In this episode:
- The Phone.inc iPhone app is out with its first users, and there's a real call on the platform every hour during Danish business hours
- Why Phone.inc decided to roll its own voice infrastructure (and how a senior engineer reimplemented a SIP library in an afternoon with Claude)
- Niklas on his biggest worry: scaling the commercial side, and his investors telling him he's trying to fix it too early
- Splitting the podcast and the vlog into two channels, and a short that hit 22,000 views
- Peter's partner-description workflow and the lesson that stuck: when the writing is bad, fix the inputs, not the output
- Getting OG Kit recommended by LLMs, and learning GEO from scratch
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Recorded remotely while Niklas holds down the fort solo (his wife is in China for the week, and he's flying to San Francisco right after she's back).
Niklas kicks off with the big news: the Phone.inc iPhone app is out with its first handful of users. There's a Slack channel called Pulse that pings on every call, and these days there's a real call on the platform pretty much every hour during Danish business hours. The first version just handles making and receiving calls, but the goal is for the app to become the leading interface so you don't need the web app at all. He also shares a fun moment with Katrine, their designer, who doesn't have a Figma license and works directly with Claude instead. He nudged her to stop writing a detailed Linear ticket and just build the thing, and by lunch she'd shipped it. A few days later she messaged him at half past midnight saying she couldn't sleep because building was too fun.
The bigger Phone.inc decision: they're rolling their own voice infrastructure instead of buying it. Fully loaded (staff, office, hosting) it's still 3-5x cheaper than buying from a supplier, which opens the door to something Niklas hasn't seen before, a freemium phone system. It pushes the public launch back a couple of months, but it's worth it. There's a great story here about SIP, the core telephony protocol. Good non-GPL open source SIP libraries for iOS basically don't exist, and the commercial licenses run $10-50k a year for old C code with patchy support. Their engineer Thomas, who has 25 years of experience but none in telephony, looked at it, looked at Claude, and reimplemented just the parts they needed in a few hours. It got both of them thinking about what open source even looks like now that you can reimplement the 40 lines you need instead of pulling in an 8,000-line dependency.
Niklas then opens up about his biggest worry with Phone.inc: scaling the commercial side. He's completely confident they can get to hundreds or thousands of happy customers, but getting to millions requires finding a channel that really works, and that's the part that's always been hardest for him across every company he's built. His investors gave him good feedback that he's trying to fix it prematurely, before there's even a product, pricing, or a single US or UK customer. He reframes it as a channel-fit worry rather than a product-market-fit worry, since he's hit product-market fit in this exact problem space before. The conclusion he's sitting with: accept that commercial scale is a later problem, focus on the first 50-100 happy customers, and carry the worry a bit longer.
On Peter's side, the content setup has changed. The podcast (this one) stays on the Still Early channel, but the vlog has moved to a new [Phone.inc](https://www.phone.inc/) branded channel, since everything they filmed for the vlog happened when they met up to work on Phone.inc anyway. Still Early is really for the people who already know them, while the shorts reach a much wider audience. One short hit 22,000 views and is still picking up views weeks later, which is why those branding impressions belong on the Phone.inc brand. Peter wants to build the muscle organically first, then test putting money behind whatever clips generate real interest.
Over on the Tailwind side, Peter is shipping individual pages for each sponsor on the partners page. Writing ~70 partner descriptions by hand was never going to happen, so he built it with Claude, but the first attempts kept coming out slightly off. The research phase would latch onto something and overweight it, and trying to fix the writing afterwards just made things worse. The fix was to split it into two skills: one that researches the company and pulls quotes, where Peter manually deletes anything he can tell the AI will fixate on, and a second that writes the description from that clean input. With the right context, it one-shot the description seven times out of ten. The lesson: when the writing is bad, don't fix the writing, fix the inputs. Niklas connects it to the shift from prompt engineering to context engineering, and how he's never seen a hallucination when he hands a model a flawed call transcript and asks for a summary, because the input is right there.
They wrap on OG Kit, which Peter's feeling excited about again (Geocodio and Laracon AU both started using it). It's barely making money right now because it has no distribution, but the obvious distribution channel is LLMs recommending it when people build websites, the way Tailwind, Resend, and Tally get recommended. That's pushed Peter into learning GEO (generative engine optimization) from scratch.
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Still Early is sponsored by Phone.inc: a business phone number, welcome greeting, call routing, and opening hours, all from an app on your personal phone.
