Vox.io/Vox.me founder Tomaz Stolfa: Your “Big Idea” Is Only Big When Users Adopt It
With most of their competition being native on the desktop, Vox’s team can focus on unique features such as free call backs in the form of links – their Vox.me feature. I talked to Tomaz Stolfa, the founder of Vox, about their product and how they managed to land both on Techcrunch and Wired!
Vox.io started as a big idea: a web based Skype alternative in fact. While many would have said that they are just too optimistic, the team over at Vox has managed to capture the attention of both users and the media in their steady build up to a real VoIP competitor to many established services that haven’t worried that much about their web-based solutions.
I asked Tomaz about how Vox managed to get all the press attention from Techcrunch, Wired and other publications. While as any good founder, he advised you should build a great product, one with a strong characted and vision, he did admit that they invested quite some energy to communicate the long term vision of their product in a clear manner:
We firmly believe that having a great product is the necessary baseline to get the press interested in your story. We did not hire any PR agencies to do the job for us, as we believe that only the founders and core-team can really tell the true Vox story at this stage.
Big Ideas – Supported by Users and the Media
Vox is in itself a big idea and big bet not only by Tomaz and his team, but also his investors from Seedcamp. Tomaz does not see it as them just creating a big idea. In fact, he says, it has been labeled as a big idea by Vox.io’s users and the media. In his view, a big idea depends on the adoption of a product:
An idea and product can only be big if and when users adopt it. So far, vox.io has been received very well in several geographies, but we know the real work has just started. We are always trying to take it step by step and ship as much product as possible, while maintaining a high standard and stick to our corporate values.
Although Vox does wants to go big in the future, they have decided to focus on just one mobile platform at the very beginning. Tomaz says that the deciding factor wasn’t the main criteria: low fragmentation and a defined set of limitations made them choose iOS over any other mobile platform, including Android. You can actually download the Vox.io iPhone app from the App Store, while their next challenge will be finishing up their Android app.
Interestingly, while they obviously communicate with Vox.io for voice and video, they still use good old IRC for internal group text communication. As far as other tools they use go, Tomaz says its a pretty standard mix of Redmine for issue tracking and a wiki, GIT as a code repository and Dropbox as a file… drop box. The Vox team does not use any specific agile methodology in their work, although Tomaz admits they have adopted elements from Scrum and Kanban.
In terms of tools we use a pretty standard set of tools, Redmine as the issue tracking tool and wiki; GIT as the repository; Dropbox as well, a drop box. We used to use IRC for internal group text communication. Finally, we solve all our voice and video communication needs with vox.io.
Tomaz says that their roadmap includes a few more features that should complete the current version of the product, letting them move more an more towards more innovative features and services which should give users a lot more benefits to communicating via their VoIP solution instead of others such as Skype:
We will be moving more and more towards a complete real-time communication solution, including text based communication and communication with the aid of existing web content. The product will also start moving away from the traditional services with several new innovations, enabling smoother and more efficient communication.
Seems Tomaz and his team are on a good way of creating what they indeed have communicated clearly: a unique web based VoIP application with very unique and more importantly, very useful set of features. Link to call? Yes please, Vox.me!
