Still Early

In this episode:Why Phone.inc gives away phone numbers for freeWhat’s getting built in October (call whispers, voice-changed greetings, maybe SMS)A bug report button that hands every report to a coding agentChatGPT did almost all the work of submitting Phone.inc’s ChatGPT pluginWhy they’re making their videos in-house instead of hiring an agencyFirst episode recorded in person, in the Phone.inc office.A lot of people just need a phone number for something (the App Store, Stripe, registering a company), and Phone.inc’s free plan gives them one. Peter thinks it’s a huge use case that’s still up for grabs. With freemium you own the lead, as Patrick Campbell used to say, and Phone.inc literally has their number. Niklas cares less about why they sign up. If Phone.inc is where someone got their first business number, it’s probably where they’ll go the next time they need one.October is the first month that isn’t only foundational work. Call whispers give you a few words when you pick up (who’s calling, and probably why) based on caller context and previous calls. Welcome greetings get a voice changer, so you record the greeting yourself and it comes out in a different voice, with your pronunciation of the company name intact. The stretch goal is texting on business numbers, the most requested feature. It’s pretty easy in the US and UK, and a lot more work in Denmark.Niklas vibe coded a bug report button. Customers click the part of the page that’s broken, Sentry captures the session, and an Amp thread starts on a fix right away, all the way to a PR that’s ready to merge.In his first week as growth lead, Peter submitted the Phone.inc MCP server as a ChatGPT plugin. ChatGPT’s plugin creator did nearly all of it (test cases, checking his demo video, telling him to set up a test account with a call and a voicemail). He thinks that’s roughly how onboarding should feel.Peter wants Phone.inc to eventually make the kind of launch videos later-stage startups put out. They could hire an agency for that, but they’d rather get good at it themselves, which means shipping something every week and improving as they go. Companies that buy one great video often struggle to make the next one. And with so much AI-generated video around now, they want theirs to clearly be made by people.Still Early is sponsored by Phone.inc: a business phone number, welcome greeting, call routing, and opening hours, all from an app on your personal phone.

In this episode:Peter's first day at Phone.inc (office breakfast, a design sync, and half an hour picking Lea's brain about the customer journey)He didn't have to set up a local dev environment, and made his first PR through AmpJesse Hanley from Bento tweeted that he didn't want to be on the waitlist, which turned into a bunch of new signupsPhone.inc hit the September goal of 100 companies (124 now), with about 15% of free users converting to paidNiklas hired a VP of sales, starting November 1What does an activated user look like for a phone number that might never ring?Peter started full time at Phone.inc on Thursday. He filmed the whole day for a vlog (the coffee machine, the car door, the drive to Copenhagen in his right-hand drive manual from 2012). Lea had ordered breakfast, then came standup, the Thursday design sync that Katrine runs, and a priorities call with Niklas (who was home with his kids after three days of travelling). After lunch he spent half an hour asking Lea where customers are right now.The nicest surprise was that he probably doesn't need a local development environment at all. Everything was already set up in Amp, so he typed into a text box, got a tour of the app and the website, and had staging sites created for him. His first PR was adding the Bento logo to the website.On Friday Peter woke up early and saw that Jesse Hanley from Bento had tweeted that he needed a number and didn't want to be on the waitlist. Peter had gotten admin access the night before, so he invited Jesse and a few others from Twitter. That led to a lot of tweets back and forth, new followers and a bunch of signups. Jesse asked how this can be free. His use case is simple, Phone.inc runs its own voice infrastructure so the cost is low, and him tweeting about it is worth more than what he would've paid.Phone.inc hit the September goal of 100 companies and is at 124 now. Around 15% of free users convert to paid, and there are no gates yet (just an upgrade button). There are paying customers in the US, the UK and Finland, and the US has passed Denmark in the last 50 waitlist signups.Niklas spent two days in Stockholm at a go-to-market meetup one of their investors organized. A revenue leader from a fast-growing AI company talked about running self-serve and enterprise sales at the same time (most of their early enterprise deals started on the self-serve side). Niklas also hired a VP of sales, someone he's worked with before who builds direct sales teams from zero. He starts November 1, and there'll probably be a sales team from January.Peter is in the Copenhagen office two or three days a week for meetings, feedback and lunch, with remote days for deep work. He's still sorting out the logistics (a new electric car, a school carpool, the right train, and moving house in two weeks).Peter is responsible for activation now, and it's hard to define for a phone number. Jesse might never get a call and still be an active user. Niklas wants one simple metric (weekly active companies that made or received a call), plus softer signals like whether the number is on the company's website. They talked about a test call button, asking people at signup why they need a number, and what to do with free numbers nobody has used for six months. Neither of them thinks there's a right answer yet.Niklas keeps both his notes and his tasks in Linear, in a private team, and adds to it by talking to Claude in the car.Still Early is sponsored by Phone.inc: a business phone number, welcome greeting, call routing, and opening hours, all from an app on your personal phone.

In this episode:Tailwind is joining Shopify, and Peter isn't going with themWhy he said no to pursuing Shopify (big company, no side projects, night calls from Europe)He's joining Phone.inc as product growth lead on October 1Why Niklas wanted a founder type in the role instead of someone with a finished playbookThe 2012 job Peter quit after four months, and the case for founders taking a job for a seasonPhone.inc shipped do not disturb and call transfer, and invites are open againTailwind is joining Shopify. Adam Wathan announced it last week, and Peter's last day at Tailwind Labs was the day before. He'd been there four years, never full time (a couple of days a week as a contractor), but it was his main stable thing the whole time. He originally joined to build a job board, which he'd completely forgotten until recently. His own startup was near the end of its runway, and Adam asked if he wanted to start a business inside Tailwind Labs part time. It later turned into running partnerships. He's known about the acquisition for a long time, which made Laravel Live Denmark a month ago pretty strange (the perfect place to talk to everyone about it, and he couldn't).Following the team to Shopify was something Peter could have pursued, and there were a ton of good reasons to do it. But he's never really wanted to work at a big company, and if he ever did, he wanted it to be a decision he made on purpose. He also had too many things going on the side that he wasn't ready to let go of, and he'd have been the only person in Europe on a North American team. Adam told him he didn't have to come, and that it would still be a good outcome for him if he went and did his own thing.Instead, Peter is joining Phone.inc as product growth lead on October 1. He was already an investor and helping out as a contractor. The role covers marketing and the part of product that overlaps with it (the founder-led growth videos, onboarding, changes in the app itself). Niklas thinks of it as founder in residence, and Peter says it looks a lot like his job when he was starting Reform. A friend had been asking him for months why he was only there one day a week, since he already sounded like he was running growth.Peter isn't very employable (the last time he didn't work for his own company was 2012), and his real worry was joining when he knows he'll want to do his own thing again someday. Niklas said that's exactly who he's looking for. An experienced growth hire usually brings the one playbook that worked somewhere else, and at this stage Phone.inc needs someone who can go find the one that works for them. Peter also tells the story of his first job as a junior Rails developer. He quit after four months, and his boss offered to fund his startup if he stayed. Niklas makes the case (from his blog post "Seasons in life") that founders can take a job for a few years without it being an identity crisis. He did it at Trustpilot after Firmafon and says it was the best thing he's done career-wise.On the Phone.inc side, invites were paused in early September until two core features shipped: do not disturb and call transfer. Both went live yesterday. At Firmafon, transferring a call meant remembering a star code, so people just didn't (some customers literally threw the phone across the office instead). Now there's a transfer button next to end call, a live list of colleagues and their status, and you can brief the person before handing over while the caller listens to hold music Mikkel made in a day of jamming (Niklas says it's the best he's ever heard). Invites are back on, with ten new companies in a day and a goal of 100 live companies in two weeks. Phone.inc is also hiring someone to lead direct sales.The podcast will follow Phone.inc even more closely from here, hopefully recorded in person at the office.Still Early is sponsored by Phone.inc: a business phone number, welcome greeting, call routing, and opening hours, all from an app on your personal phone.

In this episode:Peter went to Laravel Live Denmark, which grew out of a Copenhagen meetup he helped start in 2014Everyone there assumed he works full time at Phone.inc now (the daily videos are doing their job)The form builder idea he never shipped at Reform: a form, plus an AI-built backend to actually process the repliesNiklas said for months that Phone.inc wouldn't build call queuing, then built it in two daysClaude's voice mode works with MCP servers on mobile, which turns a drive to Copenhagen into real workPeter wants to turn Memo into a microblogging platform (both ChatGPT and Claude told him it's procrastination)Peter went to Laravel Live Denmark in Copenhagen, which is a bit of a full circle thing. He and Visti started the Laravel meetup there in 2014 (he tried in 2013 but nobody replied to his forum posts), and Kasper has since turned it into a non-profit and a 300 person conference. Aaron Francis, Taylor Otwell and DHH all showed up this year.A lot of people assumed Peter now works full time at Phone.inc. He doesn't, he's still pretty part-time, but there's something on the channels every weekday now so it feels like he's always around. The batch of Q&A shorts they recorded before summer is what makes that possible (Joseph is editing them). Four are out, around a thousand views each on YouTube and roughly the same on TikTok. Niklas got recognized from the videos by a stranger in a swimming hall changing room, while naked, which he took as a good sign.The form builder came up again. Nanoform is the product Peter is most excited about, but the version he actually wants is the one he never built at Reform. A form is a small piece of software, and the replies always need a process behind them. So the AI builds the backend too, picking from real building blocks (a kanban board, a table, separate pages, whatever fits) instead of generating it from scratch. Niklas wants lead scoring and agentic steps that fire when a card moves status. Peter's phrasing: vibe coded forms, without the slop. The name is still wrong.Niklas had been saying for months that Phone.inc wouldn't build call queuing, since it's a feature for full time support teams and that's not who they're for. Then he looked at the data from the first 40 companies and found people waiting in line anyway (50 calls a day is fine until they all land during lunch). So he built the simplest possible version in two days. Every call is queued now, even the ones answered instantly, and there isn't a single new setting or checkbox anywhere. Do not disturb is next and falls out of the same model: turn it off and a waiting call rings straight through. They're also pausing invites for a few weeks. Forty companies in, there are four foundational things to tighten up first, and none of them were a surprise. The first number porting went through too.Niklas discovered that Claude's voice mode on mobile has all the MCP servers from his desktop, so an hour and a half of driving became actual work: Linear tickets, debugging calls, pulling product feedback out of customer service conversations. Peter can't stand talking to it (a clever door, he says), but they agree it's a bit mad that Siri isn't this.TechBBQ has grown into more of an innovation fair than a startup event, and Niklas would rather have something the size of Laravel Live Denmark, invite only, founders and investors. The side events around it were still great.And Peter wants to turn Memo into a microblogging platform. Longer than a tweet, shorter than a blog post, RSS, no algorithm, somewhere to document building the form builder. Both ChatGPT and Claude told him it's an elaborate form of procrastination. Niklas told him to build it anyway.Still Early is sponsored by Phone.inc: a business phone number, welcome greeting, call routing, and opening hours, all from an app on your personal phone.

In this episode:Why Still Early and the Phone.inc vlog are two different shows, and who each one is forPhone.inc has 15-20 companies live on their own infrastructure, and the inbound is getting hard to keep up withThe two kinds of partnership Niklas thinks are actually worth doing (and why most aren't)Niklas hired a head of engineering in about a dayPeter got orbpilled: three days on Amp, a form builder and a kanban board, none of it built on a laptopNanoform's entire interface is a prompt you paste into an agentPhone.inc has started letting people onto the platform, slowly, and it's all running on their own infrastructure now. 15-20 companies so far, a mix of people with a real need and friends of the house who are good at giving feedback. The whole team ran the signup flow and did a friction log, which produced 20-25 issues in Linear, and Niklas had Cursor agents fix the ones he agreed with (watching cards move across the board by themselves was apparently pretty great).The pull is different this time. Random people calling Niklas's private phone because they heard about it, 55 unanswered LinkedIn messages, an inbox he gave up on and archived. Lea pulled him aside to point out they never felt anything like this in all the Firmafon years.Partnerships too, which Niklas would normally tell founders to avoid (usually all motion, no customers, and Peter got burned this way with Branch). But two categories look real: vertical SaaS platforms where the customer data lives, so a call can come in with context attached, and incorporation platforms where you catch a company at day one and never get switched out.He also hired Marcel as head of engineering. They'd worked together at Trustpilot and Whimsical, the whole team met him the same day, signed eight minutes later. Thomas made the first Android call too, with the business logic shared in Swift and the apps still native.Then Peter, who has had a slightly unhinged week. He tried an OpenClaw-style setup, didn't click, and then Adam told him to try Amp's orbs. He's now completely orpilled. The point isn't the agent, it's not needing a dev environment at all: spin up an orb, get a URL, comment directly on the thing, review it later. He built a hosted version of Nanoform this way, where you never touch a form builder (you paste a prompt with a link to the agents file, the agent builds the form, you click claim). He also added JSON bodies and kanban boards to Memo, which agents can update by patching JSON. All of it from his phone, including one session from the corner of Max Burgers.They also get into where this breaks down: iOS builds, push notifications, FreeSWITCH. Niklas thinks Phone.inc will have to build those runners themselves.---Still Early is sponsored by Phone.inc: a business phone number, welcome greeting, call routing, and opening hours, all from an app on your personal phone.