Voiceflow with Braden Ream

In this episode, Teri welcomes Braden Ream, one of the co-founders of Voiceflow.

Welcome Braden Ream!

Braden is a Canadian and lives in Toronto! His company, Voiceflow, makes it very easy for both people getting started in Alexa skills and also seasoned developers who are looking for a more efficient way to code.

Starting off in Voice Technology

His co-founder had an idea to create the “Honey for Voice Shopping.” Honey is the Chrome extension that enables people to get the best prices when online shopping by finding the best coupons. The idea was to apply that concept to voice shopping and this is what got Braden and his co-founders involved in voice. There were some technical limitations, however, because Amazon and Google didn’t want that at that time.
Braden’s team then started a children’s stories skill called Fable. They produced children stories that a child could read along with Amazon Alexa. The initial MVP was built on Storyline. They were writing the stories by hand and printing physical books. The user would read a line and Alexa would essentially see the line that was read and match it to the intent, and then Alexa would read the next line of the story.
They then created an Alexa skill called Storyflow which delivers choose-your-own-adventure stories and it became very popular. Storyflow is #1 in Canada in the games and entertainment space.

The Pivot

Braden and his team eventually built their own platform which allowed them to build stories and have unlimited content on one skill. This was when they renamed their company to Storyflow.
They custom built an internal tool that allowed them to easily build stories. The tool could help other people build stories and they wanted it to become like the “YouTube for Voice” so they invited a few people in the development community to try it out. They really liked it.
They then pivoted to how they can help the world build better voice apps that actually help people become voice entrepreneurs.

Voiceflow

Voiceflow is focused on having very specialized features that are geared toward helping people build businesses. For example, they are adding a business suite of tools which can allow people to build a voice app, scale it, retain customers, and monetize the skills.

We wanna help you build a really successful skill and if you build a really successful skill then we’ll monetize you.

Voiceflow with Braden Ream

Voiceflow’s Target User

They always want to ensure that even those who can’t code can use Voiceflow, but they also want to support those who can code. They have been achieving that successfully and are continuously improving on it.

Other Voiceflow features in the pipeline

They are working on more features to support users who like to build voice apps as a hobby, while also working on advanced features for business-oriented coders. Some of the advanced features include account linking, permissions blocks, deeper integrations with their API block, and others.
They are also adding more languages and regions to include every English language region, as well as German, Italian and others.
They are releasing their audio streaming feature.
People in their community can suggest features.

Other platforms other than Alexa

From the beginning, they built their tech to be platform agnostic so it can work with Google Home, Samsung Bixby, Apple Home Pod, and other platforms.
Google doesn’t have as good a publishing API like Alexa so users have to do things manually because they can’t do everything within Voiceflow.

Userbase

They have over 1,000 developers now with over 400 in their community.
They focus their attention a lot on their community because it helps them build a user-friendly product.

The Team

They have a 4 person full-time team and are backed by a Toronto venture capital firm called Ripple Ventures as well as other angel investors.
They have several people working with them part-time.
They raised $500,000 to start the company.

Monetization

They always want to have a free community tier and they don’t want to limit features in terms of building a voice app.
Their goal is a more value-based pricing model.

List of resources mentioned in this episode:

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