Innovator: Sweden’s Freespee CEO, Carl Holmquist

While Sweden has produced recognizable telecom entrepreneurs – namely one who started a company called Skype, as well as Rebtel’s founder Hjalmar Winbladh – one can’t be faulted for thinking cars and cold, and not voice startups, when Stockholm’s on the screen. So when a little-known Swedish startup called Freespee started following my feed on Twitter, I was instantly curious to learn more.

Turns out it wasn’t long into my recent phone interview with Freespee CEO and founder Carl Holmquist that I realized the first installment of the Voyces’ Innovator Series was under foot. In fact, I liked his spirit from the get-go in the email he sent after I inquired about a call. In it, Carl noted:

There is so much going on in the Voice 3.0 area in the San Francisco area, and nothing in Europe (from what you have seen, at least). But, this is wrong, as we have been very successful in getting huge European Media groups as Sanoma, Schibsted, Eniro, European Directories to build voice applications into their online offering, driven by our API. So, we decided to start to talk about this only some weeks ago…we raised a first round of funding in October last year, which we also chose not to talk about until recently.

The biggest difference we see it between ourselves and a peer like Twilio, is we offer our customers an almost plug and play voice application, even though its driven by our API. The reason for this is that we found that even a few lines of code is too much for many content providers.  They can always start their projects with our ready-to-go applications (Analytics, Voice, Talky), where they don’t have to lift a finger — just start using it.

Carl worked for the local telco prior to launching his first real startup in the late summer of 2007. What started as a self-funded initiative to provide direct-to-consumer private numbers for classifieds or other ads, has blossomed into a customer and now venture-funded voice application service provider riding the web-meets-telephony wave.

Nothing Freespee does anymore (for revenue, at least) is direct to consumer. They soon learned that privacy was a nice-to-have, but not enough to scale a full-fledged consumer business. Instead, Yellow Page-like directories and various media companies came calling on Freespee for creative ways to grow revenue and improve customer retention. Fast forward to 2010 — Freespee is flush with customers across Europe that resell its phone numbers, packaged with analytics tools, to enhance their respective lead generation and online dating offerings.

For those on this side of the pond, Freespee may look and smell like an Ifbyphone – but a ‘fast-follow’ this is not. I’d even argue that Carl’s crew knew little if anything of Ifbyphone until recently. And as I told Carl, while being compared to Irv Shapiro’s accomplishments on US soil is a good thing, better is that their respective successes serving like-markets (thousands of miles apart) provides fresh validation for his growth plans.

Freespee, like so many fast-iterating startups these days, is learning from its customers about why their sales are growing. Among the tidbits he shared with me:

• In the resurgent private number space Freespee is finding that women are taking quickly to these, for safety. Why the difference from a few years back? Increasing access to reverse look-up services means that connecting the dots between a phone a number and a physical address is easier;

• Freespee’s found its resellers’ customers gleaning more than just transparency of lead origination and campaign performance results. By tracking incoming phone leads, a car rental chain in Sweden uncovered when calls go unanswered, by time and by store location. (Funny, phone systems have provided this type of info for decades, but not until it counts – as in counting leads – do people pay attention.)

With a solid stable of customers and a funding round north of a million euros under its belt, Carl and his team are surely not done innovating. Recently launched Talky is an in-beta voice service that crosses small group communication with social networking behaviors. A work in progress, Carl says. And other announcements are coming that his team believes will take call related analytics to the next level.

To finish up, I asked Carl what I always like to of any startup CEO – what keeps you up at night? His quick answer:

Opportunities. How to select them and which ones to focus on. Do we integrate into other apps, or stick with stand alone ones? Stay in Europe or migrate outward?

Hmm. Maybe running a voice startup in the suburbs of Stockholm is a well-kept secret after all.