The Story of Flashcall, Inc.
A couple of years ago or so, I was conversing with a colleague about the uprising of a social activism movement in India lead by Anna Hazare. The movement aimed to end the political corruption in India through the passing of the Jan Lokpal Bill by the government. In the process, Mr. Anna garnered thirty five million pledges of support via missed calls from all over the country. What followed is an interesting piece of history worth reading more about, but somewhat tangential to my story here.
The impact of the movement was enough to make me absolutely convinced about the potential of such missed call based CTAs in developing nations. So, I wondered what it would take to enable businesses and newsmakers in Pakistan to reach out to masses, and vice versa, via missed calls. This wasn’t the first time that an idea sparked in my head that was convincing enough for me to abandon life and all that it had to offer in favor of pursuing it. And so I did just that.
Before we continue any further, let’s get this out of the way — so, what is a missed call (or flashcall/miskol/beeping)? It is a call dropped intentionally by the caller before the receiver answers it. But why would someone do that? For one, it alerts the person on the receiving end that the caller (missed) called, and now it’s up to him/her to figure out the intention based on the context of their last few interactions. For example, Arslan’s mom wants him to notify her when he has safely arrived at his college every morning. He can call her after reaching the college, or preferably, just give a quick missed call and she will understand that he reached college. But again, why won’t he just call? Well, he saved a minute (or a text) of his prepaid plan; and in case you are wondering, postpaid plans continue to be a luxury in developing nations.
A few days later, I introduced the idea to a few friends here in the U.S. and well, I got laughed at pretty bad… because undoubtedly, this wasn’t a step into the future of technology. It was a step backwards to make it work for brands what had worked for billions of people in the past (just like Arslan’s example), all over the world.
Anyways, rest of the week was slow as hell, until the weekend started and there I was, on a bright sunny day wearing my coding ninja hat googling ‘how to receive a phone call in java’.
(not really) Todo: Fill up boring technical details here.
A week or so later, version one of Flashcall was born: A missed call based poll powered by Twilio, which dumped results on a terminal. It was epic!
Fast forward a few months, and getflashcall.com was up and running with ability to run polls/surveys and subscription campaigns via missed calls. There were two parts of the system: the cloud based SaaS and the SIP Trunk based on FreePBX. In the process, I taught myself a great deal about the ins and outs of telephony basics and some VOIP.
And then, it was time… time to get out of our shells and do something about selling this stuff. Reality struck us when most of businesses in Pakistan were unable to grasp the idea or the utility of using missed calls to do anything for their businesses. A college professor or two liked and used us a lot for classroom interactions, we conducted a real-time poll for StartupWeekend too (thanks to Mr. Khurram Shahzad for pushing us), but nothing too big or fancy, nothing revolutionary.
Soon enough, I had figured what went wrong. Pitching a cloud telephony SaaS powered by missed calls for digital marketing campaigns to traditional businesses and brands was analogous to selling a Tesla to a farmer, for farming. We knew we had hit a blocker and the lack of our ability to sell, no matter what we tried, discouraged us enough to halt any further progress.
By then, the word had already gotten out and so started the rise of copycats. What really brought us back in the business is when our missed calls based communication copyright got violated and a competitor launched a decent sized campaign. During that period, we also learned about Zipdial in India and how they experienced exponential growth. It was time, we knew, to get back in the business.
This time around, we attempted to do something different. Instead of pitching to numerous businesses with limited marketing budget, we pitched to global brands operating in Pakistan with astronomical marketing budgets and wider audiences… and so we realized, we had struck the right chord.
A few months down the road, we launched our first nationwide campaign with Nestle Pakistan to educate people about iron deficiency in kids. Here’s the TV commercial (it’s in the Urdu language):
This was a nerve wracking experience for our team. After all, we literally jumped from low-volume non-critical SLAs to a 24/7, real-time, and nationwide campaign running for around a month. It was one hell of a ride for everyone involved.
To cut it short, in the one year or so, we’ve had
- more than 200,000 consumers connected with businesses through missed calls,
- over 500,000 engagements through our cloud platform,
- nearly a million audio minutes of advertising enabled via Flashcalls,
- over 2 million PKRs of cash rewards via Flashcall based CTAs,
- over 300 marketing qualified leads, and
- expansion in 3–4 countries via media partners.
Right now, we are working with a bunch of local and global brands to launch nationwide campaigns in the near future with gigantic media plans. None of this was possible without the hard working team we’ve got here at Flashcall, and our rock solid partnership with PlanetBeyond (thanks to Ahmer’s persistence, who leads them). To sum it up, I don’t think I have that much advice to offer about what makes or breaks a startup, but there are three things I try not to forget,
- There’s no such thing as a beta version. Launch whatever you got, and while it’s nascent, sell your product to whosoever can get you to meet your growth numbers fastest.
- Figure out who’s good at what in your team and get out of the way.
- And honestly, ‘If you are going to try, go all the way.’
So yeah, I won’t stop saying — we are just getting started! If you are interested in working with us, feel free to message me (or call +1.240.281.3589), or give a call (+92.321.2460428) to our CEO, Jawwad Jafri (he’s a nice guy), or shoot an email to hello@getflashcall.com. If you are interesting in joining our team, we’d love to have a quick chat. Send us your resume at careers@getflashcall.com.
Happy Flashcalling!
