Rule one of moving something important: build the new house before you move out of the old one.
Don’t practice on the real number
Porting a phone number is a one-way door. Once my number left Google Voice, there was no clicking “undo” if the new setup couldn’t ring my phone. So the plan was to build everything on a new number first, live with it, and only move my real number once the new system had proven itself.
The night of June 27
Starting just before midnight on June 27, Leo (Claude, my main AI teammate) and I built a full business phone system from nothing:
- A carrier account at Telnyx. Telnyx sells phone numbers, calling and texting to businesses, and every piece of it has an API. A number costs about a dollar a month.
- A phone system on a rented cloud server. It runs FreePBX, a free, open-source office phone system built on Asterisk. That’s the software behind a lot of real business phone systems. It runs on a small cloud server that costs about $10 a month.
- A new business line, (719) 530-4040, wired through Telnyx into that phone system. Today an AI receptionist answers it.
By morning I had extensions, voicemail, call routing and a number that rang. It was the kind of thing a phone company used to charge a monthly fee per desk to set up.
That same night we also pulled my entire Google Voice history out with Google Takeout and turned it into a searchable archive with three copies. Whatever happened next, those ten years of texts were safe.
Making it trustworthy
A phone system that usually works is worse than none, because you stop checking. The next few sessions were all about the boring parts:
- Voicemail to email, so a message never sits unheard in a box I forgot about.
- Follow-me to my cell, with a “press 1 to accept” check. Without that, my cell’s own voicemail would grab the call and the phone system would think I’d answered.
- Telegram alerts for every missed call and new voicemail. Telegram is my pager. If it buzzes, something needs me.
- A fire drill. We called in, left messages and made sure every alert actually fired before calling it done.
First texts on my own server
On July 5, the first real milestone for texting: a text sent to the 4040 number landed on a little webhook service, which forwarded it to my Telegram and email. For the first time, a text to my business was data I had, not data Google had.
Receiving worked right away. Sending ran into a wall with a very boring name.
Meet 10DLC
In the US, if a business wants to send texts from a regular 10-digit phone number, the carriers want to know who you are first. The system is called 10DLC (10-digit long code). You register:
- A brand: your business, verified against your tax records.
- A campaign: what kind of texts you’ll send (customer care, marketing, reminders) with examples, opt-out wording, and a privacy policy on your website.
Skip it and your texts get filtered or blocked. My first try at registering the brand bounced with “Account unverified,” because the Telnyx account itself hadn’t passed an identity check yet. My account balance was sitting at $4.51 and slowly draining, and I wasn’t ready to fight that fight yet.
So I let it sit for the summer and had my AI teammates do the homework instead: what texting really costs, how 10DLC works, exactly how you get a number out of Google Voice, and what the alternatives were. Four research write-ups later, the answer was clear. The practice rig worked. The next step was the paperwork, then the real number.