I don't see any policies around types of businesses, code of conduct, adherence to Do-Not-Call policies or information regarding privacy or security rigor applied to the citizens that would be effected by this platform.
This just seems like an amoral SaaS service I kind of want to die. Fast.
While your commentary around privacy and security is valid (they could indeed reference that more clearly), referring to them outright as an “Amoral SaaS service [you] kind of want to die” is extremely judgmental and out of place on HN.
I disagree. I think I laid out a fair argument for my opinion, and I believe I have the right to express that opinion in our lovely open internet as much as they have a right to be a thing in the first place. Me wanting this to cease to exist isn't calling in to question their right to be there in the first place. I think if we ever lose our voice in calling out things that seem detrimental to our society at large for the sake of not seeming "judgemental", then we've devoided all platforms of value - especially HN.
My issue is that you made a blanket judgement of something with seemingly little input or reasoning. Why do you feel that way? Go into some detail at the very least, instead of just dismissing it out of hand.
The security questions could be answered by then more easily instead of having to dig - I get that. But that’s not enough imho.
You have the right to express your opinion, for sure. But when you make a blanket judgement with little you’re going against HN guidelines:
> Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say face-to-face. Don't be snarky. Comments should get more civil and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
At this point, anyone starting a business to be an outbound call-center or to send email on behalf of third parties should be assumed to be a bad actor, and the burden of proof is on them.
This wasn't a blanket judgement without input. This was a judgement based on the available evidence, and particularly pointing at holes where one would expect a white hat to have solid documents.
I wonder if this is one of those startups where YC said "this team is solid, they'll likely pivot into something worthwhile".
Just because we hate those damn robe calls doesn’t mean this isn’t a valid, high quality product.
Look at the TOS and you can see that they are very strict about how they allow customers to use the platform. Before considering something amoral we should always do some digging:
> CUSTOMERS WHO USE THE SERVICES
> Upcall reserves the right to terminate access to the Upcall platform and terminate services for any reason allowed under the Agreement, or if Customer is determined by Upcall in its sole discretion to have violated any law or any provision herein.
> Customer will remain responsible and ensure that all data submitted through Upcall to Freelancer Users are compliant. This includes, without limitation, ensuring that Customer has the proper consent, established business relationship (“EBR”) or other exemption to call the telephone numbers submitted. This also includes ensuring that any scripting submitted, or product offered therein, complies with applicable laws.
> As applicable by Customer’s industry, Customer will maintain standards necessary to comply with all applicable laws, rules, regulations and ordinances, including, without limitation, CI Level , 1, and HIPAA, and Financial Services Modernization Act rules and regulations..
> Customer will ensure that its processes and scripts comply with call recording law, timezone (“curfew”) laws, rules, regulations, ordinances and licensing obligations.
> Customer is solely responsible and liable for compliance with all caller ID and “spoofing” rules at all times.
> Any Upcall Customer who makes use of the Services (“Customers”) of Upcall or its Freelancer Users must ensure that its products and marketing are in full compliance with all applicable laws and regulations, including without limitation, all state, federal and international: (1) product-specific offer regulations; (2) Do-Not-Call (“DNC”) list prohibitions, including by obtaining a SAN and providing that to Upcall upon request; (3) licensing and bonding requirements; (4) consumer cancellation rights; (5) wireless calling restrictions; (6) restrictions on the use of automatic telephone dialing systems and pre-recorded messages; (7) opt-out rules; (8) mandatory disclosures (9) intellectual property rights and restrictions; and (10) document retention regulations. Customer agrees that it has read and understands the FTC’s Telemarketing Sales Rule (“TSR”) and the FCC’s Telephone Consumer Protection Act (“TCPA”), and all other applicable laws and regulations. Customer should review these rules with Customer’s own legal counsel to ensure that Customer understands and is fully compliant. Upcall does not assume responsibility for ensuring that Customer’s marketing meets applicable legal requirements. Rather, Upcall is relying on Customer and Freelancer, as the marketing experts, for that expertise and legal compliance. Upcall will not assume any liability if Freelancer or Customer suffers any loss due to an actual or alleged law violation. Notwithstanding anything contained herein to the contrary, Customer shall indemnify and defend Upcall (including for its attorney’s fees) from and against any actual or alleged TCPA or other law violation related to the calls or Services provided hereunder.
> Just because we hate those damn robe calls doesn’t mean this isn’t a valid, high quality product.
Just because it's a valid, high-quality product doesn't make it amoral.
---
And I would argue that their TOS doesn't prove your point, but does the opposite. Let's look at one example line:
> Customer will ensure that its processes and scripts comply with call recording law, timezone (“curfew”) laws, rules, regulations, ordinances and licensing obligations.
My reading of that line is, "we will punt any questions of the legality or morality of what we do back to you, the guy giving us the dollars."
> Customer is solely responsible and liable for compliance with all caller ID and “spoofing” rules at all times.
How can the customer be responsible for something that's entirely out of their hands? Do I, as a customer, dictate which number Upcall's calls will appear to be coming from? (I honestly don't know, I haven't read tehir FAQs.)
This whole thing reads like an Uber-style "move fast and break laws" manifesto.
(Replying to pavel_lishin - thanks for being civil!)
I get where your coming from, as we’ve seen a lot of the moving fast / breaking stuff.
However, do we blame FB for someone misusing it? Do we hold YouTube responsible for what people say? We don’t entirely, as they’re platforms. In this case it is the same - UpCall is positioning themselves as a platform that the customer has to ensure they are compliant in order to use.
That said - I’m not sure how long or well it’ll work; as we can see this is a divisive subject :)
> However, do we blame FB for someone misusing it?
Yes! We do if they make it trivially simple to abuse their platform, either because they didn't bother thinking it through, or because they wanted money more than a clear conscience. (A concrete example is their recent ability to exclude minorities from housing listings.)
> Do we hold YouTube responsible for what people say?
We certainly are starting to get irate with their insistence on promoting neo-nazi and fascist channels. We're wondering why children are being shown videos of Peppa Pig drinking bleach.
> That said - I’m not sure how long or well it’ll work; as we can see this is a divisive subject :)
That's true, and I'm certainly coming at this from the view of loathing the shitbags who call up my stepfather and try to con him out of money, or call me up and imply that they're working with my credit card company. I don't have a business, so I have no need to call people for marketing purposes.
It’s called out explicitly in the list of features - TCPA compliance. It’s one of the most important things you need to provide and yes it is up to the end user to follow these rules correctly. It’s no different than how HIPAA/PCI polices work - you are responsible for following the rules.
- They mention that the tiers have 1, 5, or 10 users supported. Is this concurrent users? Does "user" even mean phone call recipient in this case, or is it just someone who's _dispatching_ the Upcall calls?
- The enterprise tier seems like it should be subdivided; some of the things you pay for are really, really niche, but likely cost a small fortune to get set up on Upcall's end, justifying a much higher price. Looking at you, HIPAA compliance.
- What is, even, a "Logic Decision Tree" in this context? Is this just the fact that the caller should offer the recipient a few specific paths? Isn't it cheaper to do this using a robocall (and widely done this way by many enterprise phone support systems)?
- "Custom inbound voicemail" is a weird feature for a company marketing itself as outreach towards clients rather than the other way around; my understanding is that this is marketing and reactivation, not support, and incoming calls should be minimal in most use cases.
- All the email stuff is probably cheaper being handled by a specialized standalone service; why try to fracture your business's focus by trying to enter a space dominated by well-established players? (Not trying to say competition is bad, but this company clearly specializes in something other than email, so it makes little sense to me that they should be dividing their effort like this).
>- They mention that the tiers have 1, 5, or 10 users supported. Is this concurrent users? Does "user" even mean phone call recipient in this case, or is it just someone who's _dispatching_ the Upcall calls?
I assumed user to mean people who are the clients (the people paying for the service) who can login to see the progress of the "call tasks".
>- The enterprise tier seems like it should be subdivided; some of the things you pay for are really, really niche, but likely cost a small fortune to get set up on Upcall's end, justifying a much higher price. Looking at you, HIPAA compliance.
That's pretty common for this type of service offering. Basically the pricing is there to give you an idea. You see in the basic plan where it says "Ideal for Simple Tasks"? That usually means "you can have it your way, but don't get crazy." Think things like "call and ask Carl if he's coming on Friday" or "let Lakisha know that her order is finished." Everything else is a custom plan!
- What is, even, a "Logic Decision Tree" in this context? Is this just the fact that the caller should offer the recipient a few specific paths? Isn't it cheaper to do this using a robocall (and widely done this way by many enterprise phone support systems)?
My take away from the How it Works page leads me to believe that it's for use with the "scripts". The script changes when the callee answers a certain way.
>- "Custom inbound voicemail" is a weird feature for a company marketing itself as outreach towards clients rather than the other way around; my understanding is that this is marketing and reactivation, not support, and incoming calls should be minimal in most use cases.
They're banking on people setting the custom caller ID to their actual number. It's probably just their so there is no "hole" if someone calls back. Certain types of calls do generate a lot of callbacks.
>- All the email stuff is probably cheaper being handled by a specialized standalone service; why try to fracture your business's focus by trying to enter a space dominated by well-established players? (Not trying to say competition is bad, but this company clearly specializes in something other than email, so it makes little sense to me that they should be dividing their effort like this).
I think it's specific to the use case of contacting new leads. If I were upcall, my intent would be to scan the emails for specific types of customers that the client wants to call and start "call tasks" based on that.
Telemarketing isn't inherently wrong, IMO, even though it's often poorly-executed and painfully annoying. In some cases, it's a better way of doing client outreach than email.
I'm not saying there is no imaginable ethical sales activity that involves a telephone in some way.
But despite do not call lists etc, I can no longer answer my cell phone when I don't recognize the number, because of all the unwanted commercial calls, scams, surveys, etc. Many are falsifying their caller ID data because they know that everyone would block them if they could.
This product really really looks like it will be used to make that situation worse. "90%
MORE LIKELY TO CONVERT A LEAD
if you reach out minimum six times". Blech.
Somewhere, people are failing to communicate about something important because these people are pissing in the well.
Because it's a scummy fucking thing to come out and say - "we'll call people half a dozen times until they cave and buy whatever garbage you're offloading."
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt but I can't think of a scenario where a cold call is preferable to an email, or no contact at all. Can you give an example?
I can't, but that's largely because of what I attribute cold calls to: long wait times, poor connection quality, and a person on the other end who really doesn't know what they're doing or talking about; that's why I brought up poor execution.
If I left a service because of reason X and got a cold call a reasonable amount of time later where the caller could explain why they did X and that Y replaces X, and could clearly and concisely address my concerns, then I'd be much less averse to the idea of cold calls.
I see a lot of criticism of this product by referencing it as a telemarketing solution - it is not.
These are not cold calls: they are inbound leads that you have to source and have permission to call. If someone fills out a lead form on your site and checks the “contact by phone” option, this allows you to scale a bit more rapidly in high-volume top-of-funnel lead gen where you are trying to filter out unqualified or low-value leads.
Edit: sueders101 pointed out that they reference cold calls. With the TOS in mind I bet that’s a copy mistake as they require permission to call berg secured before making a call. Thy definitely could use some copy updates and calling out security/privacy more clearly.
Fair. I was referencing the demo and the ToS makes it clear you must have an Established Business Relationship, which means I’m this case it wouldn’t be truly cold as there is a lead and permission to call involved.
No, they say you need an EBR or other reason. In many jurisdictions, for B2B calls "it can be imagined that they might be interested in our product" is a valid legal reason to cold-call someone.
> they are inbound leads that you have to source and have permission to call.
How does Upcall verify this? Does their employee UI have a big red button that they have to hit every time the person picking up the phone says "Sorry, I've never heard of CLIENT_X", and after a certain number of "cold call alarms", the account is terminated?
That’s an excellent question and one I would expect and answer for posted pretty clearly on the site. Probably a similar process, and I would also expect some sort of stats around rejected calls akin to spam stats in email platforms like MailChimp.
Wow, you can tell it's Monday! Haters gonna hate. Not sure
if it belongs in ShowHN, but as someone familiar with the company I can say that Upcall outsources outbound calling for inbound leads. For the uninitiated, that means people who've requested to be contacted by phone and given their phone number for that very reason. As a former tech sales exec, I'm always amused by engineers who think their salary comes out of thin air, or that your VCs don't expect a profit at some point. Someone has to sell what you're coding, and that generally involves a phone call, and there is a correlation between deals closing and the speed with which someone responds to a warm lead. Upcall's goal is to fill that need.
I would like to call out YCombinator for supporting this.
It is a slimy business, it is booming at the moment, but there are a lot of other, healthier ways to make money and I think they built perception to be better then others for good reason. This just doesn't suit them.
I am open to hear opposing views and explanations, sans kposehn who acts as these guys advocate here.
The platform overview video is basically a screencast, and 480P is a really painful resolution for watching small text, even if I open it in YouTube app instead of the postage-stamp inline size the site tried to show it to me in. For a service that’s supposed to talk to people for me, the fact that you apparently could not find anyone to record audio for a 4 min video really doesn’t inspire confidence.
The calls at Basic level are $0.29/minute. That's only $18/hour, and with Upcall taking a cut of that, what is the skill and education level if they have a "100% U.S.-based team"?
Intrinsically, nothing. However, it seems incongruent with how they're positioning the product. Presumably a low-skilled and low-educated work force can fit into a sales pipeline, but the same could be said for doing software QA, yet we still essentially hire for the edge cases.
Companies that don't mind outsourcing their reputation to a third-party outbound call center.
When I get an unsolicited call, I always ask pertinent questions. If they can't be answered swiftly, I know that the company doesn't care enough to properly train their sales critters, and so my trust in them to do anything properly is significantly decreased.
Pertinent questions might include "how is your software or service delivered?", "where is the company located?" or "where is your security policy documented?".
This just seems like an amoral SaaS service I kind of want to die. Fast.