On the surface, Luke Escudé is the prototypical tech entrepreneur. Greeting me in his Farmers Branch offices in shorts and flip-flops. He has the street cred: young male, learning to code and work on computers early, a startup that began in a garage. But there’s something that separates him from others looking like a cultural copy of the Silicon Valley image of success – a constant sense of wonderment at the capabilities of technology and a deep caring about not just his product, but also of the customers using it.
While just celebrating its fourth anniversary of its founding, it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that Escudé has been preparing for the recent and fast growth that PrimeVOX Communications is experiencing.
In each of the years since its founding, the company has more than nearly doubled its revenue, going from just $3,000 to an expectation of more than a million in 2019. And with a 2.0 version of the company’s phone software in development, Escudé sees no signs of this current expansion slowing.
“We did reinvent the wheel a couple times, but that’s what I love doing for some reason; our wheel is round, but it can always be rounder, I guess,” Escudé said. “I love offering services that other people can utilize to help them offer services. I like to be the top-level service provider.”
PrimeVOX is a cloud-based phone system technology for both residential and commercial use, though the latter is where the majority of the company’s resources are focused and where revenue comes from. The software has many of the standard features that Internet-based phone platforms would have, including voicemail to email transfer, private branch exchange capabilities, multi-level virtual reception, and conferencing ability.
However, it is the AI built into the software that sets the company apart, which Escudé says is unique to the telecom market.
The pitch and promise is that there is a 100-percent guarantee the call will never be dropped. This is due to a self-adjusting AI technology that can detect whether phone provider’s, such as AT&T, servers are slower than normal and can reroute calls through different paths based on the ping-time from different servers.
“If we have an outage the system kind of elastically maneuvers itself so we’re able to guarantee 100% up time even while the east coast is getting hit by a hurricane our customers who are all online will be fine,” Escudé said. “The current platform could save all the big carriers like billions of dollars every year easy just because it’s so scalable now but we’re projecting extreme amounts of scalability with the new software.”
Thus far in PrimeVOX has been completely bootstrap-funded, partly due to a promise Escudé made to early customers that he would not sell-off the company just for a quick profit and in part to some early funding from selling off his IT company founded when he was he was still in high school in Richardson. PrimeVOX was created not long after, when Escudé was only 20 and attending the University of Texas at Dallas. From the original business run out of a dorm room, the company now has 9 employees – 4 who work in the Farmer’s Branch office and 5 others spread internationally, handling much of the engineering work.
In the 2017 FY, PrimeVOX recorded about $250,000 in revenue, and through almost entirely word-of-mouth marketing, recorded about $500,000 and is expecting slightly more than double that in the current year.
“At this point, we’re growing at a rate that we should be more than doubling [revenue] pretty soon, pretty easily,” Escudé said.
With the anticipated launch of the second version of their product, which will include an overhaul of the AI software, along with a facelift to the user interface, PrimeVOX is also exploring ventures into new business models. Recently, the company has begun partnering with different associations – most recently the Texas Chiropractic Association – in order to leverage their word-of-mouth reputation. If an organization agrees to have PrimeVOX as one of its partners, the company donates 10% of the profits back to the association. Customers are also not obligated to any contract, only renewing service from month to month.
PrimeVOX is also making a few changes in its operations. It is currently exploring work with blockchain technology and has hired on Operations Officer …. who Escudé says will help move the company forward with high hopes of reaching into the tens, if not hundreds of millions in revenue within the next five to eight years.
“I tell our customers, ‘look, we built this thing ourselves, if you want us to create a phone number for you that turns on your coffeemaker, which I did for a client, it’ll do it,” Escudé said, using an example for the type of custom service PrimeVOX provides. “A lot of my motivation also comes from our customers asking for features and stuff.”
