Show HN: My two-week MVP, Call2Record

Show HN: My two-week MVP, Call2Record(calltorecord.com)

23 points by _aes 15 years ago | 20 comments

senko 15 years ago |

Speaking as a technical user, I don't think I'd use your product for recording my voice. I can do that trivially with a voice recorder utility on any computer, or even my smartphone, for absolutely free, and probably with higher quality than a typical phone line can give me.

What I would consider using this is for having a voice contact form. If I deal with users who might be more accustomed to phoning someone instead of filling out web forms, I might tell them "you can call this number and give your suggestions, feeback, etc". Having an option of leaving a greeting message (and to inform them they're being recorded) would be nice.

If you're a developer, these are trivial to do with Twilio directly, but if people don't want to waste time reimplementing stuff they can outsource to you, it could be useful. There probably are other services which do exactly this, although I'm not aware of their names at the moment, as I hadn't had the need to use them yet.

_aes 15 years ago | |

I agree it's a pretty niche application that most technical users wouldn't find a use for. Very interesting suggestion about a voice contact form. I agree it might be really useful for interacting with a less technical user base.

I'll probably make the service completely free if it doesn't see any uptake.

h6165 15 years ago |

I find your app great. I can imagine numerous users (at least in my country) who have don't use smart phones, don't know how to use recording functionality in mobile phones, and have too low bandwidths to upload recordings. For them and for me, its a simplifier.

p.s: my country = India

_aes 15 years ago | |

Thanks! I need to change my account to accept international calls to make sure that you can use it.

systemtrigger 15 years ago |

I love how low you've made the pricing. You must be in the red after paying Twilio 1¢/minute inbound, 2¢/SMS and 2¢/minute outbound. Thanks!

iPhone limits the size of voice memos that I can email myself so for long memos I will use Call2Record.

Beautiful web design. Nice job.

stanleydrew 15 years ago | |

Just a note: we (Twilio) charge 2 cents per SMS now.

systemtrigger 15 years ago | | |

Fixed, thanks.

jiffyjeff 15 years ago |

I launched an almost identical service, http://savethatcall.com, in January. My prices are extremely low (50 cents + 5 cents per minute), but it's hard to compete with free! Good luck.

aagha 15 years ago | |

Have you made any money off the service?

How long did it take you to build it? What tech did you use?

jiffyjeff 15 years ago | | |

My margins are low and I've just started gaining traffic, so I haven't made a lot of money. However, I launched the service with a profit motive, so payment integration and realistic pricing were baked in from the start.

I built the site in about 80 hours over 3 or 4 weeks. It was a nice distraction from my master's thesis... Which actually got finished about the same time as the site went live. :)

I used Google App Engine and Twilio, but I also built an audio processing module that runs as a daemon on a Dreamhost server. (The latter was a workaround to GAE's limitations on long-running processes and insertions into the app engine datastore)

_aes 15 years ago |

hi HN! I put this together to toy around with some new technologies that I hadn't played with before.

It's a service for recording audio directly to 'the cloud' with any mobile phone.

aaronrc 15 years ago | |

Very nice. Now if you could email transcriptions of the recordings and use voice recognition to identify the call participants you'd be onto a winner :).

aagha 15 years ago |

Same questions as those to @jiffyjeff:

Have you made any money off the service?

How long did it take you to build it? What tech did you use?

_aes 15 years ago | |

1. I launched it this morning, so no, I haven't made any money off of it yet.

2. I worked on it part-time for 2 weeks. I'd say it was about 4-5 full days to put together but a lot of that time was spent learning new technologies/APIs I hadn't used before.

The tech used to build it are on the FAQ page: Tornado Redis Twilio Google URL Shortener ReCAPTCHA Mako Templates jQuery SimpleModal IcoJoy WinningTheme

agranig 15 years ago | | |

I've launched http://fonoso.com/ a couple of weeks ago, which takes your idea a step further and records full phone calls and could be used for podcast recordings over the phone, or any other use case where you want to archive and/or share a phone conversation.

I didn't put any time or efforts into polishing or marketing it, so if you (or anyone else) wants to team up, contact me at agranig@fonoso.com. Instead of twilio or something similar, I use my own SIP trunks to carriers, so for inbound calls, no fees are charged. It's easier to offer something for free with this approach :)

rexreed 15 years ago |

I think if you had transcription included, this would be a more compelling offering (for me, at least -- sample size of one).

stevenp 15 years ago |

The domain name is really impressive. Did you have to buy it on the domain market, or was it available?

techscruggs 15 years ago |

What is the benefit of using this service over jott.com?

_aes 15 years ago | |

This was just a quick side project, so I didn't research too heavily any alternatives. I've never seen Jott before, but from a cursory glance the differences are:

Jott has a monthly fee whereas Call2Record is pay as you go.

Jott is probably much more expensive unless you record a lot of audio ($4/month and $12/month compared to $1/hour)

Jott limits you to recording only up to 30 seconds of audio at a time whereas Call2Record will allow you to record for an unlimited amount of time.

Jott seems to have a bunch of other extra services and features that are built around and compliment their product.

rokhayakebe 15 years ago |

Call to tweet your audio message, "Hello, I am winning".