In this vlog, founder Ryan Shank delivers PhoneWagon’s final Techstars demo day pitch at the New York Tech Meetup. He opens with an emotional reflection on graduating from Techstars, noting the camaraderie and bittersweet feeling of the program ending. Shank then shares rapid growth metrics—monthly recurring revenue rising from $2,000 to $9,000 in three months and a customer base of 112 paying users—highlighting the momentum the startup is carrying into Q4. He frames a large market opportunity, citing that 70% of local business searches happen on mobile, $25 billion is spent annually on generating phone calls (projected to double), and marketers now need call‑source tracking akin to click tracking. The core of the presentation is a live demo of PhoneWagon’s dynamic phone‑number tracking: he creates a pool of local numbers, generates a JavaScript snippet, embeds it on a mock law‑firm site, and receives a call on stage, illustrating how the system forwards calls and records them. Shank also mentions upcoming product focus areas such as messaging integration, UI refinements, and feature re‑configuration to improve deal conversion. Throughout, he encourages viewers to keep grinding, positions the audience as “pioneers” and “Wagoners,” and invites them to follow the startup’s journey.
Chapters
How's everyone doing tonight? Awesome, yeah! That was weak. Wagoners, alert! Techstars is over. It's done. Zero. Done. We're done. It's done. It's done. I don't want it to be done. That was awesome. First of all, good morning. Hope you guys are out there working hard, being pioneers, being Wagoneers. Starting off with that because I want you guys to have an amazing day. The day that you guys are about to see. So this was like the last day of Techstars. We had our demo demo day at New York Tech Meetup. There was over 400 people there. We created a custom website for the demo so there's context in it. At the end of Techstars there was like emotions and stuff because we just had this amazing program. One, you learn a lot, but also you like create a bond with all these different people who are going through the same stuff as you. So it's kind of sad that it's over. Anytime, you know, like when school's over or like summer camp's over, you're always like sad, you know, or even after like vacations are over, you're like sad because you have to like go back and stuff. So that's kind of like what it felt like. Emotionally, just because it's like we're not gonna all be together doing the same things anymore. So it was honestly such an awesome experience. Again, we grew from $2,000 in monthly recurring revenue to $9,000 in monthly recurring revenue in just 3 months. So we had a lot of growth, we learned a lot, we have 112 paying customers now. So now we're just going to continue that momentum into, you know, the end of this year— October, November, December, Q4. Without further ado, check out the vlog today, it's awesome. Probably like, uh, the demo— we actually had a really good demo, so I'm pretty pumped about that. But I'll let guys check it out. And again, hope you guys are out there working hard. Appreciate you following along. By the way, if you're new here, my name is Ryan Shank. This is our journey building Phone Wagon, taking you guys with us from the ground up. No outside funding yet. Yeah, so hope you're out there grinding, starting companies, working hard, being pioneers, being wagoners. Welcome to the vlog. Pretty much start integrations and product UI at the same time. These are all pretty key features right now. Yeah. And it honestly feels like, especially once we have messaging, it feels like these are like core features we ship. We have like, alright, now we have like features in product. And then to me it feels like, alright, now let's like reconfigure the features and like make it beautiful and actually really think through the flow of everything. 'Cause like we're losing deals pretty much for most of these features right now. Alright guys, we are going to New York Tech Meetup for Demo Day, last day of Techstars. And we are gonna go practice our demo. We're actually putting up a custom WordPress site. It's gonna be NYTM, New York Tech Meetup Lawyers.com WordPress site. We're gonna drop a thing on the site. It's gonna be super relevant to this pitch, okay? Oh, oh, Vader. Wow! Wow! Wow! Wow! So glad we missed the original elevator for this. 9th and 23rd! Now we are at the New York Tech Meetup. Getting ready, they're doing all the technical stuff right now. Then we're going to go on stage in just a little bit. We have 2 hours. [FOREIGN LANGUAGE] Contrary to what you might think, like phone calls are actually exploding. Holla, PhoneWagon, come on out. How's everyone doing tonight? Awesome. Yeah. Woo! That was weak. Alright, so my name is Ryan Shank. I'm the founder of PhoneWagon. Contrary to what you guys might think, phone calls have actually exploded in recent years. And it makes sense, right? How many of you guys out there have a smartphone? Yeah! Exactly. 70% of searches to local businesses now happen on mobile, okay? $25 billion is spent annually to generate phone calls, and that number is projected to double to $50 billion, okay? So with this amount of money being spent on phone calls, marketers need to track the source of these calls just like they can track clicks and web leads. Now more than ever. Okay, and this is exactly what PhoneWagon does. So let me show you how it works. So let's say I have a law firm and I have a company, it's called NewYorkTechMeetupLawyers.com. Okay, we're top-rated lawyers in New York City. We specialize in, you know, law, some type of law, right? Whatever lawyers specialize in. Okay, I'm going to create a pool of phone numbers right now and then it's going to generate some JavaScript that I'm gonna add to my site, okay? So I'm gonna go over to Dynamic Numbers. I'm gonna call it Site Track All Visitors. I'm gonna forward these calls. If you notice right now, the website, the number, this is literally my cell phone number, and a lot of businesses are just putting the regular phone number on their sites, okay? So I'm gonna forward this number to my cell phone, and then I'm gonna turn on call recording. Clicking Create, whoop, and I want 917 instead of 410, okay? So I'm gonna get all local New York numbers. So what it's doing now, it's grabbing all these different local numbers putting them into a pool of numbers and giving me a little snippet of code. Okay, so what I'm gonna do now is I'm just gonna go back, I'm gonna grab my code, copy it, and I'm gonna drop it into my site right here. And then instead of that 410-726 number, it's now a 917 number. So if I get a phone call— Woo! If I get a phone call right now on stage live at New York Tech Meetup— I mean, maybe I won't, but— Alright, so I'm getting a phone call right now from the site. Hello, New York Tech Meetup lawyers, this is Ryan. Uh, yeah, I need a lawyer. Need a lawyer, got you. Alright, bye. The question for PhoneWagon is— the question for PhoneWagon is— the question is how do you manage the Google index of the places with all the numbers? Yeah, so— Great, any questions for the— for ParaKey or Myelin?
