they also recognize meaning the network operators that if they did this, what is to stop all of the nefarious activity that's festered over the many years on person to person from simply migrating over to now?
Speaker 1:the easier path A2P.
Speaker 2:So they needed some sort of gatekeeper to manage all of this and they ended up finding a company known as Calera, which is a cloud communication company in Italy who actually was recently acquired by Tata Communications. But they found this subsidiary known as the Campaign Registry and you go to campaignregistrycom. They have become the reputation authority for ATP 10, elc, for all the major network operators in the United States, and now it's expanding into Canada and will be expanding even beyond that. Toll-free will likely be joining that ecosystem as well. The word is in the very near future. That's a whole separate subject. But they got them in place as this reputation authority to make sure that all players in this ecosystem are accounted for. And you have to give information prior to getting on this platform. You've got to get your tax IDs, you've got to put in your use cases, you've got to have a working website with a working privacy policy, you have to show that you're an established business and in return, you get access to these higher throughputs with much better deliverability. They needed to keep a clean path.
Speaker 2:What's interesting about this is and where I'm going with this is throughputs are the key. You're not paying for compliance. Matter of fact, almost no compliance rules have changed. They're just being enforced to get into the entryway ticket, into the new path. Most of the compliance from CTIA and the network operators are actually exactly the path. Most of the compliance from CTIA and the network operators are actually exactly the same, and what you're paying for is throughput. And that's what really got me thinking early on.
Speaker 2:Wait a second. So if everything is about throughputs, well, who's managing all this throughput? What do I mean? So there's this thing called a brand, which is an entity that's going to be sending text messages, and then there are their use cases, which are known as campaigns. Now, not all network operators are alike when it comes to throughputs. On ATP 10, dlc, meaning one brand. You could have 3,000 brands that are your customers. Each one has different limits to T-Mobile, so they give a daily limit, meaning T-Mobile, at&t gives a per campaign limit, verizon gives a per number limit.
Speaker 2:Now you might think well, why do I care about all of this? Well, first of all, you're paying for that. There's higher costs to pay for a low-volume campaign than a dedicated campaign. There's also a concept called external vetting, which allows you to get even higher throughputs. At the end of the day, as we discussed, the business-to-consumer path was created because I need higher throughputs to communicate as a business by the way, even for conversational, because you're not required to get a separate campaign for each individual rep at the call center. You could have 50 reps at the call center communicating one-to-one, but you're going to run into an issue very quickly because they're all sharing the same campaign.
Speaker 2:So many people think, oh, I don't market or I don't blast messages. No, no, even conversational messaging, you need to worry about throughput. But here's the interesting part With T-Mobile, you get the begin. It starts at 2,000 messages daily to T-Mobile. You get the begin. It starts at 2000 messages daily to T-Mobile. Right, pretty easy to hit that. Now, if it's 2000 messages daily, what happens if you hit the limit? Well, I will tell you what's going to happen. T-mobile actively tracks that. The 2001st message will drop. You will be charged a carrier pass-through fee for that message.
Speaker 2:Now here's the crazy part. You spend all this time, effort, registering, spending all this money for registration, get higher throughputs and you're now susceptible. Who's managing this? And so here's my point If there's a daily limit, when does this day start? Is it midnight to midnight and is it rolling 24 hours. If it's midnight to midnight, well, which time zone is it in? You know Evan, metro, pcs and Mint I'm sure everyone's seen the commercials for Mint are known as MVNOs or subsidiaries of T-Mobile. Well, are those end users included into this daily limit? You would need to know all of this at a brand level for each of your customers, because each of them have different limits to manage this proactively, because if it's reactive, you're going to already get failed messages and disruptions and higher costs. And so what we found? Shockingly, we thought, when we found a telegorithm understanding this in detail, that everyone was going to build a management system as a provider. Come to find out, no one, including the DPAs, had built this. So everyone's going around registering.
Speaker 1:I don't think there's anyone else out there who has the knowledge you have, who could build it. I mean, you're a walking and talking repository of insight into this problem. It's amazing. So, basically in a nutshell, you help your customers navigate all of these compliance and regulatory challenges to ensure the delivery rate. So what's the bottom line? With a new client, what can you guarantee in terms of, like, a service level or a commitment to that?
Speaker 2:So I love this question. First of all, a couple of points on this front. Here we're about trust. We give opportunity. We have pay-as-you-go trial, that we give you the period of time to test us. You become a CSP of the registry. That's an independent process. That's a prerequisite for Tuggerhythm, where you could share campaigns with us, see if we can get them approved, see how fast we can get them approved, and you own that compliance yourself. On top of that you could test to see how it works. We have a smart queuing system we've built, with all the logics so much I just touched on in place that proactively does lookups on the fly into the OSR to determine who you are about to send the message, to calculate out how many were already sent per network operator. And we send you alerts 50% or 66%, two thirds. We send you alert If you ever reach a hundred percent of your limit we actually don't let the message fail.
Speaker 2:We queue it up for you until T-Mobile, as an example, resets its timer. We have time routing built into that. Oh, I don't want to send a message at 1am. Instead, wait till 9am. We have the ability to rescind messages. It no longer makes sense to send the message anymore. Rescind it. We don't even charge for a rescinded message. We have the ability to prioritize messages.
Speaker 1:So when it does get unlocked.
Speaker 2:Send this set of messages first instead of this one. All of these things are built at the network operator level for each individual network operator based on your approvals that you share directly from the registry. With Tugrhythm, we're closely partnering with them and this is not a nicety. I hate that we call it smart tuning because people think it's some AI or some nicety. We are looking to build AI into that to make it even better, but it's not a nicety. It is crucial and fundamental.
Speaker 2:Most providers today have taken one of two approaches They'll completely lift the ceiling on T-Mobile, making you completely susceptible and unaware of this. Matter of fact, you can go to your provider's website today and Google exceeded my T-Mobile day limit. Almost every single one has a very specific error set up for that. Well, if they were managing it for you, how would you ever get that error? So, rather than try to build a process to support it, they already know you're going to run into the problem and have already pre-created an error that you're going to run into.
Speaker 2:And, on the other hand, with AT&T and others, what they do is they queue it down. So they'll queue your messages to the lowest rate and you might say, well, that's fine, but no, I just spent X amount of money to get higher throughputs on AT&T and I'm being capped at the lowest level of all of my campaigns. So the point here is, fundamentally, the whole purpose of A2P is to give higher throughputs, but today, apparently no one in the ecosystem is properly managing this for you and if it's not being managed, you could be losing 10% to 20% of your total cost, on top of all the initial costs in lost messages, not to mention the time, frustration and disruption to your customer if you don't have someone that's managing this for you. And that's what we believe and what we've built as a default that this should be every provider. We wish more would build this as well, because what we're about is a positive change to this ecosystem that ultimately supports the end user, and that's what's in our blood.
Speaker 1:Oh, it's a wonderful mission. It's rare to see a startup like Telgorithm three years in and you already have so much traction and you're helping so many customers. What's next? I mean, what are some of the big waves or trends you're looking to ride over the next three, 10 plus years? And, technology-wise, you have RCS coming in a huge change opportunity as well. What are you focused on?
Speaker 2:Totally so. I mentioned on the top of the call. While I was working at ServiceSign, I built this product called Phones Pro, and that's the concept of you open up the CRM and your phone is just there. There's no integrator, nothing to download, nothing to install. You just put on a headset. All the state-of-the-art things that, let's just say, a dial pad or a RingCentral would be doing would be part of that CRM.
Speaker 2:And what's interesting about that is when I built this ad service, titan, I found that there is literally no one out there that makes this attainable to build for a vertical CRM, and that's why it doesn't really exist, but it's in high demand. What do I mean? Well, twilio type companies is an API based company. Well, if you're going to build a phone system, then you need a UI. You need a UI for call routing, time, route queues, setting up the phone, the dialer itself, the virtual dialer known as WebRTC. You're going to need skins behind that to figure out all the use cases, and all of these things need to mesh with your specific user experience within your CRM. Well, a Twilio type or an API cloud type company doesn't provide that for you. So how long is it going to take for you to get what's called an MVP or little least viable product, maybe to market for the phone two plus years.
Speaker 2:Try to go in your head of product and saying I have this great idea, I want to bring phones into our CRM. How long is it going to take for an MVP? Maybe two years? There's no way they're going to do it. And that's the cloud API side. On the other hand, you have companies like I mentioned Dialpad or RingCentral where they provide the GUI and very nice GUI if you will but there's no APIs that they're going to expose. And so how do you customize it and scale it for your particular application? If you tell them, hey, give me the APIs, they're going to tell you to go to Twilio. So how do I solve this problem? And so what you need to do is you need something that solves both. So this is something that's in tremendous demand and need. An example I like to give is there's a very famous POS system known as TOAST T-O-A-S-T. I don't know if you've ever heard of it.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, no, it's everywhere Restaurants yeah.
Speaker 2:Literally 7% of all restaurants, if I'm not mistaken, in North America use Toast. Well, toast uses Twilio for their shortcut. They use that for there. But why is it that if you go to Jamba Juice, you'll notice who uses Toast. You'll see a clunky phone on the desk. Why is that phone not part of that POS system transcribing logging all the details here?
Speaker 1:They heard of Twilio, they know about it?
Speaker 2:What's wrong? What's the matter? It's not that they don't want it. Go ask them. Why would they not want that all into one place? And it's because it's not attainable.
Speaker 2:What we plan on doing and you asked what our future is Now do we plan on expanding into areas like RCS and WhatsApp? But we also plan and we don't want to lose focus on our core, which is not about all the bells and whistles. We want to make sure we're fundamental, our fundamentals consistently stay there and we're stable while we gradually work our way to the latest things to make sure we're doing it right without losing that focus. And so what we want to provide is a gap to that and basically this concept of the ability to plug in, let's just say, an iframe into your CRM that's fully customizable on day one and then, once you get that going, prove that to your customer base. We then expose the API so you can further customize that out into your CRM and make that custom for your customers. That concept today, as far as I'm aware and I've worked for SignalWire as well, I did a sprint there as well- and you did a free switch on the whole amazing crew there, so you have the bona fides to pull this off.
Speaker 1:So I think it's going to be exciting to watch. And just to wrap up, what are you excited about over the next few weeks, months, any travel or events or meetings that you know you're going to be out and about attending?
Speaker 2:I was just at NEF Forum out of Miami, met some amazing folks out there, excited for Mobile World Conference, as it's coming up as well, and excited for meeting the folks wherever they may be. I'm going to try to make my way to more of the shows. Don't always have the time to do it to meet a lot of the folks out there, but so much exciting stuff going on. What I'll say is is a lot of what we focus on is doing the starting with a few things that are fundamental and crucial and, as I just mentioned, keeping the focus on making sure that's consistently getting better and it's right, before going all over the place because there's so many cool technologies. Everyone today is pushing AI, and AI just for the purpose of AI, in my opinion, is nothing. You want to make sure that that AI is complementing something that's fundamentally already working and is solving a true problem, versus just saying AI to AI, and we're something that we're very passionate about making sure we get things right before jumping the gun on all of these bells and whistles.
Speaker 1:Well, that's some advice that many people should adhere to. Thanks so much, Aaron, for sharing the mission and the vision and all the success and onwards and upwards to the next phase of Telgorithm. Thanks very much. Thanks for watching everyone. That was quite a deep dive but really, really amazing insights there from Aaron Take care, talk soon. Thanks for listening in.