Some day in the future, I would like to look back and be proud of what I created because it is useful to others.
What is Hoxfon?
Hoxfon is the go-to app for people that want to manage multiple landline numbers in different countries from one handset. It is great for expats who need to call home, businesses who need a point of presence close to their customers or professionals who rely on a separate work number and are tired of carrying two phones.
Why a telephone app?
At school I was always that child that couldn’t stay still, the one that didn’t do as he was told and kept on questioning the way things work. I would rather fail in my own way, than follow the rest of the class. To complete a task it would take me more than other kids, because I couldn’t simply apply the rules and formulas without truly understanding how they worked. I think this is the reason that I dedicated my life building software.
When I started creating apps I had never thought I would have created a telephone app. It is counter intuitive to think that you need an app installed to make calls on a device. So most of us just use what the operating system provides us with and are satisfied with that. But I always found that something was missing, that the way the telephone system works can be improved. I felt that it was not really helping me in the way I needed. And one day I really started thinking on how the system could be improved.
The most successful apps were created to solve the inventor’s own problems.
I have been living abroad for a while and I remember the very first thing I did as soon as I landed was to figure out where I could get a SIM card and what the best way to connect to my friends and family back home was. Back then there were no smart phones, no apps, almost no mobile internet, I was using my Nokia 3210 and swapping SIMs 5 times a day to see if somebody back home had sent me an SMS or tried to call me. It was crazy! I could have had another phone for the Italian SIM and carry both devices with me, but I was conflicted by the very idea that I had to make my life impractical and therefore did not and it was a mistake.
When you live abroad being able to talk to your family and friends has no price
For me Facebook and Skype were really the only way to keep in touch, but not everybody was on Facebook and to setup a Skype call you needed to agree in advance at what time to call and setting up the call was a huge pain. Eventually after spending enough time comparing tariffs you could have found the best way to call home from your own device and without swapping SIMs, but that was the easiest part! You still need to share your new number with your friends, explain to them how to dial the international prefix, the difference between + and double zero, sometimes making sure they remove or add another zero before the number, and eventually it is their turn to figure out what is the best way to call and text abroad. All your friends that succeed doing all of that are real keepers!
You need to be ambitious crazy and really stubborn to succeed
I really wanted to fix this problem. Over the past years I spent countless number of hours researching about telecom technology, GSM, SIM protocols, VOIP communication, webRTC, SIP trunking, OTT, LTE, Asterisk, pbx … my head was exploding! At some point I really thought the solution was out of reach. And my creative mind start migrating towards other unexplored lands.
It was almost by coincidence that my telephone app idea come back once again. During my experience at Bizzby I had tremendous exposure to the world of mobile apps and I observed and witnessed many challenges that on-demand service marketplaces face. These two factors greatly contributed to my next idea.
On paper most ideas are great. Only when you start working on them, problems start to manifest.
I wanted to create a fair and efficient algorithm regulated marketplace for labour. It would have worked by following the basic economic principle of market equilibrium between offer and demand and my idea was to leverage smartphone apps and public APIs to initiate and coordinate all trades. After I created the first prototype of the market matcher and I modelled mathematically the system finance I realised that the model could have been completely disrupted by a simple thing: the telecommunication system that I was considering using was too primitive.
If you see something that doesn’t exist, go and build it -Elon Musk
In order to make the market work I couldn’t rely on the standard telecommunication network, especially if it were regulated by others. To prevent agents in the market to bypass the algorithm I had to guarantee that all communications happened only in the presence of a trade. In other words I needed to have complete power to block calls and SMS between parties not in trade. I needed to build the telecom network.
I needed to have complete power to block calls and SMS between parties not in trade. I needed to build the telecom network for the system.
I could not believe it! I had completed the circle and I was back to my original idea. It was almost destiny that I had to build my own telephone network. And on August the 11th 2016 Hoxfon limited was officially incorporated. It’s mission is to solve communication problems that traditional telecom companies are too busy to consider. The first Hoxfon commercial product is an app specifically designed to help expats to feel a little bit closer to home.
I can’t wait for you to download it and tell me what you think. I really hope you enjoy using it at least as much as I enjoyed making it.
