Speek - Starting Up Like Biggie Smalls - Rutgers Business School
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The deck from the talk I gave on January 13, 2014 at the Rutgers Business School Scarlet Startups event.
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Speek - Starting Up Like Biggie Smalls - Rutgers Business School
- 2. Hi, my name is Danny Boice I am the Co-Founder & CTO of Speek I am from Washington, DC I love rap music I hate conference calls
- 3. Conference Calls Suck Speek makes Conference Calls Fast & Easy We make money using the Freemium model (more about this later after Biggie Smalls)
- 4. Speek has raised $5 Million We have hosted over 300,000 callers For over 10,000,000 minutes We are growing around 50% monthly Speek is 1 1/2 years old
- 5. Biggie is going to tell you how we started up now.
- 6. "It was all a dream.."
- 7. "Call the crib, same number, same hood, and it’s all good."
- 8. "We used to fuss when the landlord dissed us."
- 9. "Mo Money Mo Problems"
- 10. "F—ck it, I didn’t wanna go to heaven anyway."
- 11. "Got introduced to the game, got an ounce, and f— ckin’ blew up."
- 12. "I’m living everyday like a hustle. Another drug to juggle, another day another struggle."
- 13. "Blowin' up like you thought I would"
- 15. The Business of Speek
- 16. Freemium
- 17. Definition of Freemium: A business model by which a proprietary product or service is provided free of charge, but money (premium) is charged for advanced features, functionality, or virtual goods.
- 18. It's kinda like selling crack.
- 19. Why Freemium? • • • • • • No friction - get user "hooked" Free registration for all - the more the merrier Maximize virality - even your active free users generate more users just by using Speek Speek is disrupting a space where the incumbents are free The math works Confidence in conversion to premium
- 20. Freemium is NOT a 30 day free trial
- 21. Speek Freemium • • o o o o o o o Free Your own speek link (speek.com/danny) Conference calls w/ up to 5 callers Premium More than 5 callers on a call File sharing Commenting Call recording Co-branding (YourCompany.speek.com)
- 22. Some Interesting Metrics • • • • We convert 20% of our home page visitors to register AdWords-originating users are half as "sticky" as organic / viral conversions We convert 5% of our active free users to paid 20% of first time / non-registered callers who join a speek call register immediately after that call o These users rarely churn
- 23. The Smile Graph
- 24. Any Questions?
Editor's Notes
- introduce myself
- elevator pitch and overview of where speek is today
- elevator pitch and overview of where speek is today
- I'm going to tell you how we started speek up and got out of beta and post revenue using the words of Biggie Smalls
- Talk about the idea behind speek - john and I were sitting around talking about how bad conference calls suck and had the link concept
- Talk about the the lean startup methodology approach we took and how we validated our assumptions that people would use a link instead of phone numbers to dial in
- We heard "no" from literally 100's of VC's and 100's of other people told us we were crazy. our market was too saturated, they had concerns about our business model. We just kept marching along and thought of raising our first round like any other sales process - high touch
- We raised our first round - $1.5mm on a convertible note - which was crossing a major first hurdle but that was just the beginning now the microscope got bigger and we had to figure things out before the money ran out
- The first major lesson in execution is that you need great people. we had to make some hard decisions early on and fire some folks in order to bring better folks on. now we have our A team and it's a matter of sticking to our plan and hitting max velocity all the while keeping an eye on key metrics
- We leveraged a formal advisory board that consists of the founders of nextel, AddThis and other folks that had been there and done that. We also leveraged our 500 startups mentored all along the way (and continue to to this day). Almost all of these people share our data driven approach and we usually look deeply into data in every conversation. Iterative marketing channels and user acquisition
- At this point we've been covered by every major press outlet tech and mainstream, we've had 100's of thousands of users and we're doubling in every key metric every other month, we're being featured in a Wall Street Journal Documentary about Startups that's airing now - but we still act like we're back in that condo when we were just starting out and realize that it's easy come easy go. execution remains key.
- Revenue is our focus now and getting profitable
- Let’s talk about Speek’s business model