5th
How to kill Goliath*
It has now been a liitle over a year since Google launched free voicemail transcription. For those who don’t know, I founded PhoneTag, a service that supplies voicemail transcription that you pay for…
If you had read my emails the morning Google launched you would have thought there had been a death in the family, they basically all said “so sorry for your loss (PhoneTag)”.
Reporters were all over the story and I came out swinging. In a interview on Gadgetell I said “If you are such a pussy that the idea of Google entering it is going to wipe you out, you don’t belong in the entrepreneurial world. I then wrote the post “Thank You Google!, Thank You!, Thank You!”
I was able to come out strong against Google for two main reasons. The first is that I had planned since day 1 on Google coming into my market. When we launched no one suspected Google would do this but my caution to the world is expect Google to compete with you no matter what. The second thing is that if my ship was going to go down, I was going to fight hard to save it until the end. That is just my personality.
How we did it can be summed up almost entirely by a email I got from a customer that had left us for Google Voice, Victor Epstein:
Subject- Customer Victor Epstein
Body- I cut your service after I was laid off in December by the AP in a bid to save money. It wound up being penny smart and dollar foolish. I thought I could replace it with the Google service, which is just terrible. I’m coming back.
And this is what we found as we watched some of our base cancel and go to Google Voice, they almost all came back. We have incredible customer service and a super high quality transcription, those are two things that people will pay for. We had the same experience when Apple launched visual voicemail on the iPhone.
So while we did not kill Goliath (thought it made for a catchy title) we definitely have survived and even thrived in direct competition to Google. In fact, because Google Voice has built some much awareness about the feature, Voicemail to Text, it has created overall growth in our business even after factoring off the few customers that left for their free service.
*or survive in a world of Goliaths
