Social communications startup Jaxtr has been experiencing some pretty amazing growth. They’ve attracted over 5 million users in under 5 months (140 days). It’s a ten fold increase in users since they reported 500,000 users in July. Jaxtr attributes a lot of the growth to the utility of the product and virality of calling links placed in emails.
In August, Jaxtr reported 1 million users and $10 million in financing. In response to the growth, they’ve brought on Taneli Otala as VP of engineering, the former CTO of MySQL.
It’s hard to compare these new numbers with Jaxtr’s main competition, newly partnered Jangl and Jajah, because Jangl has only reported numbers about their potential reach. These numbers highlight deals with websites such as Match.com or Tagged (which reaches 40 million profiles). Jajah recently crossed over 2 million users.
Jaxtr offers a really comprehensive calling system. It lets people call you anonymously online through a widget or unique Jaxtr phone number that connects to your real number. Similar to Jangl, Jaxtr adds a host of advanced features such as call screening and voicemail, all without giving away your original phone number. They’ve also built out more functionality similar to GrandCentral. Users can link multiple phones to their account, and forward certain phone numbers directly to voicemail.
Jaxtr CEO Konstantin Guericke says about 85% of their users are international, with the other 15% based in North America. This makes sense because one of most direct benefits of VOIP systems like Jaxtr is the long distance cost savings to over 220 countries. VOIP calls save money on long distance calling by connecting calls over internet lines instead of more expensive standard phone lines.
Jaxtr users have 100 free minutes to use per month, however calls to other Jaxtr users don’t use these minutes. Jaxtr plans on monetizing by letting users buy more minutes and running advertising on the web pages of free accounts in the future.
Nice service, great growth. Congrats to Jaxtr!
“virality of calling links placed in emails”
Any idea what service they used, or how this was done?
Impressive.
yes, giving away free calling will get you lots of usage and lots of abuse. they map local numbers to international numbers. this means that the local number costs them ($.01/min) and the long distance cost $.01-$.40/minute. So, jaxtr eats all that. eventually they will charge and most of this usage will go away since they will be compared with every other low cost calling tool.
look at free calling programs that have come before: jajah used to give away $3 of credit with each account sign up, now they give away $.25, skype offered free calling to all north american numbers for almost a year and now its $30 and not a lot of people upgraded, gizmo had an all call free program that has been severely cut back, there are many others here…all got a boom off of their programs, but turning the corner on a sustainable business is very very difficult.
congrats to jaxtr for putting their name on the map, i hope they can turn this into something sustainable.
I’ve tried all three of the services:
Jangl would not let me verify my phone number over here in Sweden. I emailed a bunch with a developer there about the problem and perhaps it is fixed now. I’ll try again… someday.
Jaxtr I signed up for and tried to use, but my friends couldn’t seem to get through. Again, maybe because I’ve in Europe.
Jajah usually works like a charm, although they have absolutely ZERO customer service. You have to watch your bill for errors and/or extra charges. Also I am not happy with their ethical standards, which they show when you use the “Schedule a Call” feature. When you use that, a checkbox appears asking if you want to receive a reminder of the call via SMS. The reminder costs $0.66. They have the default setting of the checkbox = “checked, meaning unless you uncheck it they are going to charge you $0.66, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but when you multiply it out by the number of people that get scammed by this, it must be a huge number. I emailed customer service a few times to try to get the charge removed from my bill and was totally ignored. So I definitely looking for a replacement provider, simply because of how these guys choose to do business. Why do some people have to be that way. It’s not necessary. They have a nice service, yet they set it up to rip off people who are not careful. They will say the checkbox default is set that way as a convenience to customers… yeah, right. Now they’d effectively be calling you stupid if they expected you to believe that lie. Sorry for the rant, but I hate this kind of shit and it seems like you see it more and more these days. That Facebook fiasco shows the ethics of the people run that business too. It’s sad.
This is an appealing proposal but looks like a lot of work. This is the same problem people have with Jajah and Mino – call back is not convenient – and prohibitive in Europe where calling party pays – and now there are two calls…
This is why Skype has had so much success for computer based calls and Globe Dialer has success for mobile calls – simplicity. It’s only time before these companies come out with a better solution than jaxtr.
Parul
http://www.bhopu.com
Well, for me this has no future. 90% of their users are in3rd world countries and there is just no way to monetise them. These people will never pay for their calls, advertisers will not pay enough for their calls. On the other hand
Jaxtr’s COGS are growing fast. With the existing business model and the 10M they have a window of 1 year – or less. And soon as they change the business model most of these user will walk away and cue for the next freeby.
i tried using jaxtrs service and it kept failing on me…sounds like they are growing too fast for their own infrastructure and need to scale up. i dont think they would last
yawn…
This is rate-arbitrage call back. Anyone in telco knows this has been done for years. The only spin these guys use is the web to initiate the call.
At the end of the day, they know they’re nothing more than a telco reseller. Five million users? Geez, you’ll need that volume on an hourly basis if you’re going to succeed as a telco.
With US domestic rates low and approaching zero on marginal cost basis, the appeak of these services will continue to be Filipina maids calling home from the Gulf Sates, and al Qaeda terrorists trying to avoid detection.
Strip away all they hype and see these guys for what they are: a phone company. And a phone company that buys access from other major carriers, so they’re really a reseller. Nothing bad about that, but it will be an interesting race to see which of these guys joins Techcrunch’s dead pool first.
Something is fishy about those numbers…probably the arbitrage issues mentioned in comment #4 and comment #9. Does anyone have any friends that actually use jaxtr, or any other anonymous calling service? I find it very suspicious that a site would grow that fast in five months without a single one of my early adopter friends using it.
@Parul–Mino, Globe Dialer and Skype all require a download to a mobile phone, which is inconvenient. The reason jaxtr is so popular is that you can make the calls directly from your regular phone without needing to download anything. To call someone via their jaxtr number, you simply pick their name out of the contacts list of your phone and press the green button to initiate the call. Also, many of our callers are using jaxtr to manage incoming calls, so it’s not just about saving money on international calls.
@arjen– Please send me a text message via http://www.jaxtr.com/megzozo so we can get you up and running asap. You don’t need to be a member to call me or send me a text message. In fact, many users call through jaxtr without ever becoming a member, so our number of users is actually much higher than five million. Five million is just the number of people who register for our service because they want to receive calls via jaxtr.
Hey Megan,
How about letting us know how many domestic calls Jaxtr does daily? If you don’t answer that question, it’s clear the announcement is for Jaxtr to posture. Tell us how many people use you daily not as a mundane web-based international call back option. That’s the only number that matters.
I bet she doesn’t answer the question.
This has to be the worst such service I have ever used. The calls keep going to voice mail and when they do connect, there is a lot of echo and noise. Wasted a lot of time trying to figure out what was happening. FAQs dont tell a lot either.
@Chrisco- The fact that you are in Europe does not affect your ability to receive calls. People in 220 countries are successfully using jaxtr, please see this excerpt from our FAQ about what may be going on if your friends cannot reach you:
——————–
Someone just tried to call me, but it went to my jaxtr voicemail. Why?
There could be several reasons for this. Please check the following:
1. That you are sending your calls to a phone and not voicemail (see Call Controls section of “Home” page)
2. That if your PrivacyShield box is checked (see Call Controls section of “Home” page), then the person that is calling you is an Approved Caller (see the Filter column of the “Calls” page)
3. That you have enough talk time credits (called “jax”) remaining.
—————–
@”Michael”– Jaxtr’s userbase is largest in the US, UK, and India. You may consider India a 3rd world country, but it is actually Nokia’s 2nd largest market in the world after China, so to us, it a very attractive place to have users.
@Joel–Most of our users not typical early adopters–in fact our CEO recently had someone approach him at a conference and tell him that he had been invited to jaxtr by his mother!
Jaxtr is designed to be useful to people of all ages and demographics, not just early adopting techies in Silicon Valley.
@Basil–Please see the above excerpt of our FAQ which explains why calls go to voicemail. Also, please send me a text message to http://www.jaxtr.com/megzozo so I can help solve the issues you are experiencing.
Yep, Megan is a full-on spigot for the latest marketing brochure. She knows nothing except what’s handed in front of her on the latest PDF.
the jaxtr is the worst thing i have ever seen in my lfe if i have 100 jax remaining in my account i can only talk for less than 5 min it is to much expensive