Omer (00:11.840)
Welcome to another episode of the SaaS Podcast.
I'm your host Omer Khan and this is the show where I interview proven founders and industry experts who share their stories, strategies and insights to help you build, launch and grow your SaaS business.
Today's interview is with David Cicarelli.
David is the co founder and CEO of Voices.com, an online marketplace that connects business people with professional voiceover talent.
The company was founded in 2005 and its customers range from small businesses to Fortune 500s including NBC, Comcast and Cisco.
David bootstrapped the company and grew it from nothing into a multi million dollar business.
David, welcome to the show.
Guest (00:56.890)
Omer, thanks for the invitation to be on the podcast today.
Really excited to tell the story and hopefully share some words of advice that might be helpful to others that are either just starting a company or as you mentioned, looking at scaling it up.
Omer (01:10.010)
Awesome.
Now I gave the audience a brief overview of your product and business, but tell us a little bit more about yourself personally.
Who is David when he's not working?
Guest (01:20.010)
Sure.
Well, I'm married to my beautiful wife Stephanie, who happens to also be the co founder of Voices.
So we really have an interesting dynamic where we literally eat, breathe, sleep and dream about this business all the time.
And when we're not using the kitchen table to double as a boardroom table, really we spend all of our time with our kids.
So we have four kids, a boy and three girls and there are 11 all the way down to three, so it's a pretty active household.
Omer (01:51.050)
How long have you guys been married?
Guest (01:53.130)
We are just on 12 years and we met each other very briefly, hit it off right away and got married within a year and we've been happy ever since.
Omer (02:07.610)
So 12 years married, probably 10 years working together as co founders.
That's a pretty solid marriage.
Guest (02:14.490)
Well, we don't know anything else.
Sometimes people ask us, oh, have you ever thought about doing another company?
And we found if it was about Voices or really just anything in life, that if we're both not in it together wholeheartedly, it can't be like then it just whatever the concept is, event idea, it just doesn't seem to work out.
And so we've learned that we absolutely need to be both engaged and buy into whatever pursuit that we're following.
And that was kind of a lesson for us on, on more of a personal basis, but it ties directly into the company as well.
Omer (02:54.450)
Now we like to kick things off with a success quote to better understand what drives and motivates our guests.
What is One of your favorite quotes?
Guest (03:05.090)
Well, I think one that comes to mind, I mean, there's a lot to choose from.
Certainly one that comes to mind is actually a biblical proverb, goes along the lines of trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding.
Meaning you're not going to know everything yourself, but if you can acknowledge him in all your ways, then he'll make your path straight.
Meaning that you know, recognize that you know God is out there, that he loves us and he will provide a path forward.
And so that I find that very inspiring and motivational that we're not in this alone and that if we continue to forge ahead, that path tends to straighten out ahead of us.
Omer (03:54.370)
Great.
Now let's start by giving our listeners a better understanding of voices.com can you talk a little bit about who your target customers are and what are the top pain points that you're trying to solve for them?
Guest (04:08.930)
Sure.
So you know, because Voices is a, what's called a two sided marketplace or an online marketplace, we actually have two distinct groups of customers.
On one hand, you have the voice talent who might have a background in theater or acting or broadcast, and they're looking for a new way to monetize a skill set that they have by providing their voice and lending it to companies that need their script read.
And so the voice talents are home studio based professionals that are looking to acquire freelance voiceover work.
The other end of the spectrum would be those clients.
Typically they're creative producers, video producers, marketing executives and so forth that have a project that involves maybe a video or some kind of audio multimedia component where they need a script read.
I mean, if you've ever heard those text to speech where you kind of just put in the text and it kind of, you know, spits out the Siri like you know, voiceover.
There's certain applications where that may be fine, but when you're a brand trying to, you know, educate, inform or entertain your audience, they don't want to hear in a computerized auto generated voice.
They want a human speaking to their audience and somebody that actually has some skill, acting skill, often to be able to bring that brand message to life.
So those video or creative producers would be really the target market for us and we help them get their voiceovers done for whatever kind of project it is imaginable.
Omer (05:54.020)
What were you doing before you launched voices.com?
Guest (05:58.750)
well, it's really all I've ever known, to be honest with you.
I went through school to engineering school, learned how to become an audio engineer, you know, the guy that sits in the recording booth and works those big mixing consoles.
Our school actually the lecture theater looked like the bridge of the Starship Enterprise.
It was like amazing the amount of equipment that was in there.
And you learned how to operate all of it.
And so when I graduated from school, I actually opened up a small recording studio in our hometown.
And it was about maybe a year later, I got my name in the newspaper on my birthday of all days.
And it was like a full page write up, big photo and so forth.
And what I didn't realize though, is that Stephanie, my wife, now that I had not yet met at the time, she was a classically trained singer.
She would sing at weddings and funerals and special events.
And her mom actually cut out this newspaper article and suggested that she get a demo CD done again.
We're going back, as you said, 12 years, get a demo CD done so she could market her singing business.
And so Stephanie came in chaperoned by her mom and we hit it off.
But it was because that same newspaper article that there were other small businesses in town that wanted a voiceover.
They wanted a female voice.
And so I gave Stephanie a call and we did a few of those voiceovers ourselves and put up a really primitive website that I'm pretty sure we just went to the local library and completely self taught, you know, took out.
It was like web design or web Design for Dummies.
We did it all in like Dreamweaver, you know, one of the earliest versions, just drag and drop and built the first version of the website and then next like to promote our own business.
And that's when other freelancers, I guess you could call them independent talent, would contact us saying, hey, if you need somebody who speaks French or Spanish, or you need somebody who does character voices, can I be on your website?
And so naturally we said yes.
And that was really the beginning of it all.
We transitioned from kind of doing the production ourselves into running this platform, this marketplace that connects these two different customer groups together.
Omer (08:30.440)
So initially you were advertising as a business to provide sort of an end to end service where people would come into your recording studio.
Guest (08:40.539)
Yes.
Omer (08:41.819)
And then you sort of, as this thing sort of grew, you transitioned it into more of a marketplace.
Guest (08:47.179)
Right.
It's probably the same realization that a lot of the listeners have on the call today on the podcast, which is that, you know, if you're in a services business, your time is, you know, the amount of revenue is basically in direct correlation to the amount of hours that there are in a day.
And so to generate more revenue for your company, you either have to, you know, have more consultants or more service providers in house or figure out how to productize what you're doing.
And it was in effect that same logic was looking at this going, I'm billing out the recording studio I think at 30 or if not $50 an hour, but there's only so many hours in the day.
So there was a cap as to what we could produce.
So it was a number of ideas that all started gelling together and ultimately figuring out, okay, how do we create a product?
And it actually became initially a subscription based product for the voice talent where they subscribed to the service to get access to these various job opportunities.
Omer (09:57.230)
How are people finding your website when you initially launched?
Guest (10:01.950)
Well, we initially launched very early in the Google AdWords days when you could buy traffic for as little as 5 and 10 cents to get a click.
So we spent basically as much money as we possibly could to acquire the traffic.
And even back in the day as now, Google is just such a powerhouse and it makes a lot of sense why.
But we created content articles.
How to.
We had the first blog in our industry.
Stephanie, she had written a blog for over a year with no comments, no sharing, nobody mentioning anything because blogs were new and people didn't really, it wasn't a forum, it was somebody putting something out there on the web.
But she blogged for a year without any feedback whatsoever from the readers.
And so we created.
There was just a treasure trove of articles.
But we've been always, I guess, focused on the content side of it in order to tell not only our story, but to use, to basically educate rather than selling directly and, and leveraging Google to be able to do that.
Google has the input from everyone has.
What do we ultimately type into Google?
It's a question, it's a problem that we have.
And we're looking for Google to give us the magic answer.
Maybe it's on the first page of Google, but they've got the answer somewhere.
And so in order to feed that machine, you need to create content and publish it on your site in order to be there when somebody's typing in that's looking for an answer to their problem.
So content I think has been the key of it in terms of the organic side of Google and then obviously spending as much as we possibly could on the paid side with the earliest days at Google Adwords.
Omer (12:07.300)
Okay, so you launched this basic website, but by the way, when you initially got the website up and running, Were you already thinking of this?
I guess.
At what point did the idea of what we know of as voices.com today, when did that sort of really hit you that, okay, we're going to build an online marketplace?
Was that, you know, the day you launched the website?
Was it a year down the road?
When did that happen?
Guest (12:42.340)
Well, the very, very first version of the website was, you know, as we mentioned, just promoting this small little studio I had.
And we, you know, we, Stephanie and I were, you know, married, had our first little one on the way.
And we're thinking, look, we can't.
I can't keep running this studio
Omer (13:06.100)
and
Guest (13:06.980)
still have, you know, a baby crying in the background as an example.
We just had enough foresight to realize that wouldn't be a good fit to have a garage band playing kind of 24 7.
And so I ended up starting to sell some of the recording equipment.
And the best place to do that at the time was ebay.
And that's where I started to really dive deep into, you know, the concept of a marketplace.
Except, you know, obviously ebay being a marketplace for physical goods.
You know, I started to think, well, couldn't, you know, what marketplaces are out there for services?
And specifically one that had this kind of unique workflow.
So the very first version of, you know, what's now voices.com was, you know, as I said, we literally hand coded it.
There was no database.
It was all static HTML pages that we would literally pull down from the server, edit on our local machine, and then drop them back on the server and make updates to people's profiles.
And when a job posting came in by email, We would edit the.
Create a page basically and send that out.
So I think it was, you know, it was around the time where realized, okay, look, well, we're not going to be in this recording studio business.
How do we still transfer all of these skills that we have and our passion for the space really into an online business?
And it was.
I'm not sure if there was necessarily like the, you know, I talk about there being kind of the aha moments, I guess.
I think it was when we realized there was.
We were, you know, this first version of the site that we had, we probably had a dozen, maybe two dozen people that we were promoting on there.
And we realized, well, rather than just listing them on our site completely free, well, what if we could charge them a subscription fee?
I think it was $49 for the year and help them get work.
So, in fact, becoming their online marketing service, if you.
Well, and Promoting the talent and then building the marketplace was kind of fell out of that because we realized, well, we got to be doing something better than just creating a profile for people.
We need to be getting them actual job opportunities.
Omer (15:37.070)
So.
I see, so you were charging the voiceover talent a subscription fee.
I missed that part.
Guest (15:42.110)
Exactly.
Omer (15:42.830)
And then.
So when you actually found them some work, were you taking a cut of whatever they made as well?
Guest (15:50.840)
Well, that didn't come until many years later.
In the US there's a television show called Shark Tank.
In Canada, it's called Dragon's Den.
And I had the opportunity to audition to be on camera for the pilot season of Dragon's Den, which is basically like a pitch reality TV show for entrepreneurs.
And I got invited to go to Toronto.
I gave the pitch of a lifetime.
And at the end of it, they said, oh, if it was a marketplace for psychics, of all things.
I think he was just being ridiculous to me, to be honest with you, then we'd be all over it.
But voiceovers, we don't know if there's a real business there.
So they all ended up passing.
But the reason I tell the story is because they said, well, look, you're charging the voice talent a subscription.
That's great.
And it's kind of a nice.
It's a nice base, sets a barrier to entry that you're getting semi pros and professionals on your platform.
But it's the clients, the ad agencies, marketing executives, the Fortune 500s that have all the money and that are actually getting the most benefit from the service.
Because you're saving them from going into a recording studio, booking casting directors and audio engineers and so forth.
You're saving them all the money, so you should be charging them something.
And so that came out of being.
Going through this Dragon's Den experience was the idea of, well, we really need to create a payment platform.
That's the only way to solve this is that when the client or buyer finds somebody that they want to work with, they can actually enter their credit card details through the website.
And then we hold the funds in a neutral bank account, which is known as an escrow account, until the work is done.
And then only once the work is done that we disperse the funds to the voice talent for completing that project.
And there's a 10% transaction fee in there for us.
So that came probably four years after we started.
It was realizing that, you know, that we're delivering tremendous value to those clients and that there needs to be a fee in order for them to continue to Use the service.
Omer (18:15.490)
Yeah.
I think there's a really interesting lesson in that, that, you know, even in these sort of moments of failure, I guess, when you had expected to go on and sort of be able to get onto a TV show like Dragon's Dental.
Yeah, even.
Even from that, there was this one moment of insight that really helped you to make an important pivot in your business.
And I think, you know, people listening now may say, you know, duh, of course that's the way you should run a marketplace.
But, you know, that's because there are so many different types of marketplaces around today.
I think 12 years ago it was a very different situation, or 10 years ago it was a very different situation.
Right?
I mean.
Guest (18:56.290)
Oh, absolutely.
And there wasn't, you know, there wasn't a lot of precedent to follow.
The best case I could look at were big job websites.
And speaking of failures, the biggest job websites charge the businesses a per job posting fee.
And we tried that.
But the fact is the voice talent are subscribing to the service with the expectation that they're going to be given all these job opportunities.
We don't promise.
And any marketplace shouldn't promise guaranteed work, but they should promise guaranteed opportunity, which is, yep, we're going to send you these opportunities and it's up to you to decide if you're a good fit for it and reply.
And so this idea that we were charging, you know, initially these clients and actually everyone, it wasn't like, you know, select clients.
We're charging all the clients.
I think it was $20 for a job posting.
We went from in.
In those days, I think we had 20 a day that we were getting free.
And as soon as we switched to a paid only, we went down to five the next day and then it was like three and then two and then we're getting one every other day.
And we're like, wow, we totally just killed off this business.
And all the voice talents who were subscribing were going, hey, where are these 20 job postings that we were expecting?
We're paying you this money to get us these opportunities.
And so we quickly reverse course and made it free for the job posting, but only once you actually find somebody that you want to work with, then that's when the transaction fee comes into place.
Omer (20:44.580)
Got it.
So it sounds like you were using AdWords as the primary way to market the business.
And then the content that Stephanie was creating probably sounds like it doesn't have much of a payoff in the short term, but probably over the Longer term, it started to help you with SEO and generating more organic traffic.
Guest (21:09.440)
Yeah, exactly.
And it's, that's again another one of those debates where everyone wants everything to happen right now and why, you know, especially if you're just starting up.
And that's where advertising can kind of expedite the process.
But if you really want to be successful over the long run, then you need a solid foundation on the content side.
Omer (21:33.870)
I'm curious, if you were starting over today, would you still be looking at AdWords as a marketing channel for building your business or would you be looking at something, something new that the way that maybe AdWords was new 10 years ago?
Guest (22:00.970)
Well, if it were me, I would likely still use AdWords because it still continues to perform well for us.
I think it depends on the market of, you know, what problem is this solving, this software product solving.
And in that case there might be a different venue, a different place there you want to advertise or promote.
An example would be maybe there's a software company that's built an amazing app for the Salesforce App Exchange.
Right.
It's an extension to the Salesforce platform.
They have this app Exchange which are basically third party developers that provide additional functionality for people who've already invested in Salesforce and those are again often software as a service based companies.
So the best place that you can be is on the app Exchange you, because that's where people go to find, to buy add ons for Salesforce.
Maybe you want to advertise there.
You certainly want to build and maintain a great profile.
So I think it depends on where, what market that you're ultimately serving.
But if it were me, we tend to try everything out at least in the same thing with social media.
And I know it's a really big broad category, but we tend to run experiments and pilot campaigns in small order just to see if we can get a lower cost per acquisition.
And if it's lower, then great, we're gonna reinvest in that.
If it's not as good or disastrous after spending a couple hundred dollars or five hundred or maybe even one thousand dollars, which in the grand scheme of things is pretty small, it's better to find that out with an intensive test and do it early on then kind of dabbling in it.
$30 here, $20 there, I'd rather know once and for all.
Omer (24:16.110)
Yeah, let's talk about, I guess, excuse me, a test that you did in the early days, which turned out to be a pretty expensive lesson and mistake for you guys.
Guest (24:30.470)
Well, there's One of the, one of the, you know, I can look back and call it the most.
I can look back and call it the most hilarious test now.
But when we.
Again, going back to the earliest days of Stephanie and I being, you know, a two person company, we were looking for some type of working capital from a local bank.
And we obtained a loan for $30,000 and we figured, well, you know, we're using this to scale up the company.
Like, let's go big here, let's try to develop a campaign.
You know, we're in London, Ontario, which is about, you know, between Toronto and Detroit.
So not necessarily a big geographic market.
But we knew that all of our customers were in, you know, New York, you know, on Madison Avenue and LA in Hollywood.
So how do we reach out to them?
And so we met with a local direct marketing company and they proposed that we send them.
The way to break through is to, you know, if they're not finding you online, well, why don't we try to get their attention another way, which was to send these jumbo sized postcards in the mail and not send them, you know, one, but send them every two weeks for a total of six weeks.
So they would be getting three postcards from us.
So it'd be enough to, you know, really kind of catch their attention.
They designed the campaign.
We had an ipod giveaway and we launched it.
And I'm just expecting the phone to be ringing off the hook and jobs to start rolling in through this website and at the end of it, because when they put in the promo code to enter to win this ipod, I figured I had the tracking system to find out how many people replied the first couple days.
Nobody replying, nobody replying.
And even all the way to the end, we had two people out of 15,000 people that actually replied and put in a promo code.
Our cost per acquisition cost per lead was $15,000 a lead, which is just so staggering.
And I just remember just the.
I don't know if it was the regrets or just such a terrible feeling that we've wasted all of this money to basically get two names.
Omer (27:02.410)
Did either of those two people convert into a customer?
Guest (27:05.130)
No, neither of them did.
But one of them did win the ipod because we had bought it already and we just felt morally obligated to give it away.
So I remember sitting with Stephanie and like literally writing their name on a piece of paper and like putting it into a baseball cap and just drawing it out and we're like, okay, I guess this guy's the winner.
Let's give him a call.
But, you know, it's easy to look back and laugh at these stories.
But there is, I think, a couple key lessons that we can all take away from this.
The first one is, the first lesson is that you really can't ask your customers, or in this case your prospects to change channels midstream.
Meaning if you're trying to target your customer online to ultimately have a conversion online, then spend your money online.
That's, you know, and if you, if it's all about the App Store and getting downloads of your app, well, then advertise in a way that is going to encourage that kind of behavior.
What we were doing and where we went wrong is that we were sending out postcards that were ending up in the mailbox.
And then, you know, best case scenario, the prospect takes that postcard, walks over to their desk, it sits on their desk.
And we were asking them to go from like physical paper based experience to oh, sure, yeah, I've got all kinds of time.
I'm going to boot up my web browser and, and type in this URL and enter this promo code.
The hurdle was just way too huge, which is why I think it could be a compelling offer.
But I think the hurdle was too huge to get somebody to transition from paper based experience onto a website and then fill out a form.
That was just way too much.
That was a big lesson for us is they advertise on the same channel where you ultimately want that conversion to occur.
The other one and just being maybe more of a, I guess a story about kind of turning lemons into lemonade was that we had these great graphics that were designed for the postcard and it did create this kind of visual brand for us.
A color scheme, a language we got.
The copywriting was, you know, it cleared up our value proposition.
So I, you know, there certainly was some value there.
You know, all wasn't lost.
And we ended up using those graphics, which are these kind of cartoony.
We call them Voice Guy and Voice Girl for lack of creativity, I think, on our part.
But these cartoony characters that almost became like mascots in the company.
And it definitely solidified this brand identity for us for years to come.
So whenever something goes awry, I always try to figure out some way to turn this around so all is not lost.
Omer (30:07.760)
So the first year, as I understand, you guys didn't make a ton of revenue, right?
Guest (30:16.400)
No, the first year we did $18,000 in sales.
Omer (30:21.520)
And so what were you guys thinking by the end of the year?
Were you thinking about Doing something else or, you know.
Guest (30:30.380)
Well, well, we, we realized that if we could get through the first year, the second year, if we continue to grow at the same rate, we would benefit from all the renewals that were coming in.
So it was more of a, hey, let's just, let's keep this thing going.
Because every month that we stay in business after that first year, you're going to get those.
Because it was only an annual subscription when we first started.
So we were just literally waiting for that first batch of renewals to come around.
And we renewed.
I think it was 85% renewal rate.
So it's pretty high.
And so at that point it kind of became.
Now there was almost two revenue streams.
New customers coming in for the renewal, sorry to buy the subscription, and then the renewals from previous years.
And that's why these software as a service business models are really interesting and why in a lot of ways, investors enjoy them and are attracted to them so much because they really can.
Well, one, they're scalable, but they're also scalable not only on the technology front, but on the revenue front.
You can move some big numbers and you can get that moving very quickly based upon those renewals.
Omer (31:50.200)
Now, you know, I think anybody who's tried to do this knows that building any kind of online marketplace is a really difficult thing to do.
From your experience, what were you doing to try and build, you know, demand on both sides in terms of attracting talent and finding customers?
Because it's this chicken and egg situation.
You know, if there isn't enough work for these guys, why are they going to, you know, even be part of your business?
And if you don't have enough talent, then why are people going to come and use your services?
So how did you tackle this?
And it doesn't sound like, you know, you had a lot of money to throw at this either.
Guest (32:32.200)
No, no, it was completely organic growth revenue funded, if you will.
Right.
And omer, you hit it on the head.
It is the classic chicken and egg problem.
And so we actually started with that group of, as I say, a dozen, maybe two dozen voice talent who had freely offered to list their name on our recording studio site.
And we invited them to join us on, you know, on, on the marketplace when we first got it going.
And so we did start with, I guess a base of, call it 20, 25 voice talent, which was enough, you know, we had some males, some females, some younger talents, some older talent, you know, different geographies.
It was enough diversity that when a client came and said, hey, I'm looking for somebody to record that we could meet that request.
And so when we started, it was.
Stephanie was always and actually still is the voice talent advocate, if you will, whereas I've always been on the client side.
And so we kind of divided and conquered from that perspective that, hey, here my role, role and responsibilities will take me up to this side of the marketplace.
And she handled the other side.
So I think this is one of those examples where I think it was tremendously valuable to actually have a co founder and a co founder who's knowledgeable in the space.
And she engaged the talent, had all the calls produced, as I mentioned, the content and the blog posts.
And I was calling all the companies and inviting them to bring their work online and to give us a shot.
Omer (34:29.110)
What was one of the biggest challenges that you guys faced when you started to get traction and start to see the business growing?
Guest (34:38.070)
Well, it sounds funny, but one of the biggest challenges that we faced was, I think it was like one of the biggest challenges we faced was brand recognition.
People didn't know who we were and the, you know, because we were struggling with this previous name that we had.
And the name was interactive voices.com, so kind of a mouthful.
Interactive voices was the URL.
People complained that it was too long, that they didn't, you know, that they.
That they had to type it in.
You know, email addresses were too long.
Like it was.
It was kind of silly.
One person said that their fingers got tired from typing it out all the time.
And it actually just pigeonholed us, I think, into doing new media and interactive media.
Like at the time, voiceovers for these flash animations and the earliest kind of web videos when there's this.
When it's just a huge market.
And so I was on this quest to change the domain name to rebrand.
And I looked@vox.com and Voxi and Voxeo and nothing was working.
And I really realized that maybe rather than a name change, more of a name simplification would be better.
What if we could just drop off the interactive part?
And so we did what probably many of you do, which is you type into Google or you do a who is lookup to find out, well, who owns this site?
And it happened to be voices.com back in the day, happened to be a medical journal called Silencing the Critical Voices in your head.
It was like this psychology paper and it hadn't been updated since the year 2000.
I figured, well, great, we might have a shot at actually acquiring this.
Doing the who is luck.
Up I realized, well, if I reach out to him, this owner, as david@interactive voices.com and they go to the website, you know, our website, and realize, hey, there's the business here.
They probably increased the price or the asking price of what it would take to sell.
So I thought the smarter approach would be to go through a neutral party, a lawyer, in effect, and say, so we asked, you know, a lawyer who happened to move into the building, you know, literally across the hall from where our office, our little one 10 square foot office was, and asked him, hey, would he reach out and ask this fellow, is he gonna sell his domain name?
If so, what price?
And he comes back and says, $50,000.
We're like, Whoa, good news is he's willing to sell the domain.
Bad news is 50,000 is a lot of money.
We totally didn't have the money to pull that off.
But I did what most entrepreneurs do, which is you go and you ask.
I think they call it nowadays the three Fs of fundraising.
It's like friends, family and fools.
Basically, anyone that's going to give you money, right?
And I just pitched my heart out and everyone said no.
And including the banks, they didn't understand what we were trying to do.
And so another important lesson there was to never take no for an answer.
And speaking with the lawyer, said, well, why don't we try to go back and negotiate with the fellow?
And he comes back and he says, you know, well, if we're going to make an offer, we got to come up with something.
So we offered 30,000.
And I said, phil, our lawyer, I said, phil, I don't have $30,000 sitting around.
We're kind of this scrappy startup.
He's like, well, can you break it up?
What about doing some installments?
I'm like, well, that's a good idea.
Why don't we do this?
We'll send him $5,000 every quarter for the next six quarters.
So five times six, $30,000.
That's our offer.
And you know what?
He went for the deal.
So with $5,000, we're able to, you know, as kind of an upfront payment, we were able to obtain the name voices.com and then basically over the next weekend, we're like, this is amazing.
We just transitioned the entire site to point over there and more or less reopened, if you will, under the voices.com banner in a matter of weeks.
And from that point on, it really did solve.
That main challenge that we were faced with was a lack of credibility.
It just sounded like we were just trying to be something on the web.
Whereas voices.com or just even Voices for sure, it has a certain cache to it that it sounds like we've always been there, that we've been there since, you know, 1998.
But.
And because of that we've been able to obtain some great coverage from journalists that are writing about the industry or covering technology in our industry.
They're doing research on Google and if they are looking for a quote from an industry expert and they come across voices.com well, the company sounds like it's been around and it would be knowledgeable.
We've been able to land some great media opportunities because it relates back to the domain name.
That was both, I think, a challenge and a huge win if I may say so.
Omer (40:09.240)
Yeah, I mean getting a domain like that, I mean, I think in the early days of any business, you know, I think there's a danger of getting caught up and you know, probably wasting too much time and money going after, you know, the perfect domain.
But as I think as you guys did in terms of once you got traction, you see that this business has, has the opportunity to grow and become something even bigger.
I think then it, it clearly is a good opportunity for you to, to go and sort of make your mark in a more impactful way.
You know, one of our previous guests, Peter Coppinger, who's the CEO and co founder of Teamwork, they're an Irish based company.
These guys actually spent almost $700,000 buying the teamwork.com domain.
Guest (41:03.910)
Wow.
Omer (41:04.550)
After a few years in business and he felt like it paid for itself within the first year, but they'd been in business for quite a while.
Guest (41:16.860)
So.
Omer (41:17.140)
Yeah, get the right domain, but get it at the right time.
Guest (41:19.980)
Exactly.
It's all about the timing because you're probably going to need to get that funding from somewhere.
And I think spending $100,000 on your domain name because it doesn't just represent the corporate quote unquote brand name, it represents the address of where your product is located.
So I've always kind of viewed these domain names as like, it's like a location on the web.
And the shorter, tighter one more memorable one that you can get with no funny spelling and no numbers in it and hyphens and so forth that the better off you're going to do in the long run.
Omer (42:05.550)
Yeah.
So let's talk about the business today.
Now I mentioned earlier that you got, you're a multimillion dollar business.
Do you guys disclose revenue numbers?
Guest (42:14.910)
It's in The.
It's.
It's well over in the tens of millions, let's put it that way.
Wow.
That.
That's.
Omer (42:22.750)
And.
And you.
You pretty much bootstrapped this.
But you did take some funding along the way, right?
Guest (42:28.110)
Yeah, it's.
The funding's been more on the debt side.
You know, we'd received some advice, actually, that is like, you know, that went along the lines, at least as far as I remember it was, if you can get debt, then take the debt.
It's typically very difficult to obtain a loan, especially a loan of any kind of sizable nature, without cash flow, because, you know, the bank wants to know that you can repay it.
And so when we first, again, kind of going back, you know, to the early days when we first started, we got a $15,000 loan, and I mentioned that $30,000 loan that we spend all of the postcards, but we paid that off in the kind of ensuing years, and then we got a 50,000 and 100,000, and we just got, you know, loans and then paid them off and built up a track record with, you know, in effect, two financial institutions that whole time.
And it is definitely on a.
It is cheaper to do.
So We've pursued that.
And in Canada, they're very supportive of entrepreneurs, and particularly technology entrepreneurs, that if you're.
There are incentives to borrow money at very, very low interest rates that are favorable almost, you'd be crazy not to pursue those.
And so that's been the way that we've been able to grow.
And because of that, to date, Stephanie and I remain the two sole shareholders without any venture capital backing.
Omer (44:11.690)
That's pretty impressive.
Congratulations on that.
Guest (44:14.650)
Thank you.
I mean, I don't realize it's kind of that it's meaningful until you speak to somebody that mentions that.
It's actually.
I know it's hard to build a company, but it's hard to really bootstrap a company to get it to at least somewhat of scale.
Certainly not taking over the world by any stretch, but at least leading and transforming this one little slice of it, which is that of the voiceover business.
Omer (44:49.370)
All right, David, it's now time for our lightning round.
I'm going to ask you a series of questions, and I'd like you to answer them as quickly as possible.
Are you ready?
Guest (44:57.130)
I will do my best.
Omer (44:58.570)
All right, what's the best piece of business advice that you ever received?
Guest (45:03.610)
To stay focused, not get distracted, you got to stay focused.
Omer (45:09.130)
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?
Guest (45:13.620)
I really enjoyed a book called Think and Grow Rich.
It's by Napoleon Hill.
I think it was in 1934.
I just love the old kind of old English language.
Has kind of a romantic quality about it and it's mostly about kind of getting your head in the right space and planning ahead that way mentally.
And then obviously what do you need to do to kind of carry out and execute that on a day to day basis.
But I've always felt I still listen to that.
I have an audiobook version.
I listen to it at least every year.
Omer (45:47.220)
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful entrepreneur?
Guest (45:55.300)
I'd go with persistence, the ability to basically the stick to it type attitude and following something through.
So even if you're told no or not now, being creative and being persistent and following through until you get the outcome that you were really hoping for.
Omer (46:16.660)
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?
Guest (46:21.540)
Mine would be my Moleskine notebook.
A little bit old school, but every Sunday evening I plan my week ahead and organize it in list formats and I hand write that mostly because I think I enjoy striking things off at the end of the week.
Omer (46:40.660)
If you had to start over tomorrow, what type of business or market or problem would you go and tackle?
Guest (46:49.220)
I would have probably started an app way earlier than we did.
I think we were really slow on that one.
Probably something in the same business.
Music, arts, entertainment.
It's a business I really enjoy.
I probably would have tried to scale up a lot faster.
We talked about the adwords where they were 5 and 10 cents apiece.
If we could buy all the traffic back then, that's something that I wish I could have done.
Omer (47:20.070)
What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?
Guest (47:24.710)
Well, I once hitchhiked across Australia and that was a tremendous amount of fun.
I had a year long visitor's visa and I had some time near the end before that expired.
So I did a lot of hitchhiking in Australia.
Omer (47:41.550)
And finally, what is one of your most important passions outside of your work?
Guest (47:45.950)
Oh my kids.
That one was easy.
Spending time with the kids and teaching them and listening to their amazing minds explore the world.
I think that's my most important passion.
Omer (47:59.910)
Great answers, David.
I want to thank you for joining me today and sharing your experiences and insights with our audience.
And thank you for letting us get to know you a little better personally as well.
Now if folks want to find out more about Voices, they can go to voices.com and if they want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that.
Guest (48:19.190)
Email is the best way.
Let's keep it easy.
Davidoices.com shoot me an email and I'm always happy to help.
Omer (48:25.980)
Awesome David.
Thanks again and I wish you continued success.
Guest (48:29.420)
Wonderful.
Great show today.
Thanks Omer.
Omer (48:31.540)
Take care.
Bye.
