Voice First Startups with Collin Borns of VoicePunch

10/29/19 • 23 min

In this episode, Teri has a conversation with Collin Borns of VoicePunch about voicefirst startups and the investment side of voice technology.

Welcome, Collin!

Collin Borns is a creator/host of the Voicing Startups Podcast and has a background in institutional investment consulting. He worked for VaynerMedia as a financial analyst, before finding a passion for audio, voice, and conversational technology a few years back.

He now works with an early stage venture fund, VoicePunch.VC, and is trying to invest in and bring awareness to the different startups and founders in the voice space who are shaking up industries.

Working with VaynerMedia

He was a financial operations analyst for VaynerMedia and had a great experience working there.
He thinks the VaynerSmart team (the voice team at VaynerMedia) is doing fantastic work and recommends them for anyone looking at doing a voice related project.

His Flash Briefing and Podcast

He was looking to do some things in the voice space and felt that a flash briefing was an interesting format to start playing around with voice and also put out valuable content consistently.
He wanted his flash briefing to be fresh and to consist of everything that he finds interesting in the world of audio and voice that businesses should be considering.
He focuses on batching up a number of episodes and recording them ahead of time so he can be able to release them consistently.
He started his Voicing Startups Podcast to bring more awareness and attention to the founders and companies that are trying different things in the audio and voice space.

The VoicePunch Fund

They look for consumer apps like games and different types of experiences that have some sort of voice aspect to them.
They are also interested in the picks and shovels of the voice space like design tools and content management tools.
They invest in early stage companies that are yet to raise their Series A funding and also look for founders who are determined and highly focused on achieving their core goal with their company.
They look into whether a company is in an interesting market that has the potential to come into fruition.
They expect to close their sixth investment by the end of 2019 and raise a closed-end fund in 2020 that will enable them to invest in more companies in the voice space.

List of resources mentioned in this episode

Other useful resources:

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, Teri has a conversation with Collin Borns of VoicePunch about voicefirst startups and the investment side of voice technology.

Welcome, Collin!

He now works with an early stage venture fund, VoicePunch.VC, and is trying to invest in and bring awareness to the different startups and founders in the voice space who are shaking up industries.

Working with VaynerMedia

He was a financial operations analyst for VaynerMedia and had a great experience working there.
He thinks the VaynerSmart team (the voice team at VaynerMedia) is doing fantastic work and recommends them for anyone looking at doing a voice related project.

His Flash Briefing and Podcast

He was looking to do some things in the voice space and felt that a flash briefing was an interesting format to start playing around with voice and also put out valuable content consistently.
He wanted his flash briefing to be fresh and to consist of everything that he finds interesting in the world of audio and voice that businesses should be considering.
He focuses on batching up a number of episodes and recording them ahead of time so he can be able to release them consistently.
He started his Voicing Startups Podcast to bring more awareness and attention to the founders and companies that are trying different things in the audio and voice space.

The VoicePunch Fund

They look for consumer apps like games and different types of experiences that have some sort of voice aspect to them.
They are also interested in the picks and shovels of the voice space like design tools and content management tools.
They invest in early stage companies that are yet to raise their Series A funding and also look for founders who are determined and highly focused on achieving their core goal with their company.
They look into whether a company is in an interesting market that has the potential to come into fruition.
They expect to close their sixth investment by the end of 2019 and raise a closed-end fund in 2020 that will enable them to invest in more companies in the voice space.

List of resources mentioned in this episode

Other useful resources:

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Previous Episode

Voice First and Flash Briefings with Peter Stewart

In this episode, Teri has a conversation with Peter Stewart, an award-winning broadcaster, social media producer, and author, who has been doing some amazing things with voice technology and flash briefings.

Welcome, Peter!

Peter was visiting Vancouver from the UK and got together with Teri to talk about everything voice technology. He has worked in national and regional radio and TV for the BBC and commercial companies, and he really knows his stuff when it comes to audio content.

He currently works for the digital unit at the BBC, creating videos on smartphones and smart speakers. He creates short videos that go into social media, and they occasionally get on the BBC website and BBC News. He has written several books on his expertise and is currently negotiating a contract for his eighth book. He has been working with Suze Cooper on some ideas of what to do with flash briefings and voice technology.

Getting A Voice Like Peter’s

He doesn’t do any kind of exercises for his voice.
He is passionate about teaching people how to read out loud in a natural manner.
He was once the BBC’s only voice trainer and he taught people how to lift words from a page and read naturally.

Developing an Interest in Voice Technology

He spent about 30 years in radio presentation production, and so his whole life has been around audio presentation, production, doing a variety of music shows, DJing, political shows, gardening shows, and sports programs.
He was really interested in the power of audio and the human voice, and what can be done with that.
While at a conference about mobile journalism, he met someone who encouraged him to look into voice technology, and when he did, he realized that it fit in with what he was already doing.
He was fascinated by the opportunities that flash briefings presented.

Peter’s Flash Briefings

He has three flash briefings.
The first one is “What’s on In Guildford”, which is targeted at people in Surrey, UK, who can afford smart speakers. The flash briefing shares information of all the top events happening in the county. The flash briefing is supported by the local council, the National Trust in the UK, and the local theater company.
What’s on In Guildford is the second highest rated flash briefing in the UK.
The second flash briefing is “The Smart Speakers Daily”, which is a daily look into smart speakers and how people are using them.
“28-Day Flash Briefing Briefing” is his third flash briefing and it’s all about how to create a flash briefing.
A couple of times a month, Peter does a podcast on voice technology.
He makes his podcasts and flash briefings lively, engaging and authentic with different forms of music and sound effects.

Advice on Starting a Flash Briefing

He has seen an increase in the number of listeners to his flash briefing.
People are slow in taking up new technologies and a lot of them don’t know or have smart speakers.
He believes people should continuously create content for their flash briefings and podcasts as people continue embracing smart speakers.

List of resources mentioned in this episode

Other useful resources:

Next Episode

200 Ways to Use Alexa with Bradley Metrock and Katherine Prescott

In this episode, Teri welcomes Bradley Metrock of Score Publishing and Katherine Prescott of VoiceBrew, to talk about their incredible work in the voice space.

Welcome, Bradley and Katherine!

Bradley is the CEO of Score Publishing and the VoiceFirst.FM network while Katherine is the Founder/Editor of VoiceBrew.

Bradley recently wrote a book about some of the things that we can do with our Echo devices, and Katherine wrote the forward for the book. Their work in the voicefirst world is geared towards helping regular non-techie people learn how to use Alexa and voice technology.

VoiceBrew

It’s a daily email newsletter that helps people get the most out of Alexa. They also publish comprehensive guides on their website covering almost all of Alexa’s key features.
They now have over 25,000 email subscribers.

Brad’s Alexa Book

Brad wanted to write an Alexa instruction manual because he saw a need for it, and it eventually morphed into the book called “More Than Just Weather and Music: 200 Ways to Use Alexa”
The book showcases the breadth of use for Alexa covering areas like healthcare, coronary, banking, publishing, and automotive.
The way most people use voice technology today is similar to how most people used the internet in the 90s. They are only asking Alexa what the weather is or to play some music. This is because they don’t know what skills or commands to use.

Narrowing Down to 200 Ways to Use Alexa

Narrowing the list down for Bradley and his team was tough. He had skills developers asking him where their skill was in the book if he hadn’t put it among the 200.
They focused more on the quality of the skills and only included those that had positive reviews (based on their quality) in the skills store. They mainly looked at whether the recent reviews were good, but also checked if the recent bad reviews were based on the quality of the skill, if not, the skill would qualify for the list.
Brad also wanted to include skills that are good but haven’t gained visibility among users. They include Daddy Saturday which compliments a book titled “Daddy Saturday”, Where the Beef? and The Reuters flash briefing.
The 200 ways to use Alexa include 175 Alexa skills and 25 Alexa built in functions.
Katherine’s favorite kids’ skills were included in the list. They include Kids Court, Chompers, and Choose Your Own Adventure.
Brad asked Katherine to write the forward for the book because VoiceBrew’s brand orientation is aligned with what the book is about.

The Need for Skills Discoverability

When Brad got into publishing, he discovered the iBooks software by Apple which people were using to create interactive content. A lot of people were creating incredible multimedia, driven and interactive content, but they were having a huge discoverability problem.
Eventually the whole ecosystem died because post-Jobs Apple didn’t know what to do with it. Brad sees a lot of parallels with Alexa in that regard, and therefor believes it’s very necessary to create the Alexa skills lists for enhanced discoverability.
Katherine believes discoverability is challenging for voicefirst experiences because with voice, content is pulled by users as opposed to how content is pushed to them by social media platforms. She advises that Alexa skills creators should think about what distribution strategies they will use in order to ensure that their skills are highly discoverable.

List of resources mentioned in this episode

Other useful resources: