First of, Congrats on the round!

The article provides some interesting numbers to chew on: - 150,000 users - 15,000 business (let's call them customers) - $50,000 in monthly revenue - 6 lines average per customer.

Impressive numbers to backup traction! But they also tell the story of the freemium model very well.

Sendhub website lists cheapest paid plan at $25/month/line. This means that at most, they have 2,000 paid lines (based on $50k monthly revenue) and in the neighborhood of 400 paid customers.

These are still very good numbers and nothing to frown upon, but if you compare that to the massive adoption of the free accounts (150k users), it's very telling of how difficult it is to convert people from free to paid.

Yep, pretty close. We used to offer individual accounts - those folks were hard to convert, hence the large number of free users.

Thank you for validating the pseudo-math :)

And, yeah, converting any free accounts to paid is an achievement in and of itself. Best of luck in growing the company!

$25 is a way too much. I'd pay no more than $9.95/mo for it and with higher limits.

We used to offer a $10 plan but we found the margins were very low. $25 allows us to provide great support and very few users need more than the limits on the plan.

Line2 is $15/mo and it offers a pretty good service including desktop clients. Oh, did I mention they offer unlimited calls and texts? I'm using it for business - I ported my toll-free number to Line2 and I get unlimited calls and texts (!) with toll-free number. Yes, you read this correctly - I can text from my toll-free number and I can receive texts, too. The only thing they suck at is offering an API.

Great to see more investment in Telecom.

This space is red hot right now :). Congrats Ash!

Thanks Josh.

Are you actually sending arbitrary files over SMS? How does that work?

My thought is it would be technically possible over MMS, but most default messaging apps wouldn't play nice with them. Also getting into the network is a huge challenge.

MMS is coming soon but the network operators aren't always easy to deal with. Right now, we put a link in the sms, that way you can send any file type.

Getting an MMSC exposed from a network operator is a nigh-impossible task (source: I'm a telecom junkie).

The MMSC infrastructure is unnecessarily complex and, for some ungodly reason, is seen as a proprietary network advantage. Your best bet is to make an end-run around the carriers by partnering with an aggregator like Acision (or someone smaller if you lack the volume).

MMS is one of the most difficult things to get carriers to expose :/...

Fantastic, congrats to Ash, Garrett and team!

Thanks Jan.

Great work SendHub team!

Thanks Omar - waiting on hearing your news too.

Woo! Congrats guys!

Congrats SendHub!

Thanks Chris.

Great feature!