E60 Voices-com

The BS with Bob podcast featuring entrepreneurs, business people and marketers this week talking with David, David is the CEO of voices.com and is a voiceover person myself is pretty cool to be able to talk to the guy that's in charge of probably the largest place to go to get that to get voices David, welcome to the program. Thanks much Bob thought glad to be here and tell some stories. So how did you get in that the whole voiceover Dick everyone finds her own path and my nose is pretty unique. Actually I see with sound go out and share about how Bob had an old record player and dad had a shortwave radio so I always could tinkered with you technology if you could call it that went to school and got a degree in in audio engineering that I opened up a small recording studio, so this was an opportunity for a reported music bands and so forth, but actually got my name in the newspaper on my birthday and I was actually that article brought in some local businesses that were looking to how the female voiceover reported done for phone system that actually met a young woman, just the day before, who was a classically trained singer and that that ladies and now Stephanie is now my wife and cofounder voices.call that time she was a classic between singer and I asked her to do these voiceovers and so she did a phone system and some local radio commercials and that was the problem referred to it as well. Instead of us doing the production. Why don't we become this. The connector between the voice actor in the client is looking to hire them and so we got out of the production ourselves and really reinvented ourselves as as this marketplace that connects the businesses with those voice actors and that's what we been doing for much the last decade and how did you score the name voices.com we actually didn't start as voices.com we we began as as interactive voices, which wasn't exactly the greatest website name the pigeons will listen to new media or interactive media. It was around the height of what was then the Web 2.0 movement when you know everything was big bright and bubbly on the web about flashy colors and and companies like twitter and Flickr were like dropping bowels from their name and as we want to be part of this movement so we were set on changing rebranding. In effect, so I did with many entrepreneurs do you pull up a browser you Google the domain name of your choosing of your desires and we had landed on a website called as a medical Journal club silencing the critical voices in your head is a medical journal that had been updated since about 2000. And so we reached out actually through a lawyer sent an email to this owner and asked what he saw the name and if so what price and he came back he said initially said that $50,000 and then know you know through some negotiation offered six payments of $5000 can of every quarter every three months with them another $5000, and for that he went to the deal. So we were able to almost like a lift and shift their business from the old servers to the new servers and redirect all that traffic that's been actually evolved one of the biggest turning points for us. It was a name that is short. It's memorable. It's easy to spell it, since what we do in a nutshell, so it's been the it's been really great for my from that standpoint. So how does something like voices.com work for the end user so it must have a business and I want to get a voice and looking for a male voice and female voice. Can I use voices.com to have auditions with different voices or how does that. How does even work. The process is very simple. You sign up for freeing you create an account and its most points will we call client feels people are looking to hire a talent have that project in their mind and so you after signing up you can do what we call posting a job was free to post the job and that is where you outline just as you said in looking for a male voice and a female voice I you know I might be enormously particular language so into this case English will allow you to pick the accent even consider certain regions that have many thicker, stronger accents than that others you can go through and then pick each range. This style of performance. Maybe that particular role. If you want a superhero or a sports announcer or a villain that corporate executives and this helps the actor ultimately deliver auditions for the persona that you want to have you to perform the voice and then of course you attach your script what you want. Auditions is a couple even a couple sentences is fine. You pick a budget which is somewhere between you know start to the hundred to $250 and goes up depending on the duration of the recording and the complexity is of the recording itself and then your deadline when you want your auditions back is something like the dating profile or dating service for voices audios a really challenging medium because there's often not the shared language or lexicon for how we describe what w