David Erickson: Conference Calls Made Easy

>> Vince Thompson: Hi welcome to Dog and Pony. I'm Vince Thompson. You know it seems these days if we need to make any decisions in business, we often need to do it with our colleagues and the choices are either try to use our own conferencing system, get people on the line. Problem there is often times static, disconnections, just a hassle. Or use one of the conference calling services, and in most cases until recently they've been cost prohibited. But solving that problem for us is Free Conference Call dot com, a new company that CEO David Erickson is here to tell us about it today. David, Free Conference Call, how do you make money with a business that's free?

>> David Erickson: The idea of Free Conference Call was to just bring us business, bring us people that are conferencing customers, and I had other services that I then sold to those customers be it toll free conferencing, which is a pay for service, flat rate conferencing, and also what I call data conferencing or the ability to do screen sharing. I developed quite a bit of traffic coming into the free bridges and I found that there was telephone companies around the nation, that needed incoming traffic. I then had a value to them, that I could bring this traffic into their area.

>> Vince Thompson: Very amazing, I mean you've taken a service that everybody had to pay for, and now you've given it to consumers for free. I'm sure a lot of people were in the business and must have said, well you can't do that.

>> David Erickson: A lot of things said, we're interesting at best. But Free Conference Call is a new type of conference call in that it forms a new economic in conference calling. So in a free conference call, it's everybody pays their own way via their long distance basically. Take for example attorneys from different sides of a lawsuit. Who pays for the conferencing? You have an unlimited long distance plan; you're not paying anything additional for the call. If you have a normal long distance plan that charges you on a per minute rate, you're paying your per minute rate. So you would be paying what you're normally paying to get into a regular conference call anyway, but in that everybody's taking care of their own transport to the call and the conference call's free so there's no party that has to get hung with the bill. So that creates a new economic, that creates a lot of conferencing that didn't happen before, that creates the possibility for social chat. We have networks where we have taxi cab drivers that all free conference call together. So we've seen a lot of cases inside companies, big fortune 100 companies, where people have said it's too much trouble for me to go down the hall and get approval to get a conference call to do something when I just want to huddle quickly.

>> Vince Thompson: How did you fund the company?

>> David Erickson: I was out trying to put conferencing bridges in by my own equipment. I didn't have financing at the time, wasn't able to get lease programs and it was happening way too fast, and so I was able to monetize and make just about enough money to pay for just putting the equipment out. There wasn't any venture capital or angel investors or anything like that.

>> Vince Thompson: I'd imagine there are people that would love to give you some money to help accelerate the growth. What are your thoughts around taking money at this stage?

>> David Erickson: I'm often scared a little bit about the money, just with smart money comes a lot of meetings and what do in an hour you're doing in ... and I've had the ability to be very, very flexible as an entrepreneur. Not that taking money's bad, it's just for us, it's been fun to be very agile.

>> Vince Thompson: What are some of your greatest challenges?

>> David Erickson: The competitors like AT and T, Verizon, Quest ... because they don't appreciate the service the same way I do I guess. But they have tried to fight our regulatory ability to do this right, so we follow the laws. They would like to change the laws but it's long periods of time and big amounts of money.

>> Vince Thompson: And so would you classify the company as an amazing lead funnel for other telecom services, or are you going to sell ads someday? What happens next?

>> David Erickson: The customer is king right? So I am trying to please our customers, so I don't want to bring everything by the customer that I can think of, right? I want to come with things that actually improve what it is they're doing.

>> Vince Thompson: How big are you going to make this company?

>> David Erickson: I would like to do a billion minutes a month is my goal, 12 billion minutes a year.

>> Vince Thompson: Are you going to hire a CEO at some point, pass the reins?

>> David Erickson: I thought that was the thing to do. I though holy cow, this thing really has great potential. Maybe it's bigger than I am. Then I kind of went through that time and I actually interviewed some people and thought about it and talked to a business consultant about it. I've often thought, well wouldn't it be something to see it go really, really big under somebody's leadership? And then I'd say, well you know what - this is free conference call, it's doing exactly what it's supposed to do.

>> Vince Thompson: David Erickson, CEO of Free Conference Call dot com. Thanks so much for being here today.

>> David Erickson: Thank you.

>> Vince Thompson: As always if you have questions, comments, or ideas for guests please email us. You can do so at info at dog and pony dot com. I'm Vince Thompson, thanks for watching!