Offer them a job and say you’ve confirmed a huge book of business.
Watch their company implode as they panic.
Or just chat, share some minor tidbits and they may do the same. Sus out if this person is a shark or a potential collaborator down the road.
You could build something so much faster already. Do not learn no code. Just don’t obsess over bugs.
Block X hours to work on it and get it to your ideal demographic for feedback.
Marketing/business/finance/ops etc.
Whatever you do to learn CS as a half measure will only take your focus away from the stuff you should be doing (and annoy the tech folks).
Whichever one has the feature set you want. The phone aspect is a commodity, and it’s all about the same quality.
But what sets things like other cloud VOIP providers apart from Google Voice is the ease of connecting tools like AI answering, phone trees, team messaging, call monitoring etc.
If you have a CRM, find something that integrates with it well so you and your reps can just call from there and keep logs etc in the single source of truth.
I used Google Voice as a sole proprietor for a few years, and it worked fine, but I wouldn’t use it for more than a few employees.
Seems like this is pretty clear:
the CEO told me he has no plans to make money over the next year or attempt to scale users
Either go to the board with your fellow concerned folks and watch it implode or wait for it to implode. Either way, I’d update your resume.
So, I’ve been parts of lots of big events on the planning/execution side. And it’s not necessarily TechCrunch, so I’d be wary of making that accusation.
Most events like this offer a sponsorship tier that allows the sponsors access to attendee emails. So some assholes with $5,000 to spend on lead generation can just buy in at that tier and get a ton of active emails to spam. Sometimes those folks get flagged and cannot access the emails next year, but if Vestik Systems gets banned, Bestik Systems can just come in next year with a check and do the same thing.
TL;DR: Why did you use your actual email?
Oh shit, yeah, that was me. Got you!