Key Takeaways
- Callnovo started with one person selling broadband plans door-to-door in Toronto winters — No funding, no office, just frozen doorsteps and rejection. The first lesson: resilience is non-negotiable.
- Early telemarketing success came from building custom tech on a shoestring budget — A Dialogic card with a VoIP gateway converted analog lines to VoIP for auto-dialing. When Canada banned telemarketing in 2007, the team pivoted to inbound within months.
- Focusing on underserved niche markets created outsized growth — By targeting Chinese-speaking communities with products like KylinTV, Callnovo became the largest reseller in North America before most competitors noticed the market existed.
- Every constraint forced a better business model — Door-to-door was too cold, so they built a call center. Outbound got banned, so they went inbound. Local labor was expensive, so they went global. Each pivot made the company stronger.
Photo by Filipe Freitas on Unsplash
This is Part 1 of a two-part conversation between Callnovo CTO Manny Xu and founder Jackie Xu, recorded in February 2026. Part 1 covers the company’s origins — from door-to-door sales to establishing global call centers.
”I Was Knocking on Doors in -20°C”
Manny Xu: Jackie, let’s go back to the very beginning. How did Callnovo actually start?
Jackie Xu: It started around 2002 in Toronto. I was selling broadband internet plans — Bell Sympatico and Rogers — door to door. That was the business. You’d walk through residential neighborhoods, knock on doors, and try to get people to switch their internet provider.
Manny: In Toronto. In winter.
Jackie: In Canadian winter, yes. Minus twenty degrees Celsius. Your hands are frozen, your face is numb, and you’re standing on someone’s doorstep trying to explain why they should switch from dial-up to broadband. Most people didn’t even want to open the door. You could knock on fifty doors and get maybe two or three conversations. Out of those, maybe one sale.
Manny: That’s a brutal conversion rate.
Jackie: It was brutal everything. The cold, the rejection, the walking. But you learn something doing door-to-door that you can’t learn anywhere else — you learn how to read people in two seconds. You learn what objection is coming before they say it. And you learn that most of the time, the reason someone says no isn’t because your product is bad. It’s because your timing is wrong or they don’t trust you yet.
You learn something doing door-to-door that you can't learn anywhere else — you learn how to read people in two seconds. You learn what objection is coming before they say it.
Jackie Xu, Founder & CEO, Callnovo
Building a Telemarketing Operation from Scratch
Manny: So how did you go from knocking on doors to having an actual office?
Jackie: After about a year of door-to-door, I realized there had to be a better way. The product was good — people wanted broadband internet. The problem was the delivery method. So I rented a small office in Toronto and started doing telemarketing to residential customers. Back then, outbound telemarketing to residential numbers was completely legal in Canada.
Manny: And that’s where I came in.
Jackie: Right. Manny set up our auto dialer system. It was based on a Dialogic card — this old, expensive piece of hardware that you’d install in a PC. It worked with a VoIP gateway that converted analog phone lines to VoIP, so we could make calls through the system at scale. It wasn’t cheap, and it wasn’t simple. But it let a small team make hundreds of calls a day instead of knocking on dozens of doors.
Manny: Those Dialogic cards were serious hardware. Industrial telephony equipment, not consumer-grade at all. We basically built a small call center from parts — the card, the gateway, the software to manage the dialer queues. There was no off-the-shelf solution we could afford, so we engineered it ourselves.
Jackie: And it worked. We went from a handful of door-to-door sales per week to closing deals by phone every day. The economics changed completely. One person on the phone could reach more people in an hour than I could reach in a full day of walking neighborhoods.
Manny: But it didn’t last forever.
Jackie: No. In 2007, Canada established the National Do Not Call List. Telemarketing to residential numbers effectively became illegal. We’d had a good run — maybe three or four years of solid outbound business — but the window closed. A lot of telemarketing operations shut down overnight.
The Pivot to Inbound
Manny: When the telemarketing regulations hit, what did you do?
Jackie: We adapted. Outbound was getting harder even before the ban — people were getting caller ID, screening calls, getting annoyed. The writing was on the wall. So we flipped the model. Instead of calling people, we’d run advertising and have people call us. We set up an inbound call center to sell the same broadband products — Bell, Rogers — but now through ads instead of cold calls.
Manny: So you went from paying agents to make calls to paying for ads that generated calls.
Jackie: Exactly. The unit economics were different, but the core skill was the same — converting a phone conversation into a sale. Our agents already knew how to sell broadband. They already knew the objection handling, the plan comparisons, the closing techniques. We just changed where the leads came from.
The transition wasn’t smooth. Advertising costs money upfront, and the return isn’t immediate. There were months where we were burning cash on ads and not closing enough to cover it. But we’d been through worse — I’d stood in minus twenty degrees knocking on doors. Running ads from a warm office felt like progress.
Finding the Niche: KylinTV and the Underserved Market
Manny: This is where things got interesting. Tell me about the niche market strategy.
Jackie: When you’re small, you can’t compete with the big players head-on. Bell and Rogers had their own massive sales operations. What we had that they didn’t was access to communities they weren’t serving well — particularly the Chinese-speaking community in North America.
We started focusing on products that served minority communities. The first big win was KylinTV.
Manny: For readers who don’t know — what was KylinTV?
Jackie: KylinTV was a Chinese-language IPTV service for the North American market. It let Chinese-speaking families watch TV channels from across East Asia in their homes in the US and Canada. It was founded by William Wang — the same William Wang who founded Vizio, the consumer electronics company.
Manny: The Vizio founder?
Jackie: Yes. William Wang founded Vizio in 2002, and KylinTV was another venture of his aimed at the Chinese diaspora market. He understood that there were millions of Chinese-speaking people in North America who wanted access to Chinese-language entertainment, and the cable companies weren’t serving them well.
[Photo placeholder: Jackie Xu with William Wang and his wife]
Manny: And you became their largest reseller.
Jackie: We became the largest KylinTV reseller in North America, and it happened fast. The reason was simple — we spoke the language. Literally. Our agents could explain the product, troubleshoot the set-top box, and handle billing questions in Mandarin and Cantonese. The Chinese-speaking customers weren’t going to call a generic English-language call center for help. They wanted someone who understood them — culturally and linguistically.
That was our first real proof of concept for what Callnovo would eventually become. We proved that if you deeply understand a niche community and you staff people who are from that community, you can dominate a market that bigger companies overlook entirely.
If you deeply understand a niche community and you staff people who are from that community, you can dominate a market that bigger companies overlook entirely.
Jackie Xu, Founder & CEO, Callnovo
Going Global: Philippines, Bolivia, and the Ecommerce Boom
Manny: When did you decide to go beyond Toronto?
Jackie: As we grew, two things became clear. First, the cost of running a call center in Toronto was high — Canadian labor, Canadian office space, Canadian everything. Second, we were getting requests from clients who needed coverage in more time zones and more languages than we could handle from one location.
So we started establishing call centers in the Philippines and Bolivia. The Philippines was the obvious choice for English-language support — the talent pool there for BPO work is world-class. Bolivia gave us access to Spanish-speaking agents at a competitive cost, with a cultural affinity for the Latin American and US Hispanic markets.
Manny: And then ecommerce exploded.
Jackie: The 2010s changed everything. Ecommerce sellers — especially cross-border sellers on Amazon, eBay, Shopify — they needed customer support but couldn’t afford to hire full-time agents. They were one-person or five-person operations selling products globally, and they needed someone to answer customer emails, handle returns, manage live chat. That was exactly what we’d built.
We went from serving telecom products to serving ecommerce sellers. The skillset transferred — sales conversations, product knowledge, customer empathy — but the market was orders of magnitude larger. Instead of selling one company’s broadband plans, we were serving hundreds of sellers, each with their own products and their own customer base.
Door-to-Door in Toronto
Selling Bell Sympatico and Rogers broadband plans door-to-door in Canadian winters. One person, no office, pure hustle.First Office & Telemarketing
Established a Toronto office. Built a custom auto dialer with Dialogic cards and VoIP gateways. Scaled from dozens of door knocks to hundreds of daily calls.Canada Bans Telemarketing
National Do Not Call List takes effect. Pivoted from outbound telemarketing to inbound call center with ad-driven leads.Niche Market Dominance
Focused on underserved minority communities. Became the largest KylinTV reseller in North America through Chinese-language support.Global Expansion & Ecommerce
Established call centers in the Philippines and Bolivia. Began serving the rapidly growing ecommerce seller market worldwide.What the Beginning Teaches You
Manny: Looking back at those first few years, what lessons stand out?
Jackie: Three things.
First, every constraint is an instruction. The cold weather pushed me off the streets and into an office. The telemarketing ban pushed us from outbound to inbound. The high cost of Canadian labor pushed us to build globally. At the time, each of these felt like a setback. Looking back, each one forced us to build a better business.
Second, start where others won’t look. We didn’t try to compete with the big call centers for Fortune 500 contracts. We found KylinTV. We found the Chinese-speaking community that nobody was serving. That niche gave us cash flow, proof of concept, and confidence. You can always expand from a niche. You can’t easily recover from trying to be everything to everyone from day one.
Third, build before you buy. We couldn’t afford a proper auto dialer system, so Manny built one from a Dialogic card and a VoIP gateway. We couldn’t afford a big marketing team, so I knocked on doors myself. Every dollar we didn’t spend on off-the-shelf solutions was a dollar we could put into surviving another month. When you’re bootstrapping, resourcefulness beats resources every time.
Every constraint is an instruction. The cold weather pushed me off the streets and into an office. The telemarketing ban pushed us from outbound to inbound. The high cost of Canadian labor pushed us to build globally. Each setback forced us to build a better business.
Jackie Xu, Founder & CEO, Callnovo
This is Part 1 of the Callnovo origin story. In Part 2, Jackie shares how the company navigated rapid global expansion, built its technology platform, and evolved into the AI-powered multilingual BPO it is today.
About Callnovo
Founded around 2002 in Toronto, Canada, Callnovo has grown from a one-person door-to-door sales operation into a global multilingual BPO with delivery centers across the Philippines, Bolivia, and other locations worldwide. Today, the company serves ecommerce sellers and businesses with 65+ language capabilities, AI-powered tools including HeroDash, HeroChat, and HeroVoice, and a team of 2,500+ customer service professionals. Learn more at callnovo.com.
