Speek is a startup that allows conference calls over a web link instead of a phone number. It has grown rapidly in the past year, now with 11 employees, $1.5 million in funding, and 100% monthly growth. The founder describes Speek's journey from initial idea to growth, including failures with early voice technology, validating their solution, and using customer surveys and analytics to fuel growth without large marketing spends. Key lessons included the importance of product quality, validating assumptions through experiments, and tracking one core metric like weekly growth rate.
5. February 2012
Place: NYC
Problem: Conference
calls suck and people hate
them
Solution: Use a link
instead of a phone
number and PIN
YOLO
Funding: $0
Users: 0
People: 2
Assumption:
People will use a link for
conference calls
Experiment: Lots of
customer interviews &
some AdWord buys
6. March 2012
Place: SXSW
Problem: We need an
app for more experiments
Solution: Drink lots of
beer (and bourbon) in our
AIRBNB house and hack
a butt ugly MVP together YOLO
Funding: $0
Users: 0
People: 2 + offshore dev
Assumption:
We can overcome voice
technology hurdles
Experiment: Get our
friends and family to start
doing calls
Result: FAIL - tech
glitches (Voice related)
7. June 2012
Place: Arlington, VA
Problem: Voice quality
sucks
Solution: Host conference
calls on hardware rather
than AWS
Funding: $50,000
YOLO
Users: 50
People: 3 + offshore dev
Assumption:
We can overcome voice
technology hurdles
Experiment: Upgrade our
technology and keep getting
people to do calls.
Result: Validated
** This is when we finally
formed Speek, Inc **
8. September 2012
Place: AOL Fishbowl Labs (our
new and current home)
Problem: Not growing
organically
Solution: Start giving survey.io
survey to all active users
Funding: $150,000 YOLO
Users: 1,000
People: 3 + offshore dev
Assumption:
We can grow without huge user
acquisition costs
Experiment: Customer
Interviews & Survey.io survey
and see if we can get to 40%
“very disappointed if Speek
didn’t exist” for a given cohort.
Result: 3+ months of iteration
9. December 2012
Place: Fishbowl Labs
Problem: Cheap user
acquisition / feed the viral
funnel
Solution: Try a bunch of
different growth tactics -
ITERATE YOLO
Funding: $500,000
Users: 20,000
People: 6
Assumption:
We can grow our user
base without huge
marketing spend
Experiment: Customer
development + analytics
Result: 3+ months of
iteration
10. Today
Place: Fishbowl Labs
Problem: Scale growth,
become ubiquitous
Solution: Keep iterating
and get out early on new
platforms and devices
Funding: $1,500,000
Monthly Growth: 100%
People: 11
Launching out of beta
and charging $$
20. Thank You!
Be Sure To Check Out Speek.com
@DannyBoice | @SpeekApp
#YOLO #EE2013
Notas del editor
Hello. I’m Danny Boice the co-founder and CTO of Speek and this is Drake. He’s the rapper who coined the acronym YOLO.Who’s familiar: Who here is familiar w/ “YOLO”? What is YOLO:If you’re not already aware YOLO is this cultural phenomena where people are doing crazy shit and just shrugging it off like “You Only Live Once”. There are a series of memes that have cropped up so you know it’s legit.Connection to my talk: My team dared me to try and work YOLO into one of my talks – so here it goes. Be sure to tweet at SpeekApp with these hashtags so my team knows I actually did thisMy startup Speek is launching out of beta this month so I just had to make my own YOLO talk but instead of “You only live once” I had to make it nerdy and call it “You Only Launch Once”Here it goes
Speek is a new way of doing conference calls that doesn’t suck. You don’t need annoying dial-ins. Instead you get a simple link like speek.com/danny that you can share with anyone you want to do a conference call with. Once on you can see who’s on the call and when they talk, add / remove callers, share files, take notes. Speek was founded in June 2012 by myself and John Bracken who previously founded E-vite and did biz dev for AOL Instant Messenger and some other big communication products.Be sure to go register your free speek link now before someone else gets your name
We’ve had a little bit of success so far but still have a ton of work to do:Raised a lot of cash early on good terms from good VC’sAmazing teamDecent pressI thought it may help to share what we did month by month to get here
So we’ve navigated the infamous trough of sorrows. We just hit a good growth trajectory. Sounds cool but it started off in a very modest fashion.Back around February of last year John and I were in NYC and went out for beers after work. We were both serial entrepreneurs and in between startups at the time and did what any founder would do – we started brainstorming on startups to found together and drawing them out on cocktail napkins.The one we felt best about was this “bit.ly for conference calling” concept that John came up with.We were both big into Lean Startup so we immediately went about validating our riskiest assumption – that people would do something other than a phone number and PIN for audio conference calls
Theme: product concept validation before we waste time and money even forming a company
Theme: Even more product concept validation before we waste time and money even starting a company
Theme: We validated our product concept. Now we had to make it not suck so much.Voice quality was core. One bad experience churned a user. We had to get this right. It took us several months to do that.We never stopped organically growing along the way though (no paid advertising)
Theme: Our product doesn’t suck now but if we can’t scale it in a cost effective manner we’re fucked. Can we scale viral growth?Get out there and distribute, distribute, distribute
Theme: We can generate new users out of active users so now we need to feed the funnel with new users that will active and not churn
We’ve had a little bit of success so far but still have a ton of work to do:Growing exponentiallyRaised a lot of cash early on good terms from good VC’sAmazing teamDecent press
Don’t spend money on marketing until your basic product works enough to retain users at a baseline levelOrganic growth is fine and a great sign if you can achieve it
MVP = minimum viable product if you’re not aware.We literally sliced black and white balsamiq wireframes as our first UI in production. It got us a few hundred users which allowed to raise money on a note with a fairly high cap.
Once you’re basic product is retaining users at even the most basic level go full steam with distribution and growth
One way of understanding whether you are ready to grow or not is to use the survey.io survey to identify whether you have achieved product / market fit or not. 40% of a 30 user cohort must answer “very dissapointed” to the question about how they would feel if your product didn’t exist.
Virginia Lee from my product team literally stalked our early users on facebook and linkedin to get their feedback. This must be done.
Ours was active users. “active” means they did a conference call that was longer than 5 minutes with more than 2 people on it within the last 30 days. We tracked our % of growth on a weekly and monthly basis.
I think we would have saved ourselves a few months if we had gone to one of these at the very beginning.It not only gets your product out there faster, connects you with really smart mentors but it will also jump start fundraising
It will take you twice as long to raise half as much. We had me (previous exit, published, harvard, decade+ of tech) and my co-founder (e-vite founder w/ exit, berkleymba, several years of biz dev for AOL instant messenger) and it took us about 6 months to raise our seed round. Granted we did a convertible note with a high cap and only took money from pro’s.
Thank you for having meNow please go put a dent in the damn universe by founding startups!