One of the things that’s changed dramatically over the past decade is the ease with which a startup can acquire the infrastructure it needs. In the bad old days of the late 1990s, one of the biggest operational headaches for a growing company was correcting infrastructure choices, made when the company was in its cash-strapped infancy, once more industrial-strength solutions were required to support the company’s increased size (both in terms of personnel and sales volume). Back then, a sophisticated computing infrastructure cost millions in capital investment, requiring startups to seek significant sums from angels and venture capitalists.
Today, in contrast, it’s possible to get a startup off the ground using a lot less money, because many of the services a company needs are available in outsourced form. Today’s startups don’t buy a phone system, they buy a phone service, which saves initial capital and grows easily as it adds people, while offering capabilities the company might otherwise forgo to preserve its capital. Obviously, there are risks associated with this approach (What if our phone service provider goes out of business?), but it’s not anywhere near as risky as five years ago, when these outsourcing vendors first came into being. (And yes, I know that Centrex service, the phone company’s outsourced PBX—private branch exchange—was around long before newer services. My Dad worked for pre-breakup Ma Bell.)
You can purchase most of these services on a month-to-month basis, with discounts for longer-term agreements. This is great, because you don’t need a lot of upfront cash and, if you need to change course, it doesn’t cost very much to rethink your initial decision. Of course, you (may) pay a bit extra for a service over the fully amortized cost of doing it yourself, but you gain flexibility and are better able to devote your limited resources (like your brain) to focusing on the nongeneric elements of your startup.
How do I know all this? Because I’m in the process of starting a new venture with some partners, and I’m looking at ways to minimize our costs while maximizing utility. Put another way, the old “make or buy” decision still applies, but there are a lot more (and better) options in the “buy” category these days.
Let’s start with that phone system you’re not going to buy. My new company currently has three people in physically different locations (not just around the North Bay, but across the country). We each have two or three phone numbers (cell phone, home phone, office-at-our-day-job phone). I’m the tech guy on our team, but my time probably isn’t best spent managing our phone system. If it were, I’d probably buy some hardware and install Asterisk (www.asterisk.org), which is open-source PBX software with lots of cool capabilities. Instead, I started looking at outsourcing vendors by searching Google for “virtual phone systems.”
Of course, there are a lot of options to sort through. The two I looked at closely were OneBox.com and GotVMail.com. Both offer toll-free numbers with multiple extensions, answered by an automated attendant. Each extension can be routed to multiple numbers or to voice mail. OneBox’s starter plan offers four extensions and 2,000 minutes (more than 33 hours of phone time) for $50 per month. GotVMail offers unlimited extensions and 2,000 minutes for the same price, but its 100-minute starter plan is only $10 a month with all the same features. Since this was my first experience with a virtual PBX, I chose the $10 per month plan from GotVMail, which has worked out fine for us and can easily be upgraded as the volume of incoming calls increases.
GotVMail has a Web-based control panel that lets me adjust nearly every detail. For example, when a call is transferred to my extension, it rings my home office phone and then my cell phone; if I don’t pick up, it transfers the call to voicemail. I also get an email notification when a caller leaves me a voicemail. Since I don’t want my home office phone ringing in the dead of night, I can tell the system not to try that number between 8 p.m. and 8 a.m. The system accepts faxes at my extension (sent as a PDF to my email address) and also at the main number (which are then sent to a designated address). This is a great feature, since it eliminates the need for a separate fax line and fax machine.
The one feature OneBox offers that GotVMail doesn’t is the option to replace the automated attendant with a live receptionist, which costs between $200 and $500 per month, depending on how many minutes of receptionist talk time you need (100 and 250 minutes respectively, or $2 per minute). This is still cheaper than hiring a full-time receptionist just to answer your phone.
The other service our startup needs is Microsoft Exchange. Whether you like Microsoft or not, the truth is that the combination of Outlook and Exchange is a pretty good solution for handing email and sharing calendars (Exchange is the part that makes it possible to share calendars). Exchange also offers Outlook Web Access (OWA), which makes it possible to access my Outlook email and calendar from anywhere using a Web browser.
Exchange, unfortunately, takes a certain amount of technical mojo to install and keep running. Plus, you want to make sure your Exchange data is backed up. Although we’re smart enough to do it ourselves, we chose to buy Exchange as a service from ExchangeMyMail.com (EMM), where we pay about $10 per month per mailbox, including OWA and iPhone access (BlackBerry support is extra). Again, I have a Web-based control panel to administer our email accounts, but I really don’t have to spend too much time worrying about any of the other details. EMM uses Postini as its anti-virus/anti-spam solution, so I don’t have to worry about those threats very much either. Best of all, the customer/technical support has been immediately responsive to my questions.
Yes, these outsourced services still require some work on my part, and they may not be appropriate for a company with 50 or more employees, but I know I’m spending much more time adding value to our startup than worrying about phone and email services. Do you have a better answer? Drop me a line at mduffy@northbaybiz.com. And don’t forget to check out the Tech Talk blog at www.northbaybiz.com.
