March 3 marks an important day in the history of Connect2Pk. The idea clicked us in January 2008 and at that time we majorly thought of it as a paid service. After surveying the market, seeing competitive rates, we decided to launch it as a free service and then move towards a paid service. Our plan didn’t work out the way we assumed and we didn’t even get many users in the initial days. Anyway, we bundled up some courage – worked day and night on the weekends, tested various features and started finalizing our website for the beta release. It was March 3, 2008 when the beta version 1.0 of the website was available for public by the Grace of Almighty Allah.
From day 1, we made our mind-set to help out our users as much as we can so as to enable them using our service in a better way. Many people thought we were ‘just another fake service’ and only dropped emails with negative feedback. Initial week went tough, we spent most of the time marketing and the durations of the call placed through our system was just few minutes! Our team was also providing live support to users through instant messengers so that we could have more users to try out our service. During second week, we reached 100 users – out of which most of them were friends of friends or acquaintances. We stopped providing support on instant messenger and asked all users to email us in case of any queries. But on the other hand, our support was rapid on the emails. Disappointed by the response to our service, we started putting up advertisements on our website so as to generate some revenue for keeping the setup live.
3rd week started, we saw ourselves in total loss, and finally a good marketing tactic struck us, email marketing! And Alhamdulillah, it actually proved to be the dawn of our service. With the increase in traffic on our website, our ad-funded model started proving itself and we recovered all our investment. It gave as a very gratifying feeling to assist all our users from different part of world – help them out and see their happy emails for connecting them to their friends & family.
Months passed by, and we gradually started conquering more cities. Connect2Pk started off with only 1 city i.e. Karachi. But with the increase in traffic, we utilized our revenue and re-invested in our service. Added cities to our service whenever it was required and by the grace of Allah, Connect2Pk now supports over 30+ simultaneous calls with the help of 4 cities, majorly due to the new Islamabad number. We’ve tweaked our website 2 times during the past year and have tried to improve it as per our user experience & feedback. From email support, we have now implemented community forums so that user can get instant solution to their queries. Frequent updates to our system are provided on our blog as well as Twitter.
3rd week of March was the last time when we felt unenthusiastic about our service. Our hopes and target were boosted by our users and MashAllah today we have a user base of more than 17,000 and counting! Daily statistics have shot up to 13,000 minutes of talk-time/day with 800+ unique visitors on the website along with 3,500+ page views. Also, Connect2Pk users are spread across 125+ countries and we’ve got really lovely feedback from our users (take a look here).
Few of our users are waiting for the paid service, and they’ll get some good news in the upcoming days InshAllah. We have some serious maintenance pending in the next few weeks, and we hope to enable some new features after that.
How did we perform last year? We would love to hear your feedback on it! Feel free to drop us an email or comment to this post so that we can improve our service as much as we can.
Thanks to our dear friends & all users who helped us made it. Happy talking!