Bringo (a.k.a. nophonetrees.com) is the new site in town that aims to eliminate annoying customer phone tree waits. With Bringo, say goodbye to having to wait in a customer service queue to speak to a person that can help you with your problem.

Read more about them at their blog here.

How did the Bringo idea come into fruition?

This was really a case of identifying a problem that people faced and figuring out a way of solving that problem. We had started building a telephony platform, and were brainstorming ideas on how we could make our web/telephony integration technology useful for users. Poorly-designed automated phone trees were an everyday annoyance that frustrated me personally. As we started to talk about the idea through ourselves and among friends, it was clear that there was a lot of pent-up frustration out there.

Once we went live, we got a flood of users and overwhelmingly positive feedback. We seem to have struck a nerve where technology can really help improve people’s daily lives. Our users are incredibly active and eager to share their experiences , which has really helped us evolve our service and our plans. Based on this great response from users and others in the technology world, we plan to keep expanding Bringo and nophonetrees.com to helping make life easier.

Can you please tell us a bit about the process of how Bringo generates its category and alphabetical list of companies? Are users able to make suggestions to add-on to that list or is it strictly determined by Bringo?

We take our lead completely from our users. It never fails to surprise us how passionately people feel about this issue, and how much they’re willing to contribute feedback on what works and what doesn’t. While we did the initial legwork of seeding the categories and many of the companies on the site, we’re constantly adding new vendors based on requests from users – that is the number one request we get. We take feedback after each call is made, and love it when users contact us through the site. It’s how we stay relevant and useful to the community.

Can you give us a ballpark figure of the costs involved in getting Bringo off the ground? Are there any cost-saving avenues you could recommend to our readers?

To date, we’ve funded ourselves through our own funds and a fantastic set of angel investors (see our advisory board bios). Our largest investment has been into our proprietary telephony back-end and web integration which we’ll use for nophonetrees.com and several other initiatives.

From the marketing side, we have been very disciplined about our spending using word-of-mouth marketing (especially through the blogging community) has proven very effective. Certainly, we may have grown faster had we had a million-dollar marketing budget, but our approach has been effective thus far. Also, it has allowed us to grow with our user-base, incorporating their feedback, and increasing the stability and usability of the site as word has gotten out.

Does Bringo have any intentions on creating a mobile version anytime soon, sort of like a Tellme for eliminating phone trees on the go?

Mobile is certainly in our long-range plans. We think this will be a killer application for many of the things that we enable. The TellMe model is one possibility, although we haven’t yet decided on the exact form factor this will take on.

What is your long-term vision for Bringo?

We’re in the business of taking the best of web and mobile technology and marrying it with telephone to make things easier and more efficient for users. We have several new products under development, and are in conversations with some large industry players. Particularly, we are focused in the health care space where there is so much frustration and confusion that Bringo can help address. In a few years, we hope to be leaders in using our technology to make life easier for consumers across a number of industries.

Message to leave with:

At Bringo, we’re committed to providing our users with the best way to find and connect to the right person or business. We invite your readers to visit us at nophonetrees to use the service to save time and frustration, and also provide feedback on the site. We’ve gotten a lot of momentum just from listening to our users, and solving their problems so help us make our service the best it can be.