Wireless phone service provider TextNow announced it has earned $1 billion USD in cumulative revenue since launching in 2009. The Waterloo- and San Francisco-headquartered company provides free and low-cost cellular voice and data plans in the U.S. The company is celebrating the milestone with the unveiling of a permanent public art installation of a sculpture by d’Orléans, Québec-based artist Philippe Pallafray.
The sculpture sits outside the company’s Waterloo headquarters in the David Johnston Research and Technology Park. Titled “Équilibre Oblique”, the piece comprises a stainless steel ball sitting between two rust-coloured steel cubes. A company spokesperson said, “The installation’s three distinct forms represent the progression from ideas to startups to scaled companies and reflect the entrepreneurial journey that has helped make Waterloo one of Canada’s most recognized technology hubs.”
“We wanted something there to remind everyone that anything is possible, and to inspire other people to do the same thing.”
The piece honours the company’s roots in Waterloo, co-founder and CEO Derek Ting told BetaKit in an interview.
“We wanted something there to remind everyone that anything is possible, and to inspire other people to do the same thing,” Ting said in an interview before the unveiling. “The meaning behind the sculpture fits our story really well.”
Ting was a student at the University of Waterloo in 2008 when he and his co-founder decided to forgo a traditional co-op placement.
“We just wanted to design our own ideal co-op term, which was to be close to our friends for the last semester and have a good time and still be able to make money,” Ting said. “And I guess in a sense, we still accomplish that today, just at a much bigger scale.”
The company was originally named EnFlick and rebranded as TextNow in 2015. Ting said the app started as a way to not pay for texting.
“Texting was expensive, but I was able to instant message people for free on my computer,” he said. “Now I have a computer in my pocket, why do I have to pay for text messaging?”
After launching with a free texting plan, Ting said the company saw that over 90 percent of the installations were on iPod Touch devices.
“That was the ‘aha’ moment. These people that were on iPod Touches, they didn’t have phone service, and they were using our app as their phone service. It wasn’t just texting; we needed to make phone service free. That began a multi-decade obsession to figure out how to do that,” Ting said.
Today, TextNow’s service is used by over 10 million people across the US. It offers free, ad-supported, and paid texting, voice, and data plans as a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) on T-Mobile’s 5G and 4G LTE networks. The success is something that Ting still could not have imagined.
“To be honest. Even $100,000 felt like a stretch back then. We were just thinking, ‘hey, we could pay rent, we could buy food’. We’d have been happy with that,” he said.
Ting’s advice for the next generation of founders is simple: stop thinking about success or failure and just enjoy the journey.
“You gotta try a bunch of things,” Ting said. “Some things work and some things don’t. Sometimes it takes two tries. Sometimes it takes 10,000 tries. I think just enjoying the journey of trying and being able to try it long enough that you find success along the way is really all it is.
Images courtesy Alex Kinsella for BetaKit.