Newark-based Phone.com understands the mission of every small business owner — providing the premium-level service and presentation a customer will expect from a big enterprise while keeping internal costs to a level that fits a small company.
The first step may be your first interaction with a customer: the initial phone call.
Phone.com offers quick and easy ways to set up service that let even a one-person operation sound and function like an established company — while putting systems in place to ensure the number stays with the company even when personnel changes while it scales.
Founder and CEO Ari Rabban spells it out. He knows how to grow a small business — he’s been growing Phone.com for more than two decades.
Here’s why Rabban says a dedicated business number matters, and how easy it’s gotten to set one up:
- You keep the number: “If you have a sales person and they leave you, then you own the number — they don’t take it,” Rabban said. Customers who’ve built a reputation around that number stay reachable no matter who’s answering it.
- Setup takes minutes: There’s no sales call. Businesses can route a number through a traditional desk IP phone, a mobile app that adds a second line to a personal smartphone, or an eSIM card that gives an unlocked phone a second number entirely.
- It doesn’t rely on Wi-Fi: Unlike app-based callers such as WhatsApp or FaceTime, the eSIM option runs on a real cellular connection, avoiding the dropped-call quality issues that come with an internet-dependent line.
- You can (cheaply) add a receptionist: An AI receptionist, priced around $20 a month, can route calls, take appointments and sync with calendar software. A human receptionist option runs about $100 a month for businesses that want a live voice.
Rabban founded Phone.com in 2006 with Michael Mann. The company grew into a cloud communications provider built specifically for small businesses — deliberately avoiding the large-enterprise market. The company was acquired by California-based Ooma in late 2025 for $23.2 million, but Rabban and his full team stayed on to keep running the business under its own name.
“It was a nice transition,” Rabban said of the Ooma deal. “They obviously want us to keep running the business. They actually like our New Jersey ties — you don’t have something like what we’ve been doing, you know, with a company like that.”
The vast majority of Phone.com’s customers are businesses with fewer than 10 employees — entrepreneurs, tradespeople and small offices who typically show up looking for a basic business phone number and end up discovering a fuller suite of tools. The City of Newark is a customer as well, though Rabban said that relationship came to Phone.com rather than the other way around; the company doesn’t chase large institutional accounts.
For a small business with five employees on a shared company number, Rabban estimated total monthly cost at under $100.
Rabban said the company sells almost entirely through digital channels
“We sell mostly e-commerce,” he said. “It’s a lot of ads and SEO, and the fact that the domain is catchy. It’s easy to tell somebody: Next week you’ll remember Phone.com.”
He said the category itself remains under-recognized, despite the demand.
“Despite the fact that we’ve been doing this for a while, the knowledge of it is still not out there,” he said.
Rabban argued that no major, publicly traded company dominates the small-business phone space the way the country’s mobile carriers or cable providers do — pointing to Zoom as the closest thing to a household name in adjacent territory, and only because of its pandemic-driven rise in video conferencing.
Rabban said the business continues to grow steadily, if not explosively.
“It’s not a viral consumer app,” he said. “But it’s growing. It’s inexpensive, it’s quality, and there are no issues about whether it works.”
