Tossable Digits: How The Business Got Started

I have always appreciated fancy older cars. My first car was a pale yellow 1976 Mercedes 300D Diesel. Power windows, heat and A/C, power steering. This beast of a vehicle was the bomb for the college scene, and that sweet Mercedes hood ornament meant business. Except when it was snowing…

My First Car

Several years later Annie Bananie, as she was fondly named, started to slowly die. I started looking for a new fancy used car. After several weeks of Craigslist trolling, I found it: a blue 1986 Jaguar XJ6. Priced in my budget, available now. Yes! When I called the owner told me he had bad news: he had hit a deer with the car the night before. Luckily the XJ6 is made out of solid steel and came out of the encounter with only minor body work needed and a big discount off the sale price.

My Third Car

The Blue Bullet was a great car. But after a few years, it was time for it to go. I decided to post the Jag on Craigslist, but I didn’t want to get annoying phone calls from inconsiderate buyers, or worse yet, 3rd parties or marketers, in the middle of the night or when I didn’t want the calls. I just needed an inexpensive, temporary, disposable phone number that forwarded to my mobile phone for about a month.

But when I started looking, the market simply did not exist. My local phone company was no help for anything less than $50, and most of the other “Web 2.0” phone companies in 2006 didn’t offer just a phone number for a month for less than $15, and you had to have a 2-year contract first. It was at that moment Tossable Digits was born.

Building the Business

I have built several web applications in the past but this was my first foray into telephony. I learned how to get everything set up, found a few vendors, built the website and opened the business up about 9 months after the Blue Bullet was sold. Tossable Digits has been in business ever since June 2006 — 12 years!

Today Tossable Digits enables you to take calls when you want, send and receive SMS messages without disclosing your real phone number, and block unwanted callers from reaching you. There’s even more power in there for you to use — try Tossable Digits today.