Insight
Erickson: Free features are cheaper than maintaining a sales team
“If I give away something like free recording, that's a lot cheaper than having a Salesforce. And a sales force, right? Goes out and sells your stuff because you don't give free, free recording.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Telecom carriers pay FreeConferenceCall.com directly to route cross-country traffic
“Oh, so, you know, what's interesting is, is a lot of it came from actually taking the free conference call network and exposing it to, you know, the big carriers. So a lot of our connectivity now is direct. So where the carriers pay us to actually transport th…”
Assertion Contradicted
FreeConferenceCall.com is the third-largest US conferencing provider
“But all of the other guys had done a lot of purchases, you know, acquisitions to gain base as opposed to, but we're about, I think we're the third largest in this country.”
Disclosure
David Erickson rejected a $250 million acquisition offer for FreeConferenceCall.com
“Right around a quarter of a billion dollars.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Bootstrapped FreeConferenceCall.com surpassed $100 million in top-line revenue in 2016
“In 2016, we were up over a hundred million on top line, and I'm not sharing the bottom.”
Disclosure
Erickson built FreeConferenceCall completely debt-free and without institutional capital
“Well, we've never taken any institutional funds and we don't believe in debt here. So we're debt free.”
Disclosure
FreeConferenceCall.com operates its terminating access fee model across 70 countries
“It still operates the same way. We're doing that same business model in 70 different countries.”
Disclosure
FreeConferenceCall earns fractions of a cent per call from access fees
“So it's a fraction of a cent. So you're, you know, 50 cents off of a conference call would be a pretty, pretty good conference call. That would be a big one.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
FreeConferenceCall.com handles 40 million callers and one million calls daily
“We have like forty million people call into conferencing bridges over the 30 day span. So you see about, you know, a million conference calls a day, kind of a average.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
FreeConferenceCall.com adds 2,000 to 3,000 new customers every day
“On an average day, we'll see anywhere between two to 3000 new customers come to free conference call on a single day.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
FreeConferenceCall's average customer lifetime value is only a couple dollars
“A couple bucks.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
FreeConferenceCall.com has hosted over 1.5 billion calls since 2001
“We know that it's over 1.5 billion conference calls we've done.”
Disclosure
FreeConferenceCall.com runs entirely without salespeople or billing overhead
“Well, we save so much money in sales. Like we don't have any salesmen selling free conference calls. We save so much money in accounting because we don't bill anybody. We don't have, you know accounts receivable and, you know, processing fees.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
FreeConferenceCall.com generated $10M in revenue and $6M profit in 2006
“That's 2006 was 10 top line. And six bottom line.”
Disclosure
FreeConferenceCall.com has made zero acquisitions to drive its massive growth
“Nope. We really haven't. We've looked at some stuff, but You know, we see things becoming simpler, and we see them being provided in a certain way. The acquisition's not really all that favorable to us, because I think we're still on a leading edge of technolo…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
FreeConferenceCall.com founder David Erickson says he has never read a book
“You're talking to a guy that's never read a book, but then we're going to put none.”
Disclosure
FreeConferenceCall.com is shifting strategy to pursue top-down enterprise sales
“We're actually now starting intentionally trying to go top down, which is different for the company. It takes different resources. And so we're looking at it as a whole and actually trying to perfect it right now.”
Disclosure
FreeConferenceCall.com operates its massive business with only 140 employees
“We're right around a 140 people.”
