I used to say that my favorite part of building Phaxio was the joy of building a product for developers. But, in these past couple of weeks, my favorite part of building Phaxio has changed. Phaxio isn’t about building a product anymore, now it’s about building a new technology - one they said couldn’t work. 

I always explain fax technology as a vicious circle;

old tech ==> programmers don’t like to play with the old tech ==> nothing gets updated ==> the tech stays old.

And, while there are plenty of calls for the death of fax by tech elitists, fax is long from dead. I’m not saying that fax is going to be around forever, it will eventually die. But, like it or not, fax is still very much alive. 

We built Phaxio to satisfy our own needs. We weren’t really looking to improve on actual faxing, we just wanted to create an easy way for our software to utilize fax. And, as luck would have it, other programmers wanted in. So, we slapped a frontend on and released v1 of the Phaxio API. 

But, like any real entrepreneurs we couldn’t let Phaxio just sit, we needed to make improvements. We sent feeler emails to find out what kind of features other programmers wanted. We can up with three improvements to the system which I posted here on the phlog. 

2. Kanye West-ing our systems -  Make our infrastructure faster better stronger.

Since Josh and I weren’t (aren’t?) telecom guys, we knew that speeding up fax times wasn’t going to be simple. We began to ask around in hopes oflocating a fax/telecom expert willing to give us a couple of minutes. As luck would have it, we met a guy who was able to recommend a couple of fax/telecom/networking experts to us and we setup a couple of meetings. 

The first expert was a bit helpful in explaining that the processes that we wanted to use to fax probably wouldn’t work. The second expert could barely understand what we were talking about and asked “for a couple days to get back to us.” There was an interesting trend that Josh and I began to notice – none of these experts had any real knowledge about fax. Sure, they could quote you things from wikipedia and talk in fancy fax phrases with long telecom acronyms, but they had no vision, they were content with what they were doing, they didn’t need improvements. But we did. 

Like many of the programmers currently using Phaxio, we are used to instant results. When I search, I want the results immediately. When I update my Google Buzz Facebook status, I expect my friends to see it immediately. So, when I send a fax I want it to happen immediately. Still, we were assured that this would be impossible with fax. “No, you won’t see times under two minutes – ever, it’s just not possible,” an expert told us.  

Maybe it’s because we’re really smart, or maybe it’s because were really stupid, but we kept at it. And, although we were constantly being told that fax could go no faster, we continued to see huge improvements. We hope to release these improvements to you in v2 of the Phaxio API. Of course, I can’t give you official numbers or promises because there’s no way to prove that the technologies that we’re building are going to continue to work as well as they have – most of it is experimental. 

Through the astronomical amounts of coffee and lack of sleep, the support requests and feedback emails, the coding and business decisions, I never expected to find the most rewarding part of Phaxio in being told “no.” We didn’t get into fax to make a significant change to the industry, we were just to stupid kids looking for a solution to our own problems. But, you never know where someone telling you “no” in your face might lead.