Sometimes the holidays are about more than cookies, decorations, and gift wrapping. Sometimes they’re about a little creativity, a bit of tech magic, and a whole lot of joy.
That’s exactly what happened with one of our users, Jon Phillips.
For Christmas 2025, Jon decided to do something a little different. Instead of just celebrating the holiday, he used his web skills to create a fun surprise for families online: a way for Santa Claus to call your kid’s voicemail. 🎅
What started as a creative holiday project quickly turned into a magical experience for kids across the internet.
Meet Jon Phillips
Jon Phillips is a husband and father of 4 from Clinton, Mississippi. He’s a health and wellness coach by day and a WordPress implementer the rest of the day.
He runs his one-man agency, Matchless Web, serving clients through his client acquisition systems, which leverage WordPress websites as the central hub for businesses’ marketing efforts.
The Project: “Missed Call From Santa”
For Christmas 2025, Jon decided to give kids something unforgettable: a missed call from Santa straight to their voicemail. But this wasn’t a simple website. It was a chain of magic powered by SureForms and AI.
Parents would fill out a SureForms submission with their child’s name, Christmas wishes, a little bit of fun information, and a phone number. That’s when the magic started.
SureForms sent the data natively to OttoKit, which generated a personalized Santa transcript using ChatGPT. Then ElevenLabs turned that transcript into a realistic Santa voice message. Jon could even preview the message right in SureForms before it went out.
Finally, Twilio placed a perfectly timed call that went straight to voicemail, leaving kids with a “missed call from Santa” they could play back whenever they wanted.
The reactions from parents and kids? Priceless. Soon, parents were sharing videos of their kids hearing Santa’s voice for the first time, and the excitement was just pure holiday joy.
Jon’s Own Words: The Interview
We caught up with Jon to get the story straight from the source. Here’s what he had to say.
1. What inspired you to create the “Missed Call from Santa” project?
I have to give credit where credit is due. The idea for this project came 100% as inspiration from a Facebook post that Adam Preiser made two years ago in one of the Facebook groups where he was demoing how to use SureForms and SureTriggers (now OttoKit) to demonstrate how a form submission could pass data over to a third-party service such as ChatGPT or ElevenLabs and return a response right below the form.
Adam’s demonstration used the example of taking a form submission describing a child’s Christmas wish and having a reply returned by a voice in the style of Santa Claus. I remember commenting in that thread that I thought it was a great idea and that parents or grandparents might be willing to pay for a personalized message from Santa Claus for their children or grandchildren.
I asked Adam if he had any plans on taking that idea and running with it, and he indicated that he’d love to see me pull it off if I could make it happen. So I purchased the domain in 2024, just before Christmas, with intentions of building out the project, but never got around to it in time.
But in November 2026, I remembered that I had the domain purchased and had just enough time to get the site put together in time for the Christmas season.
2. What was the most exciting moment after launching the site?
The most exciting moment after launching this site was when I first started seeing some free trial submissions coming through. It was cool to see that people were actually using it, and using it more than once.
And once some of the users that tried the free version a few times and converted into paying customers that could submit other types of messages from Santa via premium form types unlocked by their purchase, that’s when it really got exciting.
My little hobby project was all of a sudden putting a little extra Christmas spending money in my pocket. Emphasis on “a little”. In full transparency, I made just over $100 through paid purchases on the site from the date of launch, just a few days into December, until Christmas Day. So this was not a big moneymaker, but it was a fun hobby project that did bring in a little bit of revenue.
And I anticipate Christmas season 2026 being much more profitable, as I’ll have much more time to prep for a proper launch and promotion period. My wife and I welcomed our fourth child into the world just before Thanksgiving in 2025, so my ability to market the project was extremely limited.
3. What made you decide to use SureForms for the project?
I decided to use SureForms and several other Sure products for this project, primarily to see if I could handle all of the heavy lifting this project needed with the Sure product suite alone.
The site was created using OttoKit, which offers a Sureforms and OttoKit integration from the point of site creation, so it simply made sense to use Sureforms to power the form functionality on the site. And it was the tight integration between SureForms and OttoKit that made me happy to not hunt for any other form solution.
4. Were there any specific features in SureForms that helped make the form easy to build or manage?
A few specific features of SureForms made the product easy to manage. The conversational forms, for SureForms, were what I utilized to gate the premium forms to members only. The form URLs were locked down behind Sure Members, ensuring that only paying customers could access the premium forms.
And the Ottokit response message options within SureForms were fun to use because as soon as a missed call from Santa transcript was available from ChatGPT, it was able to be displayed beneath the form with no extra configuration on my part.
There may be other solutions out there that could take a response generated by a third-party platform and return it onto the web page, but SureForms and OttoKit made it so easy that I didn’t bother looking elsewhere.
And I thought it was a nice value add for the user to be able to view the transcript of the call that they were going to be receiving. So while they waited on their phone call to come in, they could preview the message on the screen.
Another aspect of Sureforms that I really appreciated with this setup was that I could send a confirmation email to the user who requested the phone call, complete with a copy of the text transcript of the call along with the MP3 file URL generated by Eleven Labs. That way, the user had a copy of the transcript and direct access to the MP3 file that was generated right inside of their inbox.
5. Was using SureForms a good choice for the project? How was the response from your users?
Using SureForms was a great choice for this project. Users reported really enjoying the experience and making some fun Christmas memories with their kids and grandkids.
Some users even sent me videos of kids reacting to the missed call from Santa voicemail being played back to them, and it was absolutely adorable. Seeing those innocent, excited reactions to Santa Claus really calling them and talking about their favorite things and Christmas wish list items specifically was priceless.
You can trust that some of those video clips will be used in my marketing material for this upcoming Christmas season. Those reactions from those kids are what the project is all about. Just bringing a little Christmas cheer and magic.
6. You used several tools together for the project. How did they work together in your setup? Was it easy to automate the workflow with SureForms?
There were a lot of moving parts in this project, but SureForms, OttoKit, SureCart, SureMembers, and the other tools made it easy to tie everything together. The trickiest part was using the Twilio integration to configure the custom API request that was required to configure the phone call going out to voicemail.
There were a few different parameters that required quite a bit of tinkering to get the timing just right. Without some safeguards in place, if a user let the message go to voicemail, sometimes the MP3 would have started playing too soon and therefore the voicemail recording effectively started too late, resulting in the message being partially cut off at the front.
But with enough trial and error, I found the settings that I needed that would have the MP3 play exactly when it needed to, resulting in a complete audio message from Santa.
7. What advice would you give to someone who wants to build creative projects like this?
My advice to anyone who wants to build a creative project like this is to ask questions in the community. I gleaned a lot of helpful tips and tricks simply from asking questions in the group. With so many different software options out there, it can be hard to decide exactly which software to choose.
Asking questions in the group and seeing what has worked well for others definitely saved me a lot of time and effort. Had I simply tried every single software with an OttoKit integration that can place phone calls, I would have spent way more hours than was necessary trying to sort that part out.
I think I went through at least three different phone call providers before finally figuring out I could use Twilio with a little bit of customization magic. So again, my advice is to ask questions in the group. I know it’s the case for me that in my excitement of figuring out my own solution, I’m happy to share with others what worked for me.
Take for SureForms Users
Jon’s project is a great reminder that forms don’t just collect information.
With the right tools and an exciting idea, it can be a starting point for something exciting by connecting with other tools. In this case, SureForms gave Jon the power to integrate with automations, membership tools, payment processing, and AI-generated content to start projects that are fun, creative, and meaningful.
A simple form submission turned into a personalized message from Santa, a generated voice recording, and a real phone call that left a surprise voicemail for a child.
That’s far beyond what most people expect you can do with just filling out a simple form.
The big takeaway is this. When you combine the right tools with a bit of creativity, a form can become the engine behind something much bigger. It can power experiences, automate workflows, and even create memorable moments for real people.
Jon’s story proves that sometimes the most fun projects start with something simple. In this case, just a form and a little holiday imagination. 🎅
