The awkward moment in a growing software company is when a new customer becomes a threat. More business should be good news. At Convoso, the original code sometimes turned it into an outage. Nima Hakimi and his brother Bobby had found people willing to pay for their product. Now they had to build a product that could keep up with the people paying for it.
For a founder, there are few more irritating ways to discover success. You have demonstrated demand. You have also demonstrated, rather publicly, the limits of what you made. The sales department can bring home a victory that the engineering department must spend the night surviving.
Hakimi’s response helps explain the business he still leads two decades after its founding. Convoso went through repeated rebuilds. Along the way, he acquired an education in hiring, partnership, patience, and the difference between getting a telephone to ring and earning a useful conversation.
The favor that acquired a payroll
The original problem belonged to a cousin with a mortgage business. Conventional call center software required an investment he could not afford. Bobby found open-source software, and the brothers used it to assemble an affordable alternative. The business began in 2006.
Then customers asked more of it. New features and higher calling volumes exposed weaknesses. Outages cost business. By the brothers’ 2019 account, the effort to replace the platform had involved three rebuilds and more than three years without growth. CTO Phi Le became an important part of the engineering effort.
“We stopped focusing on growth and started talking to our customers about their pain points,” Hakimi said.
There is a considerable management decision tucked inside that sentence. A customer’s complaint can be treated as an interruption to the plan. Hakimi describes letting those complaints change the plan. For software that other businesses depend on to do their daily work, reliability becomes part of the sale, whether anyone puts it in the brochure or not.
Two brothers, one monthly reckoning
Bobby is the older brother. Nima describes their connection as a source of trust, with all the familiar sibling dynamics still attached. Starting a company does not automatically retire the question of whether the younger brother will listen to the older one.
They bring different habits to the work. Nima describes himself as structured and thoughtful, concentrating on strategy and business operations. Bobby’s more action-oriented approach finds its outlet in products and innovation. Reviewing business performance together each month helps them stay aligned.
A division like that sounds tidy on paper. Its usefulness is in giving two different temperaments a shared object to work on. Someone must keep asking where the business is going. Someone must keep asking what the product could do. Both questions become expensive if nobody owns them.
The partnership also gives this story a less solitary cast than the usual founder portrait. Convoso’s rebuild involved engineers and colleagues, as well as the brothers whose names appear in its origin story. A CEO can commit a company to a difficult course. Other people still have to make the software work.
The Craigslist education
One of Hakimi’s more useful stories concerns an attempt to save money. Early on, Convoso advertised on Craigslist for telemarketers who could call businesses and sell its dialer. Some were able to set appointments. Selling the software itself required a different depth of knowledge.
He has described the experience as a lesson in hiring people with the right skills for the role. The assumption had been understandable: people who made calls could help sell a product for making calls. The buyer, however, needed someone capable of explaining complex technology and its place in a business.
It is an especially neat mistake for a dialer company to make. Owning a telephone has never guaranteed an interesting conversation. Being willing to use one is a beginning, with quite a lot of work still to follow.
The lesson has consequences beyond sales recruitment. A company sells an expectation about what will happen after the contract is signed. If the person selling cannot understand the customer’s operation, that expectation can begin badly. Saving on the conversation may create a more expensive problem further down the line.
The phone has a gatekeeper
Over time, the obstacles facing Convoso’s customers expanded beyond the speed of their software. A call can be placed and still fail to reach its intended recipient. Carrier blocking and spam labels sit between the sales operation and the person it hopes to contact.
In April 2024, Convoso released ClearCallerID Pro, with tools for registering numbers, monitoring flags, and removing affected numbers from campaigns. Hakimi’s stated concern was that efforts to stop unwanted calls could also catch legitimate businesses with consumer consent.
That is a difficult place to run a product. People have good reasons to distrust unexpected calls. Businesses with permission to contact them still need a way through. A useful system has to take both experiences seriously. Dialing faster does little good if the recipient has already decided that an unfamiliar number is unwelcome.
In July 2024, Hakimi’s appointment to the board of Responsible Enterprises Against Consumer Harassment, or R.E.A.C.H., was announced. The organization advocates responsible lead generation and represents direct-to-consumer marketers. His involvement puts a software operator inside an industry discussion about conduct, trust, and the conditions under which outreach can continue.
“Compliance is the moat in this business.”
Nima Hakimi, September 2026
That formulation makes responsibility a commercial concern. A platform depends on more relationships than the one with the customer paying its bill. Its calls pass through networks and arrive in other people’s lives. A decision made in a campaign dashboard can have consequences well beyond the dashboard.
A machine with a supporting role
Hakimi’s public account of AI has generally emphasized giving human agents more room to do useful work. Convoso’s conversational AI product, Voso.ai, is part of that effort. The ambition is to reduce repetitive tasks and help people spend their attention where a conversation requires it.
In a June 2024 interview, he discussed the limits of automation in nuanced sales exchanges. Qualification and routine work can be automated; rapport and complex decisions make different demands. It is a practical distinction for someone whose company makes the machinery around a sales conversation.
The product has to meet an unglamorous test. Does it help the person doing the work? An agent who spends less time on repetition may have more time for a prospect’s actual question. The value depends on what happens during that recovered time, rather than on how impressive the demonstration sounded.
By 2026, Convoso was also bringing its tools into Salesforce workflows. Predictive dialing, campaign management, and number management could sit closer to the systems customers already used. The move extends the same operating concern: make the work easier to carry out in the place where it happens.
The company reported remaining entirely self-funded while achieving roughly 40 percent compound annual revenue growth over the preceding five years. That figure describes a particular reporting period. The more revealing detail for Hakimi’s story is the combination of growth with continued responsibility for funding the business from within.
2006 - 2026 · Self-funded
Learning to make the difficult call
“Being bootstrapped is tough. You have to make more tradeoffs,” Hakimi said in April 2026. He also described himself as shy and reserved when young. Running a company required him to become a leader and make difficult decisions.
That is a useful corrective to the idea that leadership arrives fully formed. In his telling, the responsibility came with the business, and he grew into it. The company needed decisions whether or not its co-founder felt naturally inclined to occupy the room.
He continues to describe personal development as a priority. “My DNA has always been about personal development,” he said in 2025. There is a pleasing lack of finality in that ambition. After so much rebuilding, the CEO remains on the list of things that can improve.
The latest public chapter keeps that theme close to operations. Convoso announced completion of a SOC 2 Type 2 examination in August 2026. In September, Hakimi discussed voice AI, high-intent leads, and compliance on the Deserve to Win podcast. He has also publicly described refusing customers who want to call the same lead excessively.
There is a thread connecting the unreliable early software to those present-day limits. In each case, a sale creates an obligation that lasts longer than the celebration of making it. Sometimes meeting that obligation means rebuilding the product. Sometimes it means asking more of the people who use it.
A favor for a cousin has become twenty years of such decisions. Hakimi’s work now includes deciding what Convoso should enable, what it can sustain, and when another call is a call too many. For someone who began by helping a business reach people, knowing when to stop has become part of the job.