You’ve got to love a good bootstrapper!
StartupJournal has a story about an entrepreneur who took over a former competitor’s phone number when they went out of business.
While leafing through the Yellow Pages last fall, entrepreneur Mark Bright saw an ad for a recently dissolved competitor listing an out-of-service phone number. On a hunch that readers would continue dialing the number for some time, he arranged for the line’s outstanding calls to be rerouted to his company. Since then, he says, he’s turned many unsuspecting callers into customers, thereby boosting sales….
Mr. Bright adopted his former competitor’s digits in October, and says his company…now receives about 40 calls a day, double the number of calls from before he added the number. As a result, monthly sales…have increased by an average of ,400, he says.
The average business line costs about $50 a month. His $1,400 in increased sales is a pretty darn good return on that investment!
(Thanks to Scott Pafford for passing this along).