In this episode, Teri welcomes Braden Ream, one of the co-founders of Voiceflow.
Welcome Braden Ream!
- He is a Canadian and lives in Toronto. Their platform makes it very easy for both people getting started in Alexa skills and also seasoned developers who are looking for a more efficient way to code.
Starting off in Voice Technology
- His co-founder had an idea to create the “Honey for Voice Shopping” Honey is the Chrome extension that enables people to get the best price that applies coupons. They wanted to apply that to voice shopping and this is what got them involved in voice. There were some technical limitations because Amazon and Google didn’t want that at that time.
- They then started a children’s started a children’s stories app called Fable. They were read along children stories on Amazon Alexa. They built the initial MVP on storyline. They were writing the stories by hand and printing physical books. The user would read a line and Alexa would essentially see the line that was read and match it to the intent then Alexa would read the next line of the story.
- They then created an Alexa skill called Storyflow which delivers choose-your-own-adventure stories and it became very popular. Storyflow is number in Canada in the games and entertainment space.
The Pivot
- The Storyline platform wasn’t allowing them to add more content at some point so they had to look at other platforms like Voice Apps and Conversation.One
- They eventually built their own platform which allowed them to build stories and have unlimited content on one skill. This was when they re-named their company to Storyflow.
- They custom built an internal tool that allowed them to easily build stories. The tool could help other people build stories and they wanted it to become like the “YouTube for Voice” so they invited a few people in the development community to try it out. They really liked it.
- They then pivoted to how they can help the world build better voice apps that actually help people become voice entrepreneurs.
Voiceflow and other players
- Storyline is now Invocable.
- There are several large and small companies that are doing the same thing. They include Voice Apps, Invocable and Voiceflow. They have different goals.
- Invocable is now a tool for businesses to prototype and design voice apps quickly.
- Voice Apps are focused on having the widest functionality and feature set.
- Voiceflow is more focused on having very specialized features that are geared towards helping people build businesses. For example, they are adding a business suite of tools which can allow people to build a voice app, scale it, retain customers and monetize customers.
Voiceflow’s Target User
- They always want to ensure that even those who can’t code can use Voiceflow but they also want to support those who can code. They have been achieving that successfully and continuously improving on it.
Other Voiceflow features in the pipeline
- They are working on more features to support users who like to build voice apps as a hobby while also working on advanced features for business oriented coders. Some of the advanced features include account linking, permissions blocks (which they just enabled), deeper integrations with their API block and others.
- There has been a massive influx of hobbyist users since Storyline shifted.
- They are also adding more languages to include every English language as well as German, Italian and others.
- They are releasing their audio streaming feature.
- People in their community can suggest features.
Other platforms other than Alexa
- From the beginning they built their tech to be platform agnostic so it can work with Google Home, Samsung Bixby, Apple Home Pod, and other platforms.
- Google doesn’t have as good a publishing API like Alexa so users have to do things manually because they can’t do everything within Voiceflow.
Userbase
- They have over 1,000 developers now with over 400 in their community.
- The response has been mixed with some users preferring that Voiceflow had some features that other platforms have while some users love Voiceflow as it is because it fits with their needs.
- They focus their attention a lot on their community because it helps them build a user friendly product.
The Team
- They have a 4 person full time team and are backed by a Toronto venture capital firm called Ripple Ventures as well as other angel investors. Most of them dropped out of college.
- They have several people working with them part time.
- They raised $500,000 to start the company.
Monetization
- They always want to have a free community tier and they don’t want to limit features in terms of building a voice app.
- Their goal is a more value-based pricing model.
List of resources mentioned in this episode
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