Tightrope Interactive found its biggest growth channel hiding inside a fax feature

The fastest-growing part of Tightrope Interactive's business started as a checkbox. Tightrope Interactive, a California and New York product company that develops and markets consumer software at high volume, had built faxing into PDF Live, its document management, processing, and storage platform for small-business professionals and consumers. The feature ran on Telnyx from the start. Then something unexpected happened.

"Overnight, it became one of our most popular tools on the platform," said John Barrack of Tightrope Interactive. "We had a lot of clients, especially legal professionals, medical offices, real estate agents, starting to ask us for more faxing capabilities. They wanted things like dedicated phone numbers, the ability to receive faxes, real-time statuses, custom cover pages, contact lists. They were essentially power faxing users that we really didn't know we had."

A second product born from customer demand

Rather than pile professional-grade functionality into a general-purpose tool, the team spun it out. "We felt like PDF Live wasn't really the right home for that depth of functionality, and from an overall branding perspective," Barrack said. "So we eventually built our second product, which is probably our main thing that we use Telnyx for, which is Fax Live. That's a purpose-built online faxing service, and it gives us the space to offer our clients everything they were asking for without overcomplicating the PDF Live experience."

Every fax sent and received across both products, and every phone number provisioned, runs through the Telnyx Fax API and phone numbers.

The platform choice itself came from the people closest to the code. "We tasked our developers with researching a solution that would best fit our need, and they all came back and said that Telnyx was the best one," Barrack said. "The API was clean, it was very well documented, and the feature set was exactly what we were looking for in order to build and scale a successful business."

Faxing as the front door

Fax Live has reshaped how customers find the company at all. "Faxing has become the single biggest point of entry for new clients discovering our products," Barrack said. "The reason we've been able to grow that channel is because Telnyx gives us the features that we need to keep building for these customers." Area code specific number provisioning gives clients a local presence anywhere in the US. Real-time delivery status removes any doubt about whether a fax went through. International faxing opens a broader professional market.

It has also changed how the team plans. "Every time we've identified a feature that our clients need, Telnyx has had the infrastructure that has helped us support it," Barrack said. "Our product roadmap in reality exists because the Telnyx platform underneath can support what the clients want."

Reliability when a failed fax has consequences

Tightrope's customers send documents where delivery is not negotiable. "We're talking about court filing documents, medical records, real estate dealings," Barrack said. "A failed fax is not a minor inconvenience. That has professional consequences in many cases. Telnyx solves that by making reliable delivery a foundation rather than an afterthought, and that allows us to build something that performs and something we don't have to compensate for."

Serving the whole US market adds its own wrinkle, since many recipients still run legacy hardware. "Whether you're a client in a big law firm in a major city or you're a small-market medical practice, they're both sending documents that matter to the recipients," Barrack said. "Telnyx's network coverage gives us that geographical consistency."

Two reasons that compound

Barrack's recommendation rests on a pair of qualities he sees as inseparable. "The first is that the API is genuinely developer friendly. The documentation is accurate, the behavior is predictable, and when something goes wrong, our developers are always able to troubleshoot and debug it," he said. "In theory that sounds like a pretty low bar, but we have worked with a ton of different APIs, and a lot of them just fall short of hitting those basic points."

"The second piece comes down to reliability. The types of professionals that we serve can't have failed faxes. Telnyx's reliability is what allows us to confidently serve that market and put our name behind the product," he said. "When you combine those two things together, it makes it really easy to create a reliable and robust product for any consumer base that you want to serve."