How I Built a $15K/month Skype alternative
Who are you and what business did you start?
I have built a Skype alternative app for international calls solo. It's called Yadaphone, and it lets people make cheap international calls in browser. It makes $14k a month. In 7 months, we reached 10,000 registered users and 20 enterprise customers. Our main B2C customers are travelers, expats, freelancers, and B2B customers include background verification companies, travel agencies, and asset management companies.
I have launched Yadaphone days after Microsoft announced it was closing Skype, built the MVP in a weekend, and got my first sales minutes after my first Reddit post announcing it.
My image
How do you come up with the idea for Yadaphone?
I used to call via Skype before it closed down when I was traveling. I thought I was the only one like this, but when Microsoft announced it wanted to close Skype down, a lot of people were angry. I saw a tweet by Pieter Levels (@levelsio), saying how pissed he was and inviting people to build an alternative. I thought, hell, I can build it.
I shipped the MVP in a weekend and launched it on Reddit and X. I launched products before, but none made money. This time was different - I saw the first Stripe notification minutes after I announced Yadaphone on Reddit.
This idea wasn't an idea at all – it was a validated market, and I had enough skills to build it fast.
How did you build the initial version of Yadaphone?
Denis Iurchak built the Yadaphone app solo, focusing on creating a Skype alternative for international calls. Using his skills, he quickly developed the MVP in a weekend and launched it on Reddit, where he saw his first sales within minutes. The development process was fast and efficient, taking only a weekend to build the first version of the product. Challenges included the need for rapid development in response to Microsoft's announcement of closing Skype and the subsequent competition that arose in the market. The tech stack used to build Yadaphone was not specified, but it is clear that Denis leveraged his skills to create a simple, effective product that resonated with users.
How did you launch Yadaphone and get initial traction?
I launched Yadaphone with a couple of Reddit posts. In the first ones, I included a screenshot with our slick-looking web dialer and one short sentence describing it.
On Reddit, you get blocked fast if you blatantly promote yourself and don't provide value. It's important to be able to tell a compelling story. Mine was about a lone engineer making an alternative for a long-standing incumbent that betrayed its users and closed Skype. People like it and learned valuable stuff on how to build side projects. My Reddit posts started getting 100-200k impressions, and that's how I got the first eyeballs on Yadaphone.
One of my first clients was an attorney living in Cyprus. He needed to call internationally across the EU and the US. He learned about us on Reddit and became a superfan of Yadaphone. He told all his friends and colleagues about it. This kind of real feedback made me certain: I'm building something useful.
In the first month, we climbed to 300 users and $4000 in revenue. In the 3rd month, we made $10,800, and in the 6th - $13,300.
What was the growth strategy for Yadaphone and how did you scale?
After Reddit, I focused on getting mentioned in high-ranking blog posts. People think that you need to be a big corporation to get mentioned, but it's not true. Most authors want their content to be up-to-date. So I focused on the articles that still mentioned Skype.
I reached out to the authors via email, LinkedIn, or X, and pointed out that they were still mentioning Skype, which had closed down. I suggested they replace it with Yadaphone. There was a clear value both for them and for me. Most agreed, and that's how Yadaphone started ranking on very difficult keywords, such as "Skype alternative".
To get more eyeballs on Yadaphone, I reached out to local newspapers and startup magazines. I ended up being interviewed by one of them. The interview got published and brought us more publicity, credibility, and a high-value backlink.
To reach out to journalists, I used the same tactic as with blog owners. Small publications are always on the lookout for new stories, and the journalists there are quite approachable. I pitched my story to some of them, and they loved it – a lone founder building a telecom app sounds interesting!
Pro tip: Google the publications and authors that have written about startups like yours in the past and write to them. This way, you increase the likelihood that your story is going to fit their profile.
Me in a local Austrian startup magazine
This is the template I used to reach out to journalists and blog owners:
"Hey! I'm Denis, the founder of Yadaphone. I've read your article on cheap international calls - amazing work. Yadaphone provides calls directly in the browser, which none of the mentioned services do. I think it will be interesting to your readers. Let me know if you could mention Yadaphone in the artilce as well!"
What were the biggest lessons learned from building Yadaphone?
If I were to start again, I would pay much more attention to the SEO. I've been building Yadaphone in public from the get-go, and naturally, competitors appeared. Some of them were better at SEO than I was, and they started ranking for our keywords.
One day, I discovered that my sitemap was missing the www. prefix, and Google ignored all our pages - I quickly fixed it, but the damage was done.
When you are doing SEO, you have to produce high-quality content and make sure your website loads fast. A lot of people advise doing programmatic SEO, when you generate a lot of ranking pages using code. I would be cautious with it. If Google sees that a new website spits out a lot of similar-looking pages, it's going to punish it. Only to large-scale pSEO when you have enough domain authority.
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More about Yadaphone:
Who is the owner of Yadaphone?
Denis Iurchak is the founder of Yadaphone.
When did Denis Iurchak start Yadaphone?
2024
How much money has Denis Iurchak made from Yadaphone?
Denis Iurchak started the business in 2024, and currently makes an average of $40.8K/year.
