

Ask HN: Using Google Voice Number for your startup? - proee

I'm getting ready to setup a number for my startup and wondering if people are finding Google Voice reliable and of high enough quality to use as their main number.<p>We'd like to start contacting some rather large companies to sell our product and we want a convenient way to relay around our business number to cell phones or other connections as needed.<p>Any advice on setting up a business number for a small startup is appreciated..
======
edash
I've tried lots of different phone systems and still haven't found a good
solution yet, but hopefully my experience is instructive:

RING CENTRAL: RingCentral provided a toll-free number for me. Their interface
is awful and they're just generally not that innovative, but they accomplished
the task for $15 / mo or so. I wouldn't use them again, but only because there
was no "wow."

GOOGLE VOICE: Google Voice is hit or miss. The connection is spotty, the dial
out sometimes just doesn't work, there's a slight delay in the connection when
answering etc. It is promising as a personal product, but nowhere near
business quality. I've tried on two occasions...and both times got frustrated
and needed to switch. Contrary to what others have said, you can have a phone
assigned to two Google Voice accounts, but one must be marked "home/office"
and it won't be able to send or receive SMS messages. It's confusing because
I'm sure they're trying to avoid this use case.

GRASSHOPPER: I have been using Grasshopper for 3 months after hearing
recommendations from Jason Fried and Mixergy. I find their interface to be
really unintuitive and difficult to use.

They have great support, but I had to rely on it too often. I called 5-6 times
to set up basic Google Voice functionality (route calls to my cell phone, have
voice mail). The Java program for recording your voicemail greeting was wonky
and broke often. The recording was poor as well. They encourage you to hire
voice actors to do the work, but I want my voicemail to sound like a human,
not a radio robot. They should simply allow you to upload an MP3.

There's no good way to dial out. With Google Voice you can log-in to the web
app or use their mobile app. With Grasshopper, the only way to dial out is to
call a number first, then dial the number you want to call. With this
approach, sometimes connections were refused that were later successful from
my cell phone. Nice people and I love what they're doing with Chargify, but I
plan to move to something else...

TWILIO: I considered Twilio and will most likely use it for other aspects of
the business (click to call, sms follow-up). But I ultimately decided it was
better to use a solution designed for this purpose rather than spend developer
resources making Twilio work for us. It will be cool to see applications built
upon Twilio that solve problems like this.

LINE2: Line2 looked interesting, but recently had crippling DDOS problems and
is iPhone only. It also seems best suited for a single person consultancy
rather than a company.

ONSIP: I recently decided to make the move to OnSip. They were also
recommended by Jason Fried. Since they are essentially just providing virtual
PBX via SIP, you can choose from a wide selection of phones, apps from third
party developers etc. So I plan to purchase an office phone (with a cord!) and
use that during work hours. When I'm not in the office, or for off-hours,
calls will be routed to my cell phone and I'll use an iPhone app to dial out.

~~~
AndrewWarner
Thanks for trying Grasshopper.com on my recommendation. I'm curious about what
UX issues you had.

If you want to tell me, please email me mail at awarner dot com

I worked hard to get them as a sponsor because I thought they were very easy
to use.

------
mikexstudios
One issue with Google Voice is that if you already have a personal GV number
pointing to a phone number, you can't create another GV number (ex. for
business) that points to that same number.

A GV-like service that was built for businesses is Phonebooth
(<http://www.phonebooth.com/>). Give it a try, it's freemium!

~~~
jeffepp
Thanks for the tip about Phonebooth, just signed up. My favorite feature about
GV is that I can see that the call is being fwd (I know its not a personal
call to my cell) and then I can answer accordingly.

This feature is a must-have for me, as I would prefer not to answer every call
with my business tag line :)

------
quizbiz
GV is a fantastic program. I have hit problems because of the limitations on
the number of times you're allowed to connect your cell phone number to GV.
That being said, I think it's against their terms to use it for commercial
use.

Check Grasshopper.com. I am not a customer of theirs.

------
AndrewHampton
I've been using GV for almost a year now and for the most part it's been
great. I have had issues with certain people trying to call me as well and
getting busy signals or operator error messages. From what I've read I think
this has to do with routing tables not being updated in certain states for
certain GV number blocks, and that it's really hard to get resolved.

------
nkurz
I'm using one as a business line, but would not recommend it. There's a brief
period of silence before connecting, which results in constant 'do you hear
me' questions, and generally poor voice quality overall.

I like the attempts at transcription for voice mail, but find the voice mail
difficult to configure otherwise. Sometimes I get messages on the ring-to
phone, sometimes on GV. There's no way to set the number of rings before pick
up.

I'm having a much better experience with standard VOIP numbers through
Callcentric, to the point that I'm looking at trying to port out the Google
Voice number. Has anyone had any success in porting a number out?

~~~
teye
I successfully ported a number to Callcentric before GrandCentral became GV.
After GC -> GV, the number magically returned to GV, which is fine by me with
the improved feature set.

------
JangoSteve
I've used Google Voice for one of my companies since 2007, and it's been
great.

However, I replaced it with Grasshopper (<http://www.grasshopper.com>) a few
months ago and haven't looked back. It is much better for inbound calls and is
well worth the $10/mo for the entry-level plan. You can setup an 800 number
(or a vanity 800-number for $30), and record an entire phone tree for various
"departments" like support, sales, etc.

Starting out as a 1-man team, all of these extensions routed to my own cell
phone of course. But then as I grew, it was easy to login and change the
destination of each extension to various team members. Both of my companies
are primarily B2B, so being able to give the user experience of having a
stable central hub, when we in fact work mostly remotely, is comforting to
existing and potential clients. Without this, we'd have to try forwarding
calls to each other's cell phone numbers, or telling the client to try dialing
the other person's number directly, both of which are simply unacceptable.

The one downside of Grasshopper is that, as of now, you are still unable to
make outgoing calls through the number, since it doesn't have a GV app for
Android or iPhone.

------
samaparicio
I work for Ringio (<http://www.ringio.com>) so my advice is potentially
subjective. Biggest differentiators:

* You get a screen pop on your computer (or your Android) when a call comes in, with the whole interaction history between the caller and anybody in your business, so your chances of sounding like you know what you're talking about are higher.

* It syncs in real-time, 2 way, with your Google Contacts and makes it a snap to share contacts between colleagues.

* It gives you fine-grained control over your Caller ID when making phone calls, so people who call you back are reaching you where they should (e.g. a support call shows your main company number, but a personal call shows your personal business number)

* Unlike most of the other services, Making an outgoing call is not an afterthought, it's well built into the system as a full feature. And most startups trying to get customers do a lot of outbound calls, and rarely get called. (10:1 ratio)

------
tomhogans
I have had a good experience using Twilio to handle and route incoming sales
and support calls.

------
gte910h
It's fine as a forwarding number, but it's a little odd dialing out.

Twilo and Tropo (which runs on voxel) are both alternatives you may want to
look at.

------
mitchellhislop
#1 questions: How prevelant is Android at your startup?

Most Android: Do it. Not Android: Use Grasshopper/Phonebooth

------
bakes11
Google Voice was great for me until I started my business and needed a toll
free number as well as an extension for each of my 2 employees. I looked at
RingCentral and Grasshopper and ended up going with a similar company called
my1voice.

------
rewded
I believe this is a violation of the TOS for Google Voice. I've heard great
things about phonebooth.com, which is especially for commercial use and starts
as a free service.

------
joezydeco
You might want to look into a cheap plan from a paid provider like Vocalocity.
We're using them at the moment and it's pretty solid.

------
eadz
Skype?

Apparently they now route a decent % of all calls.

------
drivebyacct
I use it and love it for personal use. I would not trust it for business use
yet. Text syncing goes out once every two weeks, sometimes for an entire
weekend. It requires manual refreshing in the GV app. Froyo's new push
notifications should reduce this problem.

I've been told that people have tried to call me and got busy signals multiple
times.

~~~
clb22
I agree with you

