[ibimage==21824==Original==none==self==ibimage_align-right]
FluentStream Technologies is another one of Denver's established tech companies. We spoke to Joshua Elson, President and CTO.
FluentStream Technologies "provides a cloud based business phone solution that reduces costs, enables numerous business features, and removes the stress and time needed to successfully manage your organization’s phone system."
How did you get started in the telecommunications industry? Have you gotten to where you expected to when you started the company?
You know, when we started out, I'm not sure we had a very clear picture of where we wanted to be. My partner and I just started doing call center consulting. We had done some software development and product work, and while we were doing the consulting it turned out that several of our early adopters were doing call center stuff. We didn’t necessarily mean to be in that space.
The key transformation was after doing a year of call center type work we were in a position where we started to see a lot of the market needs emerging with what people now call cloud. A lot of the work we had been doing turned into the product we released in 2010.
Tell us about some of the significant successes you've had.
Day-to-day it’s hard to see sometimes. The biggest win has been getting a lot of people excited and engaged in the way they do telecommunications. This is an old and established market, and cloud is a new way to do things.
It certainly was a bit of a coup to survivie this long and take a product to market that competes in many ways with some of those really big, established players.
What's coming up for the company?
There will be several big product announcements this year. Part of what we’ve tried to do is push really hard on adding incremental value. Most of them are essentially giveaways or additions to current packages. There will be an updated mobile platform, the launch of a fully web-based virtual phone system coming later this year. There's also going to be a business-oriented SMS product coming out.
We'll also be growing this year; we expect to expand our team quite a bit.
[ibimage==21828==Medium==none==self==ibimage_align-center]
Any mistakes or failures you'd be willing to share with us?
For us there are so many things in hindsight – certainly a lot of technical things we’ve learned along the way, relationships we’ve had to build with carriers. It was both a blessing and a curse not to really understand how telecomm worked. A lot of things don’t work the way a rational person would think it works. There’s a lot of regulation – I would’ve done more reading and talking to people early on to learn about that.
We certainly made a lot of product missteps – building things people didn’t end up caring about. But that's how you learn.
Occasionally should have said "no" to an idea that seemed attractive but wasn’t our core focus.
What advice would you give to someone who is just getting started with their own company?
It is both harder than it looks and a lot easier. I see a lot of focus on ideas and people trying to come up with that next killer concept – in many ways, that’s very little of the process. FluentStream – the innovation was in a very different place – the business model, support, how we scaled a product that was very different than what you might have expected for a telecommunications company. That was the thing that made us new and different. We didn't create an app; we re-thought the way exisitng things were working. Everyone wants to find that next brilliant thing, but there are a lot of other ways to innovate, things below the surface that can give you an edge.
Are there any tools or resources you swear by?
Yesware and Boomerang for Gmail are tools I use every day. I like keeping tabs on what's happening in social with with Hootsuite.
For us, it's really helpful to have an understanding of traditional sales analytics; we use several Salesforce packages for that.
Any books or other things you'd recommend?
This is totally not politically correct, “The No Asshole Rule” is a fantastic book. It's all about understanding entrepreneurial organizations, how people interact and biuild innovative environments.
Learn more about FluentStream Technologies by visiting their company profile, website, or connect with them on LinkedIn, Google+, Facebook, or Twitter @FluentStream.
This week we also visited RentBits and Digital Fridge. Learn more about the Startup Tour and find links to past weeks' profiles here.
