(We originally posted this in 2019. You can read more of our original ideas in our archive.)
Problem: The state of sound is changing. Perhaps the most notable quote about this is Rohun Vora, who wrote on Twitter on December 1, 2020 that “Airpods made more money in 2019 than Twitter, Snapchat, Spotify, and Shopify combined.” I doubt this trend will decline. One area where voice has not yet taken off is in the realm of work.
Solution: This business would focus on optimizing vocal communication at work. Currently, the majority of work communication happens through email. In fact, today, more than 269 billion email messages are sent every day, according to the Radicati Group. That's about 72 emails for every one of the estimated 3.7 billion email users in the world. Adobe quantified these results as MSNBC reports below:
When software company Adobe surveyed over 1,000 American workers for its annual email usage study, they found that people on average spend more than five hours per day checking their email.
“Email continues to be the preferred way to ask co-workers a quick question (39%), provide a status update (57%) or even provide feedback (47%),” Bruce Swann, Group Product Marketing Manager for Adobe Campaign tells CNBC Make It in a statement. “So while email is a large part of our current workday, we expect it will only increase in significance, with 26% of survey respondents saying they expect their use of email at work to increase over the next two years.”
During the workday, respondents reported spending an average of 209 minutes checking their work email and 143 minutes checking their personal email, for a total of 352 minutes (about five hours and 52 minutes) each day.
Luckily, 2020 has been the year of audio. However, Steve Jobs even seemed to foresee this decades ago:
Many companies have begun expanding in this space as well as voice experiences at work become widespread (thanks Bessemer Venture Partners for describing some of these startups in their annual “State of Sound” review):
Voodle allows users to share short videos at work. With a TikTok-like interface and a variety of “rooms/Channels” similar to Slack, users can share information around topics in video rather than via email or chat message. It’s almost like decentralize video chats that aren’t time-bounded.
Yac utilizes asynchronous voice messaging to help cut down on meetings and calls,
Slashtalk decentralizes conversations so remote teams can move faster.
In spatial audio, companies like Branch are creating virtual HQs to bring serendipity back into the workday.
Gong, a voice intelligence company, uses real-time natural language processing to train and suggest information to salespeople and other customer service reps. (Fun fact: Gong’s model was trained on the full run of Seinfeld, in an effort to teach the platform about awkward conversations and sarcasm.)
These businesses are definitely a good start to understand audio, and are potentially orders of magnitude bigger than airpods.
The market is huge. As described by Bessemer, “Roughly one in four adults owns a smart speaker, with a third of those owners having three or more devices in their homes. Sixty-two percent of Americans use a voice-operated personal assistant. And if those statistics aren’t convincing enough, just look at the podcasting industry: monthly podcast listeners grew by 16% year-over-year, surpassing 100 million Americans for the very first time.”
Monetization: Sales of this software.
Contributed by: Michael Bervell (Billion Dollar Startup Ideas)