James Siminoff

I feel like a Somali pirate*

When Nuance (Nasdaq: NUAN) bought both Jott and Spinvox it left only two companies capable of supplying voicemail to text to the global market, us (PhoneTag/Ditech) and them.  They are a $4.5 billion market cap company, we are a strong public company (Nasdaq: DITC) but compared to Nuance our market cap of around $40 million is 112 times smaller than theirs.  Additionally Google and Microsoft have also entered the consumer market with their own services (they do not resell it to carriers) and they make Nuance look small…

Which makes Ditech those little boats above.  It feels great waking up every morning to take on Nuance, Google and Microsoft in the new world of open source, cloud computing and ruby on rails, etc.  I am much happier being me than them (the big ship).

Today was the trifecta,  The New York Times did a story on voicemail to text, featuring PhoneTag, Mark Suster from GRP featured us in his post “Productivity Hacks: Voicemail, Folders & To-Do’s” and then Fred Wilson from USV did a follow on post to Mark’s calling us “a lifesaver”.

So if you are a “little guy” trying to take on the “big guys” it can be done, just takes a lot of work and a tough stomach.  If you can handle it, the rewards feel that much sweeter.

*also for the metaphor to Somali pirates, what they do is obviously horrible.  The metaphor is about how a few guys on fast dinghies (Ditech) can take a slow moving impossible to redirect massively expensive freighter (you know who this is) to its knees.  So if I had more space in the title I would make it “I Feel Like a Somali Pirate… one that uses peaceful tactics to make money by being nimble in their market and never breaks the law in doing it”.

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