Callr Eliminates Conference PINs for Good: Don’t Punch Your Phone, or PINs Anymore

Callr Eliminates Conference PINs for Good: Don’t Punch Your Phone, or PINs Anymore

It’s hard to punch in the correct conference PIN when you really want to punch your phone in its face. Sure, you’ve prepared for the meeting. Your agenda is rock solid. You’re ready to drop the phrase “let’s take this offline” on anyone who eats up too much conference time. But you can’t prepare for the PIN. When you’re already blood curdingly mad from your four previous unsuccessful attempts to enter the 14-digit PIN, you might not kick off the conference call with glee.

Callr knows your pain, and they’ve built an easy, Twilio-based service that automatically calls you directly before your meeting and connects you through to your conference call. Don’t worry, you do not have to enter the PIN number or even remember when to dial in. They do that programmatically so you don’t have to look into cracked screen replacement after you get off your conference call.

Callr CEO Mike Endale will readily admit that Callr’s magic isn’t calling you before your meeting. Twilio does most of that heavy lifting. Callr’s genius is getting you into the meeting without you lifting a finger.

Conference call PINs are all apples and oranges. From platform to platform each PIN is proprietary. Mike and his team took these conference call meetings constantly. The team  grew increasingly frustrated grappling with each proprietary system and being late to meetings because they couldn’t find the key code he needed to enter. This is where they got the idea for Callr.

The team couldn’t find a service that acted as a common denominator or universal key to get you into conference calls, so they built one. “We’re a bunch of nerds. We figured we’d move quickly and get this solved,” Mike says.

The hardest part was writing the universal key, the algorithm to connect all the conference platforms. It’s Callr’s secret sauce that powers their whole service. The Callr MVP was built in eight days and then rolled out the world after extensive beta testing.

“Twilio’s a great tool, it was easy to build on it. We spent more time thinking how to build it, than building it on Twilio. It’s really amazing how the API is structured,” says Mike.

After their mobile app was featured on Product Hunt and TechCrunch, their user base started growing like wildfire. While it was hard for Mike to find a common denominator to connect conference platforms, it was quite easy to find and capitalize on a common hatred of conference PINs.

Learn more about Callr here