Profig, a new Y Combinator-backed startup, just launched its instant virtual phone system for small and medium businesses. The service is geared toward companies and individuals looking for a professional phone solution without the cost and hassle of using legacy hardware and software solutions. For just $30 per month, Profig offers its users one toll-free number, two local numbers, 500 minutes of calling time and 250 text messages.
To celebrate its launch, the company is offering the first 1,000 new users who use ‘techcrunch’ as their discount code when they sign up a $30 credit (enough for one month of basic service) to test Profig.
The service, as Profig’s co-founder Anantha Katragadda told me yesterday, works with your existing phones and is meant to be extremely easy to set up and use. Most currently available systems, Katragadda noted, are not just more expensive, but also lack the wide variety of features that Profig’s cloud-based system is able to offer. According to Katragadda, about a quarter of the current Y Combinator class has already signed up for its service.
What makes the service unique is that this one $30/month plan covers all of Profig’s services, which currently include the virtual phone system with features like an auto attendant, call routing, call screening and all the usual features one would expect from a phone system. Also included in the plan is a call tracking solution and a voice broadcasting service for reaching out to customers with automatic messages. All of these tools are accessible from one centralized dashboard.
You can, of course, always buy additional numbers and you are charged for calls and messages that go over the monthly allotments (that’s why you will have to give Profig a credit card number, even when you use the ‘techcrunch’ discount code).
With the basic system in place, the Profig team is now working on extending the service’s features set. The company, for example, just launched a click-to-call button that its users can integrate on their own websites to allow customers to contact them directly without leaving their site.
Profig is working on a solution for sales and support call centers and is already running beta tests of its full-blown SIP-based office phone system. The team is also working on integrating its solution – and especially its call tracking analytics data – with existing CRM solutions like Salesforce and Highrise.
For the time being, the two co-founders (who are also brothers) are the only full-time engineers working on the product. Interestingly, as Anantha and his brother Vamsi were working on a completely different idea when they were accepted into this summer’s Y Combinator class. After a few office hours with the program’s founder Paul Graham, however, it quickly became clear that the team’s talents were better suited for a product like Profig. Indeed, as they told me, the brothers had built a telephony system for their father’s business a few years earlier and that experience came in handy when the team decided to pivot.
