Name of your website?Localphone International Calling
Your name?
Dave Cardwell
Your Location (city, etc)
Sheffield
Please give us a short summary of your website?
We provide cheap calls to any country in the world. We give our customers a unique, local number for each of their international contacts and they can call straight through without the need for access numbers or PINs.
What inspired you to launch your own website?
We had an interest in Voice Over IP (VoIP) and other related technologies, and weren't happy with the existing companies in the market. From there our interest developed into ways of calling abroad easier, cheaper, and at a higher quality.
How did you decide on a name for your website?
The name Localphone is exactly what we’re all about - making anyone in the world a local call away.
What makes it different from other, similar offerings?
Apart from giving you a unique local number to call each of your international contacts directly, we've tried to provide a high call quality at a low price. Many of our competitors hide the true cost of calling behind expensive access numbers, connection charges, maintenance fees, or by expiring your credit.
We don't think any of these methods are fair to the customer, and have found that if you sit down and take into account all these hidden charges, Localphone works out cheaper even in cases when our per-minute rate appears higher.
What is your eventual goal? (To sell it, keep it for income, secure a book or other mainstream media deal?)
We're in it for the long haul - we're really passionate about what we do and we want to build Localphone into a major player in international calling and the emerging VoIP market.
How does your investment of time and money balance against your success?
It's early days yet, but we've already built a large customer base with our message of high call quality and low cost. Our users are loving the service and telling all of their friends and family, so we're really looking forward to building on this success.
If you had an unlimited development budget for development, how would you change your site?
We've got a great technical team and they're always working on improving the site and the service. We've got a number of new ideas and products we're looking forward to launching in the near future.
With an expanded development budget I'd hope to make these new features and the existing site even easier to use and more intuitive for our customers.
If your site got really big, really quickly, would you be able to keep up with the demand?
We've spent a lot of time and effort on building a highly-redundant, high-speed network. Unlike many of our competitors, we also own our own number ranges and have built a robust and reliable back-end system.
I think we're in a really strong position to handle a rapid growth in demand, and we fully expect it!
What has been your biggest challenge?
It's always a struggle to balance our customers' demands for high call quality and low rates. Finding new routes and carriers that can meet our high expectations has been tricky, but we've gotten good at weeding out the unreliable providers and have built up a strong portfolio of partners.
What method has been most successful for promoting your website?
As a web-based business, we've found organic search, link building, and pay-per-click advertising to be the most effective methods of promoting our website so far. We'll be looking to expand our efforts into traditional media in the near future.
How has running your website differed from your expectations?
Everybody on the team comes from a web and/or e-commerce background, so we all knew what to expect this time around.
How long have you run the site already, and how long will you continue to keep it up if you don't enjoy big gains in traffic, income or popularity?
The public launch of Localphone.com was in October 2007. It's early days yet, so we haven't made any plans to retire the site just yet ;)
What is your website address?
Localphone International Calling
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