The Beginning of Anthony Karibian’s Career
Anthony Karibian, founder of bOnline, has always had entrepreneurial ventures throughout his career. He has always noticed gaps within the underserved SME space and is driven enough to begin a new company for each. His story begins in the late ’90s starting up Europe’s leading office-supplies e-commerce business to win a number of ‘best VoIP provider’ awards in 2024 with bOnline. Below we outline Anthony Karibian’s career and how it all began:
First Business Ventures
From Euroffice in the late 90s to today’s bOnline, Karibian’s ventures have all had a common thread – focusing on being the leading provider of a critical service for small business owners across the UK. Here are Karibian’s business ventures:
Founding Euroffice
Anthony Karibian’s entrepreneurial career started with the founding of Euroffice, a pure-play office supplies e-commerce business which he started during the peak of the dot-com boom. Karibian and his co-founders focused on building a business prior to raising funds, unlike most dot-com businesses that had raised £5-25 million pre-revenue. Euroffice survived the ensuing dotcom bust with 5k+ customers and growing revenues while most dotcoms shut down. This venture was instrumental in growing Anthony’s entrepreneurial mindset to focus on your customers while building a lean business model with an eye on cash.
Exiting Euroffice
Euroffice survived and even secured venture funding to keep growing the business. But it was a random phone call from a Telecoms sales person that led Anthony and his business partner Christian to take another chance, an opportunity arising from Ofcom’s deregulation of ‘fixed line rental’, and so they both left Euroffice to start XLN Telecom to challenge BT’s monopoly.
Beginning of XLN Telecom
After Euroffice, Anthony established XLN Telecom riding on the UK telecom deregulation to provide low-cost telephone services to small businesses. It was at XLN that Anthony learned on the fly to build an efficient business at scale by automating most of the operations while most rivals were running operations manually.
By integrating technologies from the provision of Openreach services to providing customer support and managing credit control, XLN managed to provide a great service at the lowest prices while still generating healthy margins. This led to XLN’s rapid growth, with 130,000 subscribers in just five years, only second to BT’s dominance in the UK.
In the end, Anthony sold XLN to the private equity firm ECI in 2010 and the company has since changed hands several times with customer numbers dropping to under 100,000 until sold to Daisy in 2022. XLN is among a handful of Telecoms resellers that Anthony considers as “yesterday’s challengers”, now being disrupted by innovating software companies like bOnline.
When bOnline Was Founded
Anthony Karibian initially founded bOnline as a DIY website provider for small businesses. However, this market was over-saturated and Anthony soon decided to pivot the business into a modern Telecoms company that would leverage the same DIY software skills of the team to deliver the industry’s first “zero-touch” digital telephony service for small businesses.
What is bOnline?
bOnline is the UK’s leading VoIP provider to micro and small businesses today challenging BT’s dominance once again at a time when the industry is going through another seismic change with BT’s PSTN Switch-off by 2027. There are over 5 million PSTN copper lines still in operation and most are micro and small businesses using such legacy products. They will have no choice but to move to VoIP digital lines or lose their phone numbers which are a lifeline to a small business.
Beginning of bOnline
bOnline’s success comes from its ability to innovate like a software company and focus only on small business needs without diluting its proposition. Most of its competitors are legacy Telecoms providers reselling enterprise VoIP software such as Cisco Webex, but it lacks automation and ease of use making it very challenging and costly to serve the small business market.
What Makes bOnline a Success Story
bOnline built a VoIP platform from the ground up with 100% “zero-touch’ automation, fast and easy set up within minutes and easy to manage for business owners (not IT gurus). bOnline’s platform is built on AWS and Google Cloud to provide maximum reliability and scalability. The platform was built on APIs to provide the flexibility to add useful features like CRM integration, AI Call recording and sentiment analysis and so much more. These advanced tools give small businesses the kind of technology that’s usually only available to larger companies with an expensive IT department.
bOnline’s VoIP digital phone systems have become the natural replacement for BT’s legacy products such as ISDN and outdated PSTN copper phone lines. Not only is the HD call quality far superior, but the lines are more reliable and cost less than half BT’s prices. bOnline’s platform experienced less than 2 minutes downtime in all of 2024 which is far better than any other provider in the UK. In the small business market, this is a critical requirement where a business phone line is a business owner’s lifeline. bOnline’s nailed it.
What Does bOnline Look Like in 2024
Their hard work has been recognised with awards like the 2024 Comms Council Award for Best VoIP Provider for the fourth year in a row and Finalists in 6 other major awards proving they’re one of the best. They’re just getting started with a fantastic new VoIP platform to innovate and build some amazing new features to help small businesses run more efficiency. With Anthony Karibian’s leadership, bOnline shows how listening to customers and using smart technology can help small businesses grow and succeed.
Advice From Anthony Karibian
When asked what his advice would be to his younger self, the answer was simple yet effective ˝Life is short, don’t be afraid to make bold decisions.˝ Two years ago, bOnline decided to build it’s own VoIP platform from ground up instead of continuing to resell market leading Broadsoft and Enreach VoIP phones and that decision has been transformative to bOnline’s business and success in 2024.
