Overview
This report is a high level summery of how Speechify would fit into the various sub markets of the B2B marketplace. The focus was on understand the current trends in team and individual productivity tools. In addition there are some high level summaries of what some next steps could look like and some diagrams of how we fit into these marketplaces.
Some clear strengths of Speechify are:
Current text-speech options for speeding up and slowing down playback is far beyond the capabilities of any operating system or stand app that I have been able to find but the computation is really growing quickly.
Our ability to do translation of text-speech at scale between languages may be the biggest thing Speechify has shipped.
Key:
Opportunity Space
Markets
Schools
Educational products can be tricky, mostly because schools are one of the slowest moving organizations outside of governments. So starting with a school we know is probably best. K-12 can be a good starting point but would require lots of onboarding on our part because the accessibility and IT departments are typically very small.
College and Universities are like a good place to start, again with ones we have direct connections too tho. There are two sub markets with in universities. Direction one is starting in the accessibility departments who typically have more specialized types of funding for tools like us and will typically pay for us on behalf of the student. But this gets interesting when we get a school to install us in Labs and then eventually bundle it into their student technology expenses. (For example my school bundled the Adobe creative suit into out tuition) This path could take a year or more depending on the organization.
-
Some example of products that already do this in are:
[Creative Cloud for schools, universities, institutions Adobe](https://www.adobe.com/creativecloud/buy/education.html) [The Leading Mobile 3D Design App for iPad Shapr3D](https://www.shapr3d.com)
Businesses
For business there are two market as well, small teams (5- 50 people) and enterprise (anyone with a @company.com email) This market feels a little tricker because the goals are typically team productivity and because we are a solo experience. The bulk of what we would be offering would need to be marketing and storytelling around why “helping the individual be more productive” helps the “company be more productive.” Most of the current product in this space are helping an individual make a team more efficient, but it
Figma Example
Figma does a great job at communicating how they are team first, based on how it loading effect annotates. Having a second landing pages thats b2b focused could be very helpful down the road.
- Some example of products that already do this in are:
Productivity
The productivity,market has been saturated with notation and note taking apps for the last several years. But recently the personal health/wellness has been merging more with the productivity market. This has largely stemmed form the impact of how much noise now exists in our daily workflow. Which slows down what we can process and requires us to filter out a lot.
For Speechify this is a big strength as we can help you digest more information in less time, thus saving time, and help increate retention by allowing multimodal recall of information. If in the future we can offer a better notion like experience this could allow us to own more of this marketspace.
- Research Sources
Time Saving Tools
Teams tools love to stress how much time they will save your team. Typically these apps seem to take the form of time tracking tools. I think for speechify this would take the form of “time saved”. With the focus being on how much more time team and the individual would have. But it could also be summarized by quantity of characters or books read etc. Some example of this might be Apples health app and how they communicate time spent meditating or how in Apple Books you can now set a reading goal each day.
Task Management
One of the top tools for teams are various ways of project management. Out of all the trends I think this is the one that is most unrelated to us. Overall these apps tend to be things like Jira, Trello, Monday.com, or other Kanban tools. For the most part they focus on task communications and listing tasks across managers and other employees. Often for the purpose of creating clear ways to represent accountability. These tools put the value on a ship date or clearing a board of tasks.
Communication
Communication tools can be seen in two main buckets. The first are email replacement or internal communication tools. The second are external or consumer management tools. Email replacement tools are things like slack or teams, which focus on creating a space for communication to happen asynchronous in a mostly public environment. The metrics tracked are typically messages sent or connection made between team members. Client facing communication tools are things like intercom, or CMS systems. Here the metrics are also volume based but time taken to resolve a task or customer engagement scores are typically the focus. We can learn form some of these example but the focus is more on engagement and less on the individual, where I think we shine.
Collaboration Tools
Collaboration tools can range from Figma to Github but all are focused on some type of near realtime collaboration. We would want to look more at these if the notes/highlighting became collaborative in the future.
Social Tools
Social tools are focus on sharing information made by an individual who then shares out to a group. Until the last 5 years this was typically products like Facebook, Twitter, or etc. But today it’s expanding more and more into a market we have a shot at. A interesting example would be Breaker or Pocket where you can see what podcast are being listened to from friends. We could do this same things for reading/listening content once we have something like importing from rss implemented.
- Some example of products that already do this in are:
- breaker.audio
- instapaper.com
- pocket.com
Personal Health
Personal health may feel unrelated but I think it could be a big selling point. It’s a little less related to B2B when compared to the other topics built looking at the noise on the internet today more and more company’s are promoting personal health. For Speechify we can help others cut through that noice because of how you can retain more and read the content you already wanted to read faster. So we can probably connect with some of the health and time well spent apps too.
Headspace
This overview video form headspace does a great job at introducing to people why mediation and thus their app can help you be happier, healthier, and mindful. What would this look like for Speechify?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CS76mK58urI
- Some example of products that already do this in are:
- Head space Video on Personl Health https://youtu.be/CS76mK58urI -
Translation
This space has been largely static after computer vision based translation became computable. Little of this has evolved past the basic OCR of text or hand writing. But it could be the one of the largest market opportunities for Speechify. The leaders in translation are purely adding OCR to their services as a to make the documents searchable. But on one has been making a service that allows for live translate of document in one language to another when listening.
- Some example of products that already do this in are:
Reading Apps
We pretty much know what these do for us this it more of a service vs platform thing I think. Some news apps and reading apps offer a team tier, and typically the focus is to help the team share articles or documents. Or the ability to share notes or share files or see what other team members have been reading could be an interesting direction. There is not really any great or even good social reading apps.
B2B Customer
I spoke with 5 Speechify users that mostly use Speechify for work. They where a mix of teachers, administration, and tech employees. For the most part they haven’t had to much trouble expensing Speechify because they have just been either paying for it out of pocket or pulling funds from another work budget they have for software. But many described that in order to get a team or company on the app they would need to be able to point their managers to and enterprise payment option on our site. Students struggle with how expensive we are and would like to see us talk with the technology service department of colleges to get it added to their tuition and automatically available on their accounts.
Note on the listening experience.
- Pocket and instapaper has a great auditory markers that note the start of chapters or sections in an article.
Food for thought
In the next 1-3 year, is the goal to make speechify a service or a platform?
If its a Service it would look a lot more like us being the reader you can use everywhere. This is the full on chrome extensions, plugins to existing apps, native feeling apps, shoud
If its a platform the focus would seam to be on adding more integrations in order to feel like a one stop shop of all your reading needs.