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As we’re building Jelly, we have found ourselves looking at lots of raw emails. In particular, we’ve spent a lot of time with email headers. If you’ve ever had cause to do the same, you know it can lead to lots of scanning and squinting. There’s got to be a better way! And here it is: Prettier Email Headers. With the help of AI, I threw together this tool that accepts a raw email paste. Then it shows those headers and header values in a format that is easier on the eyes. I also asked AI to do some research into the definition of each header and include citations. As always, I practiced the “don’t trust and verify” method when working with AI. If you ever find yourself staring at email headers, I think you should give Prettier Email Headers a try! If you liked this post, maybe you’ll like Jelly, our new email collaboration app for small teams!
The London Ruby User Group is one of the longest-running technology user groups in the world, having held a monthly meeting almost every single month since late 2006. It’s no small feat to have kept a local community running for so long, especially since everyone involved is a volunteer. Jelly is the foundational tool that helps LRUG’s organisers keep things running smoothly. The beating heart of LRUG is the mailing list, and the team regularly puts out a call for members to give presentations at the monthly LRUG meet-up. Those submissions are sent to an email address which forwards directly into Jelly. All of the volunteer organisational team can see each talk proposal conversation, and can respond directly or privately discuss the talk right in that thread. And, most importantly, anyone can quickly get up to speed with where a talk proposal is because the whole history of the conversation is right there. This is particularly important for a volunteer-led organisation like LRUG, because at any time one of the organisation team might be on vacation or busy with life and work; but because any other member can jump in and seamlessly pick up a conversation, LRUG never stumbles. Jelly helps the LRUG team make sure that no conversation is accidentally ignored, because it’s always clear who’s got what. As well as talk proposals, LRUG uses Jelly to coordinate with venues, to field questions from community members and attendees, and to coordinate with other user groups. Jelly acts as a shared inbox for all of LRUG’s communication, with specific email addresses for sponsors, job posting to the mailing list, and general organisational matters. Jelly handles everything. LRUG’s longest-running organiser, Murray Steele, says: We looked at other more "complete" support tools like ZenDesk and HelpScout, but they are way more expensive (you have to pay per user) and more complex than we need. Jelly presents email just like email, and there's a flat cost which means we don't get penalised whenever someone new joins our team. If you liked this post, maybe you’ll like Jelly, our new email collaboration app for small teams!
For your small business to survive, you need customers. Not just to buy once. You need them to come back, tell their friends, and trust you over time. And yet, too many small businesses make it weirdly hard to talk to them. Well, duh, right? I agree, yet I see small businesses fumbling this over and over. All the attention when discussing business is about giant corporations. Whether they’re selling servers or vehicles or every product under the sun, millions of dollars pass through their doors every day. Yet it is folly to apply the methodologies of giant companies to our small businesses. It sounds obvious, but I constantly see small businesses making it hard for customers to get in touch. If a customer does get through the “contact us” gauntlet, that small business often uses needlessly complicated enterprise software to talk with customers. Small businesses don’t get the spotlight, but they are the engine of the economy. To wit, in the United States: 99.9% of businesses are small Nearly half the private workforce is employed by small businesses They generate over 43% of the country’s GDP And beyond the stats, small businesses are who we turn to every day: your corner coffee shop, your local cleaner, your neighborhood software team. And don’t forget that every big business started small. Small businesses are the genesis of innovation. We all need small businesses to succeed. Most small teams aren’t trying to become giant corporations. They want to make a living doing work for a fair return. Many of them work hard in hopes of moving the needle from a fair return to a comfortable life, and maybe even some riches down the road. Yet it’s amazing how often it’s forgotten: you need customers to succeed. Success in small business starts with human conversation. While talking effectively with your customers does not guarantee success, it is certainly a requirement. Here’s what that looks like: a customer has a question and your team responds kindly, clearly, and quickly. Or sometimes your team wants to reach out with a question for a customer. It’s a simple, human interaction that cannot be done effectively by automation or AI. It’s the air your small business is breathing. Starve that air, and everything else suffers. Your product or service is almost secondary to building a healthy relationship with each of your customers. Big business doesn’t operate this way. We shouldn’t expect it to show us how to build real relationships. We’re doing our best here at Good Enough to build healthy, happy customer relationships. Whenever you write to us about any of our products, someone on the team is going to reply to offer help or an explanation or an alternative. Fact is, if you write to us about anything, we’re going to reply to offer help or an explanation or an alternative. As an online business, we’re talking with customers primarily over email. For us, Jelly makes those conversations easy to have—human, not hectic. Actual customer support is remarkable. Actual, healthy human relationships are important. Actual customer conversations are a key to small business success. Choose your actions and tools accordingly. If you liked this post, maybe you’ll like Jelly, our new email collaboration app for small teams!
We put a lot of ourselves into our work, and it occurs to us that you, dear reader, might not know much about us. So we’re descending deeper, ever deeper, into the Q&A column introduce ourselves, one-at-a-time. Desperate to keep things interesting, James tried to spice up the interview format... https://lazyatom.com https://interblah.net https://goodenough.us https://goodenough.us/blog Once you've done that, I want you to conduct a question-by-question interview with me, to form the basis of a "James is Good Enough" post. Ask me one question at a time, and then use my answer to evolve the interview. We should aim for about 8 questions in total. Don't be boring. Use the existing posts as inspiration, but I want the post about me to be unique. I'd be cool if it went in a strange tangent. Q1: If your inner monologue were a programming language, what would it be, and why? E_WHAT_THE_HELL_ARE_YOU_TALKING_ABOUT_THIS_IS_NONSENSE Fantastic. You’ve got a reflective meta-loop keeping everything in check. Let’s follow that thought deeper: Q2: What’s one recurring loop or thought-process that’s currently being tagged by your inner supervisor as E_WHAT_THE_HELL_ARE_YOU_TALKING_ABOUT_THIS_IS_NONSENSE? Fair enough—let’s rewind a bit and start from a more grounded place. Q3: OK James, tell me a bit about who you are, what you’re doing these days, and how you fit into the Good Enough story? How do I fit into the Good Enough story? My friend Patrick, who I met when we both lived in Austin, TX, had always been trying to persuade me to work with him. A few jobs later, he succeeded! I was the 6th person to join the team, in mid 2023, and I love being a part of this team. It's long been my dream to build great products with love, and at Good Enough we are lucky to have that opportunity. That’s perfect; let’s build on that a bit. Q4: You mentioned it’s long been your dream to build great products with love. What does “building with love” mean for you personally—especially after two decades of programming? Great! Let’s push into this tension a bit more: Q5: Loving your users is admirable, but what’s a memorable example of when loving users conflicted with practical realities—like deadlines, budgets, or even your team’s sanity? How did you navigate that? Alright, let’s throw practicalities aside and pivot into something more colorful. Q5 (take two): If Good Enough were secretly a front for a mysterious cult, what strange rituals or beliefs would you and your teammates secretly adhere to, and why would you be tempted to join in? Q6: If Tony the Pony, Zalgo, and Y2K emerged through your DVD player at midnight and demanded you justify your existence in precisely one feature you’ve built or contributed to, which one would you pick, and how would you convince them to spare humanity based on it? Jelly -- it's an idea I've wanted to develop properly for a very long time. That, and an unreleased application I made called Chicken. Excellent—Jelly and Chicken it is. Clearly, we’ve entered culinary territory now. Q7: If Jelly and Chicken were literally dishes on a menu at the Good Enough café (the front for the aforementioned cult, obviously), how would you describe their flavors and textures to customers who wander in, unsuspecting of their metaphysical implications? Q7 (revised): What is it about Jelly, as an idea, that resonated with you deeply enough that it stuck around in your mind until you could finally build it at Good Enough? It should be a simple thing! But all these big software products make it complicated, smother it in bells and whistles -- and now AI, no offence GPT. There should be a "no-brainer" answer for a group that wants to use email together. I think Jelly can be that answer. Let’s wrap this up neatly: Final Question (Q8): You’ve spent your career advocating for simplicity in software. Do you think there’s a deeper personal philosophy beneath that, something you’re trying to express beyond just “good software design”? At this point ChatGPT tried to summarise the whole thing into a coherent post and, to be honest, it was garbage. So, instead, you get the raw interview. Judge me harshly, for I deserve it. If you liked this post, maybe you’ll like Jelly, our new email collaboration app for small teams!
We put a lot of ourselves into our work, and it occurs to us that you, dear reader, might not know much about us. So we’re continuing our Q&A column to introduce ourselves, one-at-a-time. Today, we’re meeting the biggest Pika fan, Barry Hess… Who are you? (Who, who, who, who?) My name is Barry Hess. I grew up in a rural part of Minnesota where the population of the entire county is less than 10,000 people. After getting a college degree in Computer Science, I moved to a metropolis of 25,000 people in southern Minnesota. I live here with my wife and three daughters, though our children are actively growing and slowly moving out into the world to create their own lives. 😭 I’ve been coding off and on for nearly thirty years now, though there was a bit of a dalliance in management for a while. What do you do at Good Enough? I started Good Enough with Shawn. For the past year my primary work has been Pika, which is near and dear to my heart. An illustration of me even sits on the Pika homepage, yet somehow Pika still keeps attracting new customers. Baffling! To accomplish my work, I mostly code Ruby on Rails while sometimes talking to AIs to help me write JavaScript. I also try to do some marketing work as best I can, write a bit, and help out with our other products. What are the tools of your trade? Ruby, Rails, JavaScript, repeat. I’ve been using RubyMine as my editor for the past year, along with Cody as my AI assistant. I’m thinking of taking a month to try using Cursor as a more integrated AI partner. While AI is more of a sounding board for my Rails work, it has become key for me to be able to accomplish anything at all in the JavaScript world. Aside from that, it’s my trusty MacBook Pro, a browser, Terminal, and reading the docs. What’s your origin story? I entered college as a Physics major, but knew enough about myself to take a Computer Science class in my first semester. I think I changed my major within a week. Though I loved computers, there wasn’t much programming in my life before college. My coding through college was primarily C++ for class, and I loved iterating on the little projects to make them more and more user friendly. From there I got into web development of the basic sort: HTML, CSS, SSI, and eventually PHP. My career started at an insurance company, which onboarded new employees with an intensive, three-month COBOL training class. So, yes, I spent a couple of years being paid to code COBOL before transitioning to a Java team. After about six years, I had an early-life crisis and left that job for parts unknown. (Literally, I had no new job lined up, and my wife was pregnant with our second child. Do not try this at home!) I was very fortunate to run into the Harvest founders, and was able to start working with them from (nearly) the beginning of that product. It was there that I was able to experience the tiny, scrappy startup; the growing, scrappy startup; and eventually the medium-sized company, established in its niche. I went from coding many of the original features to helping build a team to managing the entire technical team. Eventually, it was time to move on to a new experience, and here I am at Good Enough, trying something rather different! Me and my family overlooking Florence What’s new? How are things going? Oh, you know, life keeps barreling on! As I mentioned above, our children continue to grow. We have a tight-knit family and love to hang out together. We also love to travel together! We just got back from visiting our oldest while she was studying abroad in Florence, Italy. It was fantastic. Our middle child is heading to college in the fall, and we’ll continue to adapt. As you can imagine, this is all bittersweet, but we are doing our best to cherish the moments and enjoy watching our children grow into lovely adults. What’s your drink of choice? In the past few years, I’ve gotten into making cocktails. I don’t make a cocktail often, but I really enjoy the variety of flavors that exist out there—I had no idea until I started making them! I love a good Negroni. Paper Planes are awesome, as are Last Words and Enzonis. If I’m being honest, though, the most frequently drunk cocktail in the Hess household is the Gin & Tonic. Any parting words of wisdom for our dear readers? It’s okay to be mildly addicted to Fortnite if you take care to play with family and friends. It’s a fun game that’s always changing. The fun is enhanced by planning together and succeeding (or more likely failing) together. When you play too much alone, and spend all of your “content viewing time” watching YouTube videos about how to play better (even though you never really get that good because you can’t put that much time into training), then perhaps you’ve went too far. I may or may not be giving this speech to myself. Don’t worry, I have a totally balanced Fortnite life these days! Where can you be found on the internet? This blog, Pika’s blog, and my blog on Pika. I’m also haltingly involved in various social sites @bjhess: Want to know other things about our team? Let us know what really interests you!
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A long time ago I wrote about secret government telephone numbers, and before that, secret military telephone buttons. I suppose this is becoming a series. To be clear, the "secret" here is a joke, but more charitably I could say that it refers to obscurity rather than any real effort to keep them secret. Actually, today's examples really make this point: they're specifically intended to be well known, but are still pretty obscure in practice. If you've been around for a while, you know how much I love telephone numbers. Here in North America, we have a system called the North American Numbering Plan (NANP) that has rigidly standardized telephone dialing practices since the middle of the 20th century. The US, Canada, and a number of Central American countries benefit from a very orderly system of area codes (more formally numbering plan areas or NPAs) followed by a subscriber number written in the format NXX-XXXX (this is a largely NANP-centric notation for describing phone number patterns, N represents the digits 2-9 and X any digit). All of these NANP numbers reside under the country code 1, allowing at least theoretically seamless international dialing within the NANP community. It's really a pretty elegant system. NANP is the way it is for many reasons, but it mostly reflects technical requirements of the telephone exchanges of the 1940s. This is more thoroughly explained in the link above, but one of the goals of NANP is to ensure that step-by-step (SxS) exchanges can process phone numbers digit by digit as they are dialed. In other words, it needs to be possible to navigate the decision tree of telephone routing using only the digits dialed so far. Readers with a computer science education might have some tidy way to describe this in terms of Chompsky or something, but I do not have a computer science education; I have an Information Technology education. That means I prefer flow charts to automata, and we can visualize a basic SxS exchange as a big tree. When you pick up your phone, you start at the root of the tree, and each digit dialed chooses the edge to follow. Eventually you get to a leaf that is hopefully someone's telephone, but at no point in the process does any node benefit from the context of digits you dial before, after, or how many total digits you dial. This creates all kinds of practical constraints, and is the reason, for example, that we tend to write ten-digit phone numbers with a "1" before them. That requirement was in some ways long-lived (The last SxS exchange on the public telephone network was retired in 1999), and in other ways not so long lived... "common control" telephone exchanges, which did store the entire number in electromechanical memory before making a routing decision, were already in use by the time the NANP scheme was adopted. They just weren't universal, and a common nationwide numbering scheme had to be designed to accommodate the lowest common denominator. This discussion so far is all applicable to the land-line telephone. There is a whole telephone network that is, these days, almost completely separate but interconnected: cellular phones. Early cellular phones (where "early" extends into CDMA and early GSM deployments) were much more closely attached to the "POTS" (Plain Old Telephone System). AT&T and Verizon both operated traditional telephone exchanges, for example 5ESS, that routed calls to and from their customers. These telephone exchanges have become increasingly irrelevant to mobile telephony, and you won't find a T-Mobile ESS or DMS anywhere. All US cellular carriers have adopted the GSM technology stack, and GSM has its own definition of the switching element that can be, and often is, fulfilled by an AWS EC2 instance running RHEL 8. Calls between cell phones today, even between different carriers, are often connected completely over IP and never touch a traditional telephone exchange. The point is that not only is telephone number parsing less constrained on today's telephone network, in the case of cellular phones, it is outright required to be more flexible. GSM also defines the properties of phone numbers, and it is a very loose definition. Keep in mind that GSM is deeply European, and was built from the start to accommodate the wide variety of dialing practices found in Europe. This manifests in ways big and small; one of the notable small ways is that the European emergency number 112 works just as well as 911 on US cell phones because GSM dictates special handling for emergency numbers and dictates that 112 is one of those numbers. In fact, the definition of an "emergency call" on modern GSM networks is requesting a SIP URI of "urn:service:sos". This reveals that dialed number handling on cellular networks is fundamentally different. When you dial a number on your cellular phone, the phone collects the entire number and then applies a series of rules to determine what to do, often leading to a GSM call setup process where the entire number, along with various flags, is sent to the network. This is all software-defined. In the immortal words of our present predicament, "everything's computer." The bottom line is that, within certain regulatory boundaries and requirements set by GSM, cellular carriers can do pretty much whatever they want with phone numbers. Obviously numbers need to be NANP-compliant to be carried by the POTS, but many modern cellular calls aren't carried by the POTS, they are completed entirely within cellular carrier systems through their own interconnection agreements. This freedom allows all kinds of things like "HD voice" (cellular calls connected without the narrow filtering and companding used by the traditional network), and a lot of flexibility in dialing. Most people already know about some weird cellular phone numbers. For example, you can dial *#06# to display your phone's various serial numbers. This is an example of a GSM MMI (man-machine interface) code, phone numbers that are handled entirely within your device but nonetheless defined as dialable numbers by GSM for compatibility with even the most basic flip phones. GSM also defined numbers called USSD for unstructured supplementary service data, which set up connections to the network that can be used in any arbitrary way the network pleases. Older prepaid phone services used to implement balance check and top-up operations using USSD numbers, and they're also often used in ways similar to Vertical Service Codes (VSCs) on the landline network to control carrier features. USSDs also enabled the first forms of mobile data, which involved a "special telephone call" to a USSD in order to download a cut-down form of ESPN in a weird mobile-specific markup language. Now, put yourself in the shoes of an enterprising cellular network. The flexibility of processing phone numbers as you please opens up all kinds of possibilities. Innovative services! Customer convenience! Sell them for money! Oh my god, sell them for money! It seems like this started with customer service. It is an old practice, dating to the Bell operating companies, to have special short phone numbers to reach the telephone company itself. The details varied by company (often based on technical constraints in their switching system), but a common early setup was that dialing 114 got you the repair service operator to report a problem with your phone line. These numbers were usually listed in the front of the phone book, and for the phone company the fact that they were "special" or nonstandard was sort of a feature, since they could ensure that they were always routed within the same switch. The selection of "911" as the US emergency number seems rooted in this practice, as later on several major telcos used the "N11" numbers for their service lines. This became immortalized in the form of 611, which will get you customer service for most phone carriers. So cellular companies did the same, allocating themselves "special" numbers for various service lines. Verizon offers #PMT to make a payment. Naturally, there's also room for upsell services: #ROAD for roadside assistance on Verizon. The odd thing about these phone numbers is that there's really no standard involved, they're just the arbitrary practices of specific cellular companies. The term "mobile dial code" (MDC) is usually used to refer to them, although that term seems to have arisen organically rather than by intent. Remember, these aren't a real thing! The carriers just make them up, all on their own. The only real constraint on MDCs is that they need to not collide with any POTS number, which is most easily achieved by prefixing them with some combination of * and #, and usually not "*#" because it's referenced by the GSM standard for MMI. MDCs are available for purchase, but the terms don't seem to be public and you have to negotiate separately with each carrier. That's because there is no centralization. This is where MDCs stand in clear contrast to the better known SMS Short Code, or SMSSC. Those are the five or six-digit numbers widely used in advertising campaigns. SMSSCs are centrally managed by the SMS Short Code Registry, which is a function of industry association CTIA but contracted to iConectiv. iConectiv is sort of like the SAIC of the communications industry, a huge company that dates back to the Bell System (where it became Bellcore after divestiture) and that no one has heard of but nonetheless is a critically important part of the telephone system. Providers that want to have an SMSSC (typically on behalf of one of their customers) pay a fee, and usually recoup it from the end user. That fee is not cheap, typical end-user rates for an SMSSC run over $10k a year. But at least it's straightforward, and your SMS A2P or marketing company can make it happen for you. MDCs have no such centralization, no standardized registration process. You negotiate with each carrier individually. That means it's pretty difficult to put together "complete coverage" on an MDC by getting the same one assigned by every major carrier. And this is one of those areas where "good enough" is seldom good enough; people get pissed off when something you advertise doesn't work. Putting a phone number that only works for some people on a billboard can quickly turn into an expensive embarrassment, so companies will be wary of using an MDC in marketing if they don't feel really confident that it works for the vast majority of cellphone users. Because of this fragmentation, adoption of MDCs for marketing purposes has been very low. The only going concern I know of is #250, operated by a company called Mobile Direct Response. The premise of #250 is very simple: users call 250 and are greeted by a simple IVR. They say a keyword, and they're either forwarded to the phone number of the business that paid for the keyword or they receive a text message response with more information. #250 is specifically oriented towards radio advertising, where asking people to remember a ten-digit phone number is, well, asking a lot. It's also made the jump to podcast advertising. #250 is priced in a very radio-centric way, by the keyword and the size of the market area in which the advertisement that gives the keyword is played. 250 was founded by Dave Robinett, who used to work on marketing at Sprint, presumably where he became aware that these MDCs were a possibility. He has negotiated for #250 to work across a substantial list of cellular carriers in the US and Canada, providing almost complete coverage. That wasn't easy, Robinett said in an interview that it took five years to get AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, and Sprint on board. 250 does not appear to be especially widely used. For one, the website is a little junky, with some broken links and other indications that it is not backed by a large communications department. Dave Robinett may be the entire company. They've been operating since at least 2017, and I've only ever heard it in an ad once---a podcast ad that ended with "Call #250 and say I need a dentist." One thing you quickly notice when you look into telephone marketing is that dentists are apparently about 80% of the market. He does mention success with shows like "Rush, Hannity, and Levin," so it's safe to say that my radio habits are a little different from Robinett's. That's not to say that #250 is a failure. In the same interview Robinett says that the company pays his mortgage and, well, that ain't too bad. But it's also nothing like the widespread adoption of SMSSCs. One wonders if the limitation of MDCs to one company that is so focused on radio marketing limits their potential. It might really open things up if some company created a registration service, and prenegotiated terms with carriers so that companies could pick up their own MDCs to use as they please. Well, yeah, someone's trying. Around 2006, a recently-founded mobile marketing company called Zoove announced StarStar dialing. I'm a little unclear on Zoove's history. It seems that they were originally founded as Teleractive in Rhode Island as an SMS short code keyword response service, and after an infusion of VC cash moved to Palo Alto and started looking for something bigger. In 2016, they were acquired by a call center technology company called Mindful. Or maybe Zoove sold the StarStar business to Mindful? Stick a pin in that. I don't love the name StarStar, which has shades of Spacestar Ordering. But it refers to their chosen MDC prefix, two stars. Well, that point is a little odd, according to their marketing material you can also get numbers with a # prefix or * prefix, but all of the examples use **. I would say that, in general, StarStar has it a little less together than #250. Their website is kind of broken, it only loads intermittently and some of the images are missing. At one point it uses the term "CADC" to describe these numbers but I can't find that expanded anywhere. Plus the "About" page refers repeatedly to Virtual Hold Technologies, which renamed to VHT in 2018 and Mindful 2022. It really feels like the vestigial website of a dead company. I know about StarStar because, for a time, trucks from moving franchise All My Sons prominently bore the number MOVE on the side. Indeed, this is still one of the headline examples on the StarStar website, but it doesn't work. I just get a loud click and then the call ends. And it's not that StarStar doesn't work with my mobile carrier, because StarStar's own number MOBILE does connect to their IVR. That IVR promises that a representative will speak with me shortly, plays about five seconds of hold music, and then dumps me on a voicemail system. Despite StarStar numbers apparently basically working, I'm finding that most of the examples they give on their website won't even connect. Perhaps results will vary depending on the mobile network. Well, perhaps not that much is lost. StarStar was founded by Steve Doumar, a serial telephone marketing entrepreneur with a colorful past founding various inbound call center companies. Perhaps his most famous venture is R360, a "lead acquisition" service memorialized by headlines like "Drug treatment referral service took advantage of addictions to make a quick buck" from the Federal Trade Commission. He's one of those guys whose bio involves founding a new company every two years, which he has to spin as entrepreneurial dynamism rather than some combination of fleeing dissatisfied investors and fleeing angered regulators. Today he runs whisp.io, a "customer activation platform" that appears to be a glorified SMS advertising service featuring something ominously called "simplified opt-in." Whisp has a YouTube channel which features the 48-second gem "Fun Fact We Absolutely Love About Steve Doumar". Description: Our very own CEO, Steve Doumar is a kind and generous person who has given back to the community in many ways; this man is absolutely a man with a heart of gold. Do you want to know the fun fact? Yes you do! Here it is: "He is an incredible philanthropist. He loves helping other people. Every time I'm with him he comes up with new ways and new ideas to help other people. Which I think is amazing. And he doesn't brag about it, he doesn't talk about it a lot." Except he's got his CMO making a YouTube video about it? From Steve Doumar's blog: American entrepreneur Ray Kroc expressed the importance of persisting in a busy world where everyone wants a bite of success. This man is no exception. An entrepreneur. A family man. A visionary. These are the many names of a man that has made it possible for opt-ins to be safe, secure, and accurate; Steve Doumar. I love this stuff, you just can't make it up. I'm pretty sure what's going on here is just an SEO effort to outrank the FTC releases and other articles about the R360 case when you search for his name. It's only partially working, "FTC Hits R360 and its Owner With $3.8 Million Civil ..." still comes in at Google result #4 for "Steve Doumar," at least for me. But hey, #4 is better than #1. Well, to be fair to StarStar, I don't think Steve Doumar has been involved for some years, but also to be fair, some of their current situation clearly dates to past behavior that is maybe less than savory. Zoove originally styled itself as "The National StarStar Registry," clearly trying to draw parallels to CTIA/iConectiv's SMSSC registry. Their largest customer was evidently a company called Sumotext, which leased a number of StarStar numbers to offer an SMS and telephone marketing service. In 2016, Sumotext sued StarStar, Zoove, VHT (now Mindful), and a healthy list of other entities all involved in StarStar including the intriguingly named StarSteve LLC. I'm not alone in finding the corporate history a little baffling; in a footnote on one ruling the court expressed confusion about all the different names and opted to call them all Zoove. In any case, Sumotext alleged that Zoove, StarSteve, and VHT all merged as part of a scheme to illegally monopolize the StarStar market by undercutting the companies that had been leasing the numbers and effectively giving VHT (Mindful) an exclusive ability to offer marketing services with StarStar numbers. The case didn't end up going anywhere for Sumotext, the jury found that Sumotext hadn't established a relevant market which is a key part of a Sherman act case. An appeal was made all the way to the Supreme Court, but they didn't take it up. What the case did do was publicize some pretty sketchy sounding details, like the seemingly uncontested accusation that VHT got Sumotext's customer list from the registry database and used it to convert them all into StarSteve customers. And yes, the Steve in StarSteve is Steve Doumar. As best I can tell, the story here is that Steve Doumar founded Zoove (or bought Teleractive and renamed it or something?) to establish the National StarStar Registry, then founded a marketing company called StarSteve that resold StarStar numbers, then merged StarSteve and the National StarStar Registry together and cut off all of the other resellers. Apparently not a Sherman act violation but it sure is a bad look, and I wonder how much it contributed to the lack of adoption of the whole StarStar idea---especially given that Sumotext seems to have been responsible for most of that adoption, including the All My Sons deal for MOVE. I wonder if All My Sons had to take MOVE off of their trucks because of the whole StarSteve maneuver? That seems to be what happened. Look, ten-digit phone numbers are had to remember, that much is true. But as is, the "MDC" industry doesn't seem stable enough for advertising applications where the number needs to continue to work into the future. I think the #250 service is probably here to stay, but confined to the niche of audio advertising. StarStar raised at least $30 million in capital in the 2010s, but seems to have shot itself in the foot. StarStar owner VHT/Mindful, now acquired by Medallia, doesn't even mention StarStar as a product offering. Hey, remember how Steve Doumar is such a great philanthropist? There are a lot of vestiges around of StarStar Inc., a nonprofit that made StarStar numbers available to charitable organizations. Their website, starstar.org, is now a Wix error page. You can find old articles about StarStar Me, also written **me, which sounds lewd but was a $3/mo offering that allowed customers to get a vanity short code (such as ** followed by their name)---the original form of StarStar, dating back to 2012 and the beginning of Zoove. In a press release announcing the StarStar Me, Zoove CEO Joe Gillespie said: With two-thirds of smartphone users having downloaded social networking apps to their phones, there’s a rapidly growing trend in today's on-the-go lifestyle to extend our personal communications and identity into the digital realm via our mobile phones. And somehow this leads to paying $3 for to get StarStarred? I love it! It's so meaningless! And years later it would be StarStar Mobile formerly Zoove by VHT now known as Mindful a Medallia company. Truly an inspiring story of industry, and just one little corner of the vast tapestry of phone numbers.
