LucyPhone

» see lucyphone.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

The trick was simple enough to explain in one sentence, which is rare. You called a customer service line through LucyPhone, and when the hold music started you pressed star star and hung up. LucyPhone stayed on the line in your place. When a human being finally picked up at the other end, it rang you back and joined the two of you together.

Mike and Tom Oristian, brothers and Stanford graduates living in Richmond, Virginia, started building it in mid 2009 out of their own web consulting company. The first version was a private tool called Botlr, a robot butler they ran on their personal calls before it occurred to them that everybody had the same problem. It launched in March 2010. The name came from the phone on I Love Lucy.

It moved fast for a two-person project. The iPhone app was downloaded sixty thousand times in July 2010, and by August the service was being used seventy to eighty thousand times a month. By 2013 the founders could say the thing had spent more than six million minutes on hold on other people's behalf. Coverage came easily, because the pitch needed no explaining to anybody who had ever called a bank.

~ the record ~

~ where the money wasn't ~

They meant to charge for it. That did not survive contact with actual users, so the service went free and the plan became widgets on company websites, which is the plan every free consumer utility writes down after the subscription idea dies. Financing did not arrive either, because there was nothing to point at when an investor asked where revenue was going to come from.

The product had a structural drag on it too. The company's own numbers showed fewer than one call in ten being terminated by the customer service agent rather than the caller. And some organizations refused it outright: the IRS instructed its staff not to accept LucyPhone calls, which is a strange sort of compliment to be paid.

~ the pivot that got bought ~

The interest that did arrive was not from consumers. Companies with call centers started asking whether they could have the callback running on their own lines, and the Oristians built exactly that as CallPromise, a cloud queueing product. Intuit and MetLife ran it. Virtual Hold Technology of Akron, Ohio took a minority stake in CallPromise in 2015 and bought the remainder in 2016.

The consumer site was no part of that story and nobody announced anything about it. lucyphone.com kept answering, with the same tagline about never waiting on hold again, for another three years after the brothers' real business had been sold off. The last working capture is 27 January 2019. By 25 April the address returned a server error, and the archive holds nothing after that.

~ the distance ~

This one only ever worked on American numbers. LucyPhone knew the shape of a US customer service tree, the 1-800 prefix and the menu depth and the specific hold music, and Turkish call centers in 2010 were a separate hell with separate hold music that no Virginia startup was going to model. I read about it years afterward. What stays with me is not the product but the founders' number: six million minutes is eleven and a half years of somebody's life, spent listening to a loop so that nobody else had to.

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