Md. Taqi Yasir
Fifteen years ago, David Erickson was at a crossroads. He’d sunk time and effort into building a service to let users conduct screen sharing and videoconferencing, but then a rival company began offering a similar service for free. So, he decided to get into the free business model himself named as FreeConferenceCall.com.
Beginning with a $10 domain name it was sitting there at GoDaddy, this company has grown into an under-the radar behemoth.
Here are some of the stats.
1. Nine digits in annual revenue
2. Between 5,000 and 7,000 new customers a day
3. Billions of minutes of conference calls
4. Worldwide service, with local dial-in numbers in 60 countries
5. Online meetings with free screen sharing and videoconferencing for up to 1,000 participants for free.
It turns out that’s pretty much what Erickson hoped would happen when he started the company in 2001. “Not a single person was advertising under the three keywords free, conference, and call in the search engines,” he said. Back then, it was GoTo.com that was your first PPC advertising. I got ‘free conference call at a nickel a click. He was a one-man band back then, Erickson said, answering customer service calls at 3 a.m., and kept innovating based on everything I heard from customer’s apartment. Now, he has almost 150 employees, the bulk of whom work with him in Long Beach, California.
“We’ve taken no institutional money and have no debt,” Erickson said when I pushed him to disclose his private company’s revenue. “Nine digits and profitable” was as far as he’d go, adding, “I want people to know we’re not venture funded, not looking for our next round of capital.”