How it all began

I worked as an engineer in a telecommunications company that earned outsourcing. That is, the company sent us to temporary projects around the world, where we set up equipment, expanded infrastructure, analyzed quality parameters and consulted local mobile operators.

Everything changed after one of my business trips to Côte d'Ivoire: I received a huge bill for roaming - almost $ 800 per week. It is important to understand that I did not use the Internet when roaming, since I was used to traveling for a long time when traveling to buy local SIM cards for cheap Internet, which I inserted into my second phone. It turns out that I spent $ 800 on incoming phone calls. And all because I could not drop most of the incoming calls and call back via Skype, as these calls were from partners or customers. Agree, it’s ridiculous to pay such amounts for voice roaming during the complete dominance of mobile applications.
Having paid the bills, I decided that this should not happen again.



I am sure that many of the readers of this blog did the same: Asterisk with a connected home number, which is set up with a redirect from a mobile while traveling, and connect to the asterisk via a VoIP application. Thus, I got the opportunity to receive incoming calls to my mobile number without overpaying for roaming. True, there was one inconvenience: outgoing calls determined my home number, not my mobile number. But this was offset by almost zero communication costs and the lack of the need to carry two phones. In fact, it was my MVP, which was successfully tested during the next trip.

When I showed this to my friends, they immediately got in line: everyone wanted the same thing. Then I realized that this could be more than just a way to save on roaming charges.

Then there was StartupWeekend, on which we quite unexpectedly took second place. After that there was a difficult period of team formation and even more complex Tolstoy Startup Camp, during which the vitality of the idea was called into question.

In addition to solving technical problems associated with building an easily scalable infrastructure and working on usability of the application, we needed to prove to mentors that our product would be in demand.


Thanks to the LeanStartup and CustomerDevelopment techniques, which, incidentally, taught us there, we were able to prove the value of our ideas and the interest of users.

I don’t know where we would be now and if there would be any at all if not for Yandex camp. There, in two months, we were taught everything: from how to make presentations and build feedback with users, to things like product metrics, marketing chips and growshack strategies. For me, as for a person who until this moment had practically nothing in common with the IT industry, this was the discovery of a parallel universe. I sincerely recommend applying when the next set is announced.

A little over a year has passed since then. All this time we worked hard on the application, tested sales channels and various monetization models, talked with investors and, of course, fakapili. If you are interested in learning how our project has evolved, subscribe to this blog.

We promise: it will be interesting)

www.avoapp.com