Built with Open Source. Fueled by Frustration. Finished at :33 — and Watched by a Dog.

I didn’t start out trying to build a product. I was just a telecom developer in Europe, trying to integrate an SBC with an Iskratel softswitch. It was frustrating. Everything was too complicated. But we got it working. Eventually, we even added PBX features on top.

That’s when I started getting closer to the customer layer — not directly, but through the sales team. Customers would request features, and the policy was always the same: they had to submit a full technical description. Then the request went to the CTO. Then, eventually, to me. I was the developer. But even I hated the process.

The customers weren’t doing anything wrong. They knew what they wanted — they just didn’t know how to express it in the language we forced them to use. They wanted call routing after hours, menus in multiple languages, voicemail fallback, and agent transfers. Pretty normal stuff. But the system made them feel like they had to submit RFCs just to make a phone ring.

That’s when I had my first idea about what a normal platform should look like. Something that gives people what they want by default — instead of forcing them to configure it from scratch.

Then, all of a sudden, I won the green card lottery and moved to the U.S. Everything felt different. Everyone was building something. Everyone had a side project, a tool, an app. I didn’t think too long — I started building.

I took all the pain I’d seen, all the inefficiencies I’d lived through, and started coding the thing I always wished we had. And then something strange happened: I found people here who thought the same way, but had grown up in the startup world. They gave me the clarity I was missing.

“Make it simpler.”
“Cut that. Hide that.”
“Create by default whatever can be created by default.”

That was the shift. I realized that most people don’t want freedom to customize — they want freedom from customizing. They want something that just works. Something they don’t have to explain or manage or diagram. They want to sound like a real company without needing to become a telecom engineer.

And as I built it, I did it all with open-source software. I learned a lot — fast. It was the best kind of education: high stakes, self-directed, and deeply practical. I got to connect technology directly to real human needs without a manager, a sales rep, or a product committee in the way.

And through all of it — through the long nights, the edge cases, the endless tweaking — one weird thing kept happening. Every time I checked the clock, it was :33. 1:33, 3:33, 11:33. It didn’t matter the hour. It started to feel like a little sign, a quiet affirmation that I was still on the path. Still moving. Still doing the right thing.

Most of those nights, the only other living being in the room was my dog — a small red poodle who curled up under my desk while I worked. He didn’t care about SIP or WebRTC or config files, but he stayed there through every bug, every breakthrough. I don’t think anyone else felt my programming pain quite like he did.

So now, after all of that, I want to offer something better. I want the people who used to get stuck writing tech specs for phone menus to just click a button and watch it work.

I want them to be surprised at how easy it is. I want them to feel in control without having to configure anything. I want them to say, “That’s it?” and smile.

And yes — I want to benefit from building something that actually makes someone’s day easier.

That’s how SimpleCallCenter started. And that’s still exactly what it’s about.