Sarah Andrew Wilson Talks Content Strategy for Top Voice Applications

Welcome, Sarah Andrew Wilson

Sarah Andrew Wilson is the Chief Content Officer at Matchbox.io. Matchbox is the creator of some of the most popular voice applications on Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, and Samsung Bixby. There are 20 voice applications in their portfolio. It was founded in January 2017 by Joel Wilson.

Some of the most popular ones are the Question of the Day, Kids Quiz, and Find my Phone. Matchbox creates and posts high-quality content on a regular basis and has 11 million users and hundreds of thousands of daily active users.

Matchbox has a large content team that researches topics that users will find interesting on a culturally appropriate basis for the different locales.

What Is it Like Working with Your Husband Side by Side?

Sarah’s husband, Joel Wilson, experimented with different skills and formats to determine what would gain the most traction. He was also interested in retention and how users could be retained day-to-day. His thought process was that if you give people something new every day, they are going to come back to their smart speaker.

Six months into Question of the Day, Joel found it difficult to juggle the workload that came with creating trivia content every day, so he asked Sarah if she was willing to help. Joel figured that Sarah’s background of 20 years in the music industry would be helpful in writing trivia and researching content ideas.

A year into it, things really started taking off and they had to decide if Sarah would take this on full-time or if they needed to hire someone else, and Sarah decided to go all in full-time. Sarah mentioned that the key to making this business partnership successful is that they separate their business relationships from their personal relationship.

How Did the Pandemic Provide New Opportunities and Experimentation?

Sarah and Joel decided to experiment with a daily podcast and a website with new content every day. When the pandemic hit, it provided an opportunity to experiment even more, and now they are sorting through all the experiments to see what gained traction last year.

What Has the Experience with the Mobile App Been?

The mobile app came out of the need to try out a lot of requests that they were getting from users, such as leaderboards, play and connect with friends, play game packs, and the ability to play, read or have Question of the Day read to you. The app can also be synced with their account so they can play on the road.

What Other Devices Besides Amazon Echo Can People Play the Games On?

In addition to Amazon Echo devices, they are also on Samsung Bixby and Google Assistant. People in Latin America play on their phones, so they are accessing it via Google Assistant on their phones.

What Are the Most Important Things to Focus on When it Comes to Scaling?

Even though there are different variations and generations of the technology, there is this interoperability and sharing of data between these different manufacturers and a collaborative effort between them. To scale, the right technology will be needed as well as experimenting and tweaking things as needed.

Connect with Sarah Andrew Wilson

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