How It Started

SpherePBX started the way most honest startup ideas do — from watching a problem nobody was solving well.

The hosted VoIP market in 2014 was crowded at the enterprise end (RingCentral, 8x8, Vonage) and nearly empty at the small business end where it actually mattered. Small businesses were still running on-premise PBX hardware that cost thousands to install, required a specialist to configure, and fell apart the moment something needed to change. The hosted alternatives that existed were either expensive, technically confusing, or sold by people who communicated exclusively in acronyms.

We saw a straightforward opportunity: build a genuinely good hosted PBX platform, price it at a flat monthly rate with unlimited calling to the U.S., Canada, and Puerto Rico, and support it with people who speak plain English. No geek-speak, no hidden fees, no hardware drama.

What We Built

The platform was an end-to-end hosted VoIP solution — multi-tenant, cloud-hosted, Asterisk at the core. The feature set covered the fundamentals every business phone system needs: Auto Attendant (IVR), Find Me / Follow Me routing, call queues, voicemail, virtual fax, and call center inbound routing.

We also built out a hardware line — sourcing, branding, and selling IP desk phones directly through the platform’s WooCommerce shop, which let customers get handsets that were pre-configured for their account. That closed a friction point that killed a lot of competitor deals: the “I bought the service but now what do I plug in?” problem.

Later we built ubCallin — an in-house CRM and power dialer platform that integrated directly with the VoIP layer. Sales teams could run outbound dialer campaigns, manage leads and accounts, handle drip marketing, and see call reports all in one place. It was effectively building Salesforce + RingCentral in a single integrated product for the market that couldn’t afford either.

The VC Experience

We raised $400K. The process was educational in ways I wasn’t expecting.

The pitch wasn’t the hard part — the VoIP market was legible, the unit economics were defensible, and we had paying customers before we raised. The hard part was finding investors whose definition of “small business communications” matched ours. Most institutional money at that level wanted to see a path to a much larger addressable market, which meant either going upmarket (competing with RingCentral directly, a different company entirely) or adding complexity that would have killed the thing that made us work.

We ended up with the right partners for what we were actually building, which is the better outcome even if the number was smaller than the dream number always is.

200 Customers and a Four-Engineer Team

Growing to 200+ customers meant making deliberate choices about what not to build. The engineering team was four people, supported by a broader team handling installations, sales, customer service, and accounting — but on the engineering side specifically, four people had to cover a lot of ground. The multi-tenant architecture was essential — every configuration change, every new customer, every feature rollout had to work without per-customer manual intervention. We invested heavily in the provisioning layer early and it paid back for years.

The plain English support commitment wasn’t just marketing copy. It shaped how we hired and how we wrote documentation. Technical accuracy and human clarity are not in conflict — they require more discipline to achieve together, not less.

What I’d Do Differently

ubCallin was the right idea at the wrong time. We built it when we still had growth left to capture on the core VoIP product. The result was that we split engineering attention across two complex products rather than making one exceptional. A cleaner separation — prove the VoIP platform to a larger customer base, then build the CRM as a second product with dedicated resources — would have been better sequencing.

I’d also have been more aggressive about recurring revenue optimization earlier. Flat-rate unlimited pricing is easy to sell but it puts pressure on you to maintain margins as usage scales. We solved it operationally but it required more attention than it should have if we’d structured the pricing tiers better at the start.

What It Was Worth

Five years. $400K raised. 200+ customers. A full team across engineering, sales, installations, and operations — and I’m still proud of all of them. A product that actually worked and that people paid for month after month because it solved a real problem.

SpherePBX is archived now. The domain is still up, the lessons are still running. Every decision I’ve made in platform architecture since — XenTask, UbixCore — has SpherePBX fingerprints on it somewhere.