Podcasts are mainstream now so when I saw the news about Spokn, a startup which helps companies create their own audio I wanted to hear about what they are up to.
Spokn’s customers create podcasts for employee engagement; onboarding; diversity, initiatives; and learning & development. Joining me to discuss the company is one of their co-founders, Mariel Davis.
TOPICS | https://www.getspokn.com
Why is podcasting the right medium for talking to your employees right now?
Well, so let's even start with thinking about the way that the world has really changed over the past year and a half, right? Now, more than ever, companies have this urgent need to communicate more and more effectively with their employees. If you've got remote or hybrid teams, they're no longer walking through the hallways and picking up through osmosis, the knowledge and the culture it's in a company. And so a lot of the companies that we work with are trying to find new ways to build that cultural connective tissue and frankly, the existing tools fall short. If you look at email, it's really impersonal, very easy to get your tone misread and it's long, pretty boring. You look at Slack or Teams, it gets very, very noisy for employees. And even video, you've got Zoom fatigue, you've got time zone challenges, you've got caregivers who have schedules that are hard to predict.
And so we sort of look at this spectrum of communication opportunities that companies have. And then you look at podcasts and you go, "Wow, podcasting is a distinctly good format for communicating and engaging with employees in a remote or hybrid world of work." First, it's incredibly rich. The voice is so personal and it conveys so much meaning. And yet it is also incredibly easy. It is very easy on the listener, it's so convenient for them. It's the one part of their workday, frankly, that doesn't involve them sitting in front of a screen, but it's also relatively easy to create.
And we've also found interestingly that there are a lot of people who are just more comfortable using their voice and then they would be on video. And that means that you're bringing in more diverse voices within a company. And so, you take all of these benefits off the format itself, and then you also just look at the context. Yeah, podcasts are incredibly popular among the millennial and Gen Zs. And it really only feels natural that we would be communicating with employees in a way that meets their preferences, even outside of work.
What was the evolution of the product?
'll share you with you a little bit of a backstory. So in February of 2020, my co-founder and I were still living in Egypt where we had started the company. And at that time, we had started with an idea in the B2C realm and had decided to pivot into the B2B world. And the idea was to enable companies to use audio and bite-size audio to engage their learners year round. So we wanted to create a B2B audio learning and development solution. So we built partnerships with Harvard Business School, and with MIT, and with McKinsey, and many more. And we had narrated their phenomenal content on behavioral skills. We put it onto this mobile app, it's platform. And in March of 2020, we knew that we wanted to meet our customers face to face. And so my co-founder and I moved from Egypt and what is possibly the most hilariously poorly timed move ever.
We came about a week prior to COVID, to New York. Thinking we would network, thinking we would, I go to lots of meetings and things that immediately the city shut down. But what ended up happening is really interesting, is that, we started bringing customers onto this learning and development platform in about June of 2020. And what was fascinating was that, we were seeing activity, people are consuming this great content from Harvard or MIT, et cetera, but we'd get these crazy spikes in usage. And we were wondering like, "What is going on?"
And we noticed that people were using this one little feature of the platform, the idea that they could upload their own content rather than using our third-party content. And they were using it in a way we hadn't expected. We had anticipated them, uploading their own training contact. Instead, what we saw is that they were uploading, a weekly podcast from their CEO or a podcast where two employees were interviewing each other because there was so much communication and so much sort of understanding within a company, all the stories that used to be transmitted in a physical office environment, all of those were getting lost.
And so we looked at what our customers were doing on Spokn. And we said, "Wow, that is a much better idea than what it was that we were originally working on." And so that's in the fall, in the late fall actually of 2020 is when we really started to rebuild the platform to make it more specifically this podcasting platform for work where you can absolutely do phenomenal learning and development on the platform. We got a lot of our customers are doing learning and development podcasts, but you can also do podcasts for employee engagement. You can also do podcasts for executive communications and strategic alignment. So there just is a lot more opportunity in the audio for enterprise space than we had even seen at first.
We are very lucky to have the incredible first customers that we did. Customers like Cedar health based in New York who, they sort of took it and ran with it, Cedar that, of course the name Cedar, they started an employee based podcast. That's between two Hines, it's an employee talk show. And it's such just phenomenal to watch the ways that companies are getting really creative with this.
How does the platform work?
Yeah, absolutely. So, all right, imagine, lets sort of walk through one specific use case. So say you are a company leader and you wanted to do a weekly update of some sort or share like a big company win. So you could record that audio either using the mobile app itself, or you could even record it on Zoom and you upload the audio file onto the Spokn platform, and then you can send it to your employees in a push notification. So it reaches them on their mobile phone. They're able to listen while they go on a walk or while they do the dishes, while they do a load of laundry. And so they can experience your message just like they do with their favorite podcasts, except that it is private and it's secure. And you, as a company, as the admin are able to see the engagement data.
So you can understand what messages stick and what resonates with your employees. And the final thing will add to this is that the content also lives on somewhere. So you're creating a repository of content, some of which is time-sensitive, but a lot of which is actually evergreen. And so for companies that are capturing stories on their culture, even stories on maybe the changes in the industry, or history of the company, these are incredibly, incredibly helpful audios for new hires as they join, or people who are changing departments. So having this repository of audio content within a company to is becoming incredibly valuable for our customers.
This is a mobile app that employees are able to download from the app store, both Android and iPhone. And then within a couple of weeks actually we'll have a web players as well.
Examples of the kind of content your customers are pushing out.
A great example is ServiceNow. Right now, they're in the process of building their first ever learning and development podcast. And so they are going to be interviewing 30 leaders from across the organization, everyone from SVPs down to normal managers to ask about how they're dealing with work-life blend, how they see career growth at service now. That's a great example of something that's kind of story-based learning and development podcast. Some of our other customers ShipBob, for example, they're using these podcasts to introduce new hires to the company. And so, typically in an all hands meeting, you might have one minute to introduce someone, but with the podcast, you're able to take five minutes and share some unique stories, share something special, it's really distinctive and different about the person.
So, other customers of ours, Esquire is a great company. They just launched a podcast series with their founders about the founding story, the sort of untold story of the company, because they're entering a big period of growth, hiring a lot of people and want to get folks up to speed. Other companies we're seeing, sales enablement is a huge one. So celebrating sales wins and just sharing tips for how to engage customers in the customer journey. So, as you can imagine, there's a lot of, I can go on and on. I'm happy to continue if you want.
How is Spokn evolving?
One of the most interesting things that we've seen is now in a basically every single sales call that we have, we get asked, okay, we love that Spokn has this privacy, it's because it's so secure, but what if we wanted to take some of our podcasts and make them public and use them as part of our, basically our part of our recruitment process. And so actually at the end of this month where we're launching something that enables companies to basically allow list emails and create accounts for people who are not yet employees and we're seeing companies use this in two ways or their intention is to use this in two ways.
One is actually to include the history of the company or the company values as part of job descriptions. And so that's, really before the candidate is signed. The other way that we're seeing companies that get very excited about using this is for pre-boarding and so, in between when someone is signed, there's that crucial period where it's still so easy to lose this great talent. And so the idea that a lot of companies have is how can we use storytelling? How can we highlight the distinctive voices in our company? Or create trust in leadership even before a person's first day. By giving these new hires who have yet to join this real inside view of the company and the kind of people that work there. So it's a really, really exciting use case for us. And honestly, it's probably one of the ones that we're most excited about.
Why audio works well
Chris, I think really, it really speaks to two things that audio does really well. One is authenticity. And I just, I think there's a certain type of truth that comes out in a person's voice that even can feel more authentic than coming across in video. And the second thing is trust, there's something about hearing a person's voice, like podcasts have sort of trained our brains to listen to the host, service speakers and almost see them as friends or confidants. And so, being able to have that really personal touch, but it's actually quite easy. I almost call it emotional arbitrage. You don't have to put in that much as a company, but you get this huge emotional outcome out of it. And that's an incredible opportunity for companies that really want to completely transform how it is that they're recruiting.
Audio is easy, but the best audio takes some preparation. And I think it's the sort of the same thing that you'd hope people would do even before they're talking to a meeting, for example. The first thing is to set aside a little bit of time for yourself to really think about the purpose. Like, "Why am I doing this podcast? What is my purpose?" If I am, say a director of a department and I'm doing a department update, "Why am I sharing this?" Number two, "Who is my audience? What's their perspective? How much do they understand? How much context do they have for what I'm about to say?? And how can I share my news in a way that's most relevant to that, that makes them feel, "Okay, oh my gosh, I'm really glad I'm listening to this. I'm so happy that someone shared this information with me."
And then the third thing I'd say Chris is really being authentic. And a lot of times, frankly, authenticity is all the things that don't go, right? They don't go right into the project that you were talking about. So being willing to talk about failures and like vulnerability, but also, frankly, all the things that don't go right while you're recording a podcast.
It doesn’t have to be perfect
And I think actually recognizing that imperfection is something that adds value to employees. Now more than ever, if you are looking at what millennial and Gen Z employees really care about transparency and vulnerability are way up on the list, we don't want things that are super, super, highly produced, instead you want something that's a little more accessible.
Tell us about your round of funding
Honestly, it was really wonderful. We couldn't be happier with the investors. We have so happy to work with NEA, with Reach so many more and to have come out of the Y Combinator program in general is just, frankly, really a dream come true for us. We didn't expect that when we were in Egypt, but really, raising funds doesn't equal success. Success is having great customers that really love your product. And so that's where our mind is right now.
What's the pricing model like?
It depends on company size and we typically do contracts that, cross 100% of the employee base. And so it's roughly based on the number of employees, we've really found, it's actually quite interesting companies that roll it out, company-wide. It's like a whole different level of engagement because there's this social aspect to podcasting where people like to chat about what the podcast episode was about, or sort of understand what's happening in other departments.
Do you allow for things like the appreciation of cover art, things like that, and typical podcasts?
Absolutely. The whole point of the app is to make it feel as close to a consumer podcast experience as possible while still keeping it super secure. And so yep, cover art is there. And then, all the types of tools that, think about the tools and markers have, for example, to engage consumers just in the normal world, we took a lot of those tools and we sort of did is turn them inside a company. And so things like personalization, if you're the admin on this and you're setting up to send a push notification out to your entire employee base of a thousand people, you can make sure that everyone gets it with their own first name.
You can also make sure that, hey, if you want it to hit their inboxes, or do you want it to hit their phones at 9:15 in the morning, you can make sure that it hits everyone at 9:15 in their local time zone, because you don't want to be pinging people in the middle of the night. You can even tap internal influencers within your company to have them sign off on different pieces of content that you're sending out. And then of course, being able to dive into analytics about all of us, these are all tools that we're trying to borrow from basically modern marketing, and just turn it internally into how you engage with your own employee base.
Any new product enhancements coming out in the next few weeks, months?
Yes, oh my gosh, we are so excited. We're launching our first Slack integration. We are launching our web player. And so employees that don't want to download the app or who can't download the app for some reason, are able to play it when they're at their desk. And then the final thing that we're doing, which I think is going to be really interesting. We've also worked on an integration that helps with specifically onboarding because this much like a recruitment, is one of the most popular use cases that we're finding people want to use podcasts for.
And so what basically what we've structured is the ability to do drip campaigns. And so, read off the backend of your HRS system, that when someone joins your team on day one, they're getting that audio from the two founders, sharing the founding story. On day two, they're getting that audio from the chief people officer that talks about values and the way that they're lived in the company. On day four, they're getting that audio, which is a collection of different employees, first day stories and what their first week was like. And then on day six, they're getting an audio from the sales team about the customer journey, for example. And so you're able to drip this content out and have it be automated for every new employee that you have. That's something we're really excited about.
Are you hiring and tell us where to go learn more?
Yeah, well, we are hiring, thank you for asking specifically we're hiring for roles in product marketing and in sales. And so, these are jobs that are listed on our website. It's getspokn.com and Spokn is spelled without the E. And so, we'd love for anyone who's interested to reach out. And just in general, clearly we're sort of like a sponge of a company. We're constantly taking in new ideas and we love having conversations about how podcasts can be used to enhance the employee experience, recruitment, onboarding anything. So we love having those conversations.