John Sung Kim, one of the original founders of Five9, gave an insightful look into how he grew his autodialer software company from the ground up in a recent article by TechCrunch that you can read in full here. Even more interesting than building a software company from the ground up with no programming experience is getting a behind the scenes look at how Five9 began its business and become one of the most cost effective voice dialers (beating most of the competition on pricing) because they decided to switch away from the autodialer software being loaded onto bulky computers and instead moved to a cloud based platform.
Kim mentioned the following:
Instead of building software to load on cheap servers to sell like everyone else, why not build one “mega-server” that we host ourselves and let people rent the functionality over the web?
This epiphany eventually became the industry standard for serious firms like Voicent and Five9, switching away from the physical software and hardware, making it possible to scale the business into what it has become today, fully online and cloud based.
The article is great for aspiring entrepreneurs, and for us call center professionals it’s clear that his hard work and persistence, despite lacking the technical knowledge, really paid off for him in the end and gave us a really great product.
You can get in touch with Kim via his Twitter account.