Entrepreneur Believes He’s Got Your Number
James A. Novack is a Culver City entrepreneur who says his hobby is watching trends. He’s hopeful that one trend he has watched for awhile will be his fortune. “One of the things I noticed about a year ago was the increasing use of personalized or spelled telephone numbers,” he said, “and yet there wasn’t any kind of promotion of this service by the phone company.”
After vacationing at a Club Med resort, Novack learned how that company had willingly paid a premium to some perhaps foresighted soul who had preempted the telephone number 258-2633, which happens to spell CLUB MED. “That prompted more thought in this area,” he said. What, he thought, if a person could find a useful wordplay in his present phone number, which offer a total of 2,187 letter combinations? (The exception are phone numbers with 1s and 0s, which don’t designate letters.) But, “if it does spell something it’s like finding gold in your own backyard.”
The result of such thinking is LetterDial, a venture of Novack’s Panaventure Corp. (“We have various ventures,” he explained the corporate name, “and we hope they all pan out.”)
For $25, Panaventure’s LetterDial will run a customer’s business number through its proprietary software and print out a list of possibilities. The charge is $15 for private parties.
More promising prospecting occurs if a customer is willing to change phone numbers for something more meaningful. Every local phone exchange is served by a dozen or so different exchanges, he noted, and for $25 LetterDial will run a batch of five of the available prefixes, which may suggest a word or idea that can be finished off with the four remaining digits (if the combination has not already been assigned).
For Coppertone, a maker of tanning creams, Novack came up with a prefix that could spell RUB, suggesting RUB-IT-ON (782-4866) or RUB-IT-IN (782-4846). (A business that requires a Q or Z may have to be extra creative, however, since the telephone key pad or dial doesn’t have those letters.)
Local phone companies, which offer so-called vanity phone numbers, give a choice basically of the last four digits, though they also may let customers choose among local prefixes--the first three digits--available in their areas. (A personalized number with a distant prefix could run into hefty phone bills as the phone company picks up the calls across town and reroutes them along with the appropriate toll charges.) “If you can find out the spellings of the local prefixes, you can compose a seven-letter word within your area,” Novack said. “And having a number that’s easy to remember can be worth a lot of money” to a business.
Ironically, Panaventure’s number is an old-fashioned (213) 216-6800, which doesn’t spell anything. “I got my number before I came up with LetterDial,” he explained.
