Sub Club Podcast: Creative App Marketing Strategies — Cliff Weitzman, Speechify

0:00[Music] [Applause] hey you're listening to the sub club podcast a show dedicated to the best practices for building and growing subscription app businesses we'll share insider secrets from the top subscription apps on the app stores let's get into the show hello i'm your host david barnard and with me today revenue cat ceo jacob biden our guest today is cliff weitzman the founder and ceo of speechify as someone with dyslexia cliff built speechify to help himself learn by having texts read aloud cliff went on to blitz scale speechify with an irreverent approach to sas norms and a willingness to experiment on the podcast we talked with cliff

0:45about the benefits of building for a niche the one ad that changed things for speechify and why cliff is now hiring comedians hey cliff thanks for being on the podcast i wanted to kick it off with the story of speechify i know the story but i don't know that all of our listeners do and it's it's a good one so uh tell us why you built speechify uh for sure david great to hop on with you jacob great to see you again um happy to share so i'm originally from israel i grew up there i got to the us when i was 13 and i'm severely dyslexic which means that

1:19first second third fourth grade i kind of faked my way through school i was very bad at reading i finished reading my first book i think in eighth grade couldn't spell my last name and my dad essentially eventually was like all right i got five kids um tyler who's cliff's younger brother started coding when he was nine taught himself assembly in fifth grade skipped four and a half years of math at exeter and you know eventually did a master's in ai at stanford alex my sister speaks seven languages and cliff can't read so something's got to give here so eventually my dad ended up reading books

1:48to me and the book i wanted to read the most was harry potter and so he would record himself on a cassette tape and i would just listen to that thing over and over and we moved to the us us i learned english by listening to harry potter audiobooks 22 times in a row and became obsessed with audiobooks that means i've been listening to about two audiobooks a week every week for the last 16 years about 100 books per year and i listen fast as you can tell by my speaking speed so i'm trying to modulate myself when i got to college i found that most

2:14of my textbooks at brown did not have an audio book and so i built a text-to-speech tool that would read out everything to me it could scan physical books with my phone and ocr them and read them i could with one tap import a hundred page pdf and turn it into a two hour audio book uh later we built a chrome extension that lets you read your emails and medium and we created an api and i built this big followership of moms of other kids like me who have dyslexia um who got the originally for their kids and i'd fly around the country to different schools that were

2:44for people who were nerds uh you know atypical some people with dyslexia adhd low vision autism concussion anxiety people who are second language speakers of english um today that's about twenty percent five percent of our user base uh seventy five percent of neurotypical people so doctors lawyers accountants people in the military executives people in finance um and it's been a wild ride framing like uh how long ago was that where you were flying around doing these like uh traveling salesman stuff flying around i was like three and a half four years ago um and uh really the the way it started was i was uh so i had the best time as a

3:22student in college more than anyone i've ever met um i don't smoke but i dance harder than anybody else um and i got to do an independent concentration in renewable energy engineering which is a mix of physics engineering and computer science i did a lot of design classes at risd and so i convinced two of my professors to let me stay in college as a visiting scholar which meant i did not pay tuition i didn't do homework but i got to live on campus be on meal plan and just like classes when i felt like it um and i was working on side projects i built about

3:5036 products when i was a student everything from 3d printed skateboard breaks to iphone apps and websites and that's how i paid for school and when i graduated above everything else my thesis was i wanted to be the person that i needed most when i was young and the thing i really needed when i was little was someone to read my books to me at the same time i noticed that there was a huge shift in the application of narrow deep learning algorithms to speech synthesis optical character recognition transcription translation natural language processing and recommendation engines so i pulled that all together into one thing and i

4:17started messaging principles of schools for kids with disabilities and i went to this one interview and the guy was like cool app kid and he was really useful and he's like i gotta go i'm going to this conference and i was like what's the conference he's like well it's the international dyslexia association conference in florida and i was like sounds like i should be there when is it he's like well it's tomorrow at 8am and i was like cool so 3am i booked a ticket i had no money at the time so i convinced united to give me a discount of 40 on the phone booked the airbnb nearby the hotel um

4:45and then when the keynote speaker finished speaking i jumped on the page uh grabbed the microphone and demo with speechify and ace bother to fly me out teach their kids how to use petrify and that's how everything started wait did you get kicked out of the conference what happened after that i did not get kicked out of the conference they like adopted move one of their own they were like this is such a cute 21 year old who's like thinks he's a traveling salesman and is so open about the fact that he has dyslexia actually just got a message two days ago from ben powers who's the

5:14principal of one of the biggest most successful schools for kids with learning differences and i'm now building an online assessment that will automatically tell you uh heuristically the probability of you having dyslexia or adhd and he's been helping me actually figure out some of the components of that that's fascinating that's such an amazing story you know i think too many app developers don't just think about the like basic marketing principles like you went to a conference where your target market was and you spoke to them like and and that was and we were talking earlier like you saying you know staying niche early on you feel like was a

5:51really strong point tell me more about that and how how marketing in that niche really helped you grow in those early days yeah so number one i'm obsessed with text to speech i think it's the coolest technology that's ever been built i would not be the person that i am today without texas speech there's a book called shantaram about a guy who is addicted to drugs in australia he runs away from prison like breaks out ghost becomes a slum doctor in india he meets all these you know drug lords and he he gets to know their moms like man i'm really like a drug lord like my

6:20core skill set is i'm a really good leader and i do not give up i just happened to be lucky that audiobooks were a thing when i was kid so i became really erudite and i used text-to-speech to like read all of aristotle and wikipedia and all that stuff um and that's why i did well in university um and you know that kicked me into into working on speechify um and then from there you know i just kept building it i forgot the question say it again was it um staying really niche early on focusing more on dyslexia really helped you kind of get tracked don't worry

6:51don't don't sweat it i do that like three times a day so so that is exactly right so what was really motivating about staying niche in this regard is in the beginning i was the core developer so you'd upload a pdf it would not work you try it again the app would crash like it takes like four or five attempts before like a good outcome came out so if you didn't have dyslexia you're like see a guy see a buddy um but if you had dyslexia you try five times because you're not gonna read the book by yourself and after the fifth time it works to

7:20this day 15 of the reviews on the app store are people who say they cried when they downloaded the app because it was so transformative for them and so i was allowed to produce a more shoddy product because the need that i was serving for that particular cohort was so acute and the next centric circle outside of dyslexia was adhd and then low vision and autism and concussion and anxiety and second language learners and so i realized this and so when i started marketing speechify what i did is i identified five facebook groups for moms of kids with learning differences specifically dyslexia and then i did

7:52another five for adhd i found the reddit groups and i set a goal that i would post on all of them and i messaged you know six of my best friends and i was like if i don't post in every single one of these groups by you know 10 a.m on monday i have to run 10 miles this weekend so i had accountability so i posted and actually it became a problem because reddit only lets you post up until a certain amount that it takes you a bot so to open multiple reddit accounts to do it and don't worry none of that none of the reddit terms of service police are here

8:22today and i was like cool how do i keep engaging them so i ended up starting writing publicly on the internet a book about my experience being dyslexic i write 500 words a day um and it made me you know really good at communicating with this cohort and it's really life transformative for for all these people um now the telephone was recorded sound was invented by edison people don't know edison was like 90 deaf the reason why he was the inventor of recorded sound is because he could not perceive sound well so he would have to put his hand on the wood to feel the vibrations and then he goes you know

8:58what if we put a pin on this drum and we see how it oscillates up and down so the critical invention behind the telephone was invented by a guy who had a disability and this is actually true for a lot of inventions they start with someone who's optimizing for a small marginalized group and at the end of the day it actually helps everybody um so you know over the last five years airpods heralded a shift in how people consume information same thing for double speed netflix and youtube and you know lecture capture over the pandemic um and so people just learn how to listen fast from podcasts on audiobooks

9:28and so i just focus on that group and i was like my number one mission about everything else in life is to be the person that i needed most when i was young i want to make sure that reading is never a barrier for learning for anyone no matter if you have this lexir ed if you grew up in ghana and there were 50 kids in your third grade class and didn't get individualized attention like that should not matter if you want to learn i'm going to personally go and remove that challenge for you and then if we can help everybody else sweet we'll do that too

9:52how did you how did so at some point yeah you talk about moving out in these concentric circles at some point you were like okay i'm done posting on you know folks with special needs like forums and you're like okay like i'm ready to go to like college students or whatever your next like you said it was adhd or but but even like beyond that i mean speechify is a product everybody can get value out of right if you understand how to use it like when did you decide like was it like growth driven were you just like okay it's time to go to the next

10:17level like there must have been something driving you beyond because if it was just to help folks you know in the same predicament you would have just stopped there but you kept going right so like how did you you know decide to like push out and like what was your motivation so when i was a student i got provisioned a bunch of different pieces of software to help me with dyslexia and they all were horrible like so bad so i was cobbling together my own tools that worked fast i had better voices i had all the stuff that i wanted um and i realized pretty quickly that if you want

10:45to build something that actually makes an impact selling to educational institutions is not the way to do it um now i feel that we have been blessed to be alive in 2020 where consumer subscription is an acceptable business model right and that was allowed for us because spotify and netflix educated the consumer that it's okay to pay a subscription for software now actually they pay for media in my case they pay for software which is amazing because i don't have any cogs for the most part so that's great um and i was like cool i'm not gonna have fun selling to schools i would lose all my hair um so

11:23instead what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna build a powerful megaphone so everybody will learn about speechify and if you happen to have a friend with dyslexia you will tell them about it so i'll give you an example on the car ride on the way here i got a message from a friend who's like hey i just talked to sarah blakely he was the founder of spanx she has a she'd love to meet you because she has some connection to dyslexia this happens all the time people could i had a call earlier today you know hey cliff great to meet you by the way i have to ask a favor my best

11:51friend her daughter was recently diagnosed with dyslexia can you hop on a call with her absolutely this is what i'm here for um and so i was like cool if i educate everybody this exists and i also tell my story they will introduce to other friends that they have with dyslexia and that's exactly what happened now how did i do this i ended up making an email list in excel in google sheets i got a google sheets list of the top 100 best performing consumer subscription companies in the world and i emailed every ceo every head of growth um and then i hopped on zoom calls with them

12:20and i fly to wherever they were in the world in order to work with them so i you know got to know the founders of reflectly and blinkist and dollar shave club and honey and audible um and grammarly and whoop um and and neil from my tricks and then i literally sat behind them in their office and looked at how they bought instagram ads and then i moved to a level where there were a lot of really good e-commerce companies and then i i got really good at buying wait people people were okay with this you're just like hey i'm just a random internet guy i want to come sit

12:50in your office and watch you watch you do instagram ads you know it starts with a cold instagram or facebook or email being like hey okay i'm flying to vancouver soon to meet with the founder of lululemon i've been messaging this guy for three and a half years finally this meeting is happening but if i read a book about you and i think you're awesome i read about you i send like five six cold messages every single day so eventually people respond and i'm not i'm incessant you can't get rid of me and i'm nice you know so if you know committed any crimes yet so

13:23like it's probably you know like somebody it's a it's a badge of honor if cliff comes to visit you right so so so so i try to get them and then i think that the place where i'm good is like if you get on the call with me i'm interesting enough that you'll do a second call if you just blew up my whole hiring uh my whole hiring practice that's how you know retire recruit same here um and the interesting part is like i read a lot of books so it doesn't matter what topic you're interested in i'll go really deep with you it doesn't need to be speechify um so we'll talk

13:57about economics and philosophy and it doesn't matter and eventually be like hey you know where in the world are you and they'll tell me and i said cool you want to you know hang out on friday and they're like are you going to be in denmark and i'll be like i'll i'll come to denmark so that's what happened with jacob for mufleckley i happened to be in germany at the time i literally booked a flight and showed up on sunday and booked the hotel five minutes from his house and we hung out in denmark and he was like come come hang out in the office sounds good and i

14:22was like this is your monitor yeah oh can i look at your instagram account and he's like sure why are you buying this in terms of stories as opposed to doing posts oh polls convert better i didn't even think about that so i just like i would do this and make friends i mean i'm still friends with like you know all these people and that's how i learned and then i moved to la and i was like cool i need to get better at making ads so who's good at making content for the internet influencers cool i made friends with most like really well followed influencers on nla um and some of them

14:50became like you know some of my best friends um and so i got really good at making content for speechify for the internet and then i built this whole team um that's really really good at producing content um so we put out about 120 new pieces of creative per week across facebook instagram picked up on youtube and we just do very very extensive testing of creative and we just keep sitting in increasing increasingly increasing spend and there's a very fun you know cac to first payment period we make sure the cac is lower than the first payment period and then the renewals are gravy um and then

15:20all these people who download speech reply who use it as a non-dyslexic user some of them are dyslexic great but those who don't tell their dyslexic friends is it is it a did you set that as a comp like as you evolved this like you know i've got an app and i'm going to a conference and jumping on pirating stages uh to like i'm gonna make this because at some point you know you raise money you kind of like you decided to make this a thing did you like sit down and is that still part of your mission like when you're on boarding people you're like hey like our mission is to

15:50help those who need this we're gonna sell it to people who it helps a little bit so we can really have the is that like part of you do you have like a really tight mission statement that you like you share with customers yeah so the goal is to make sure the reading is never a barrier to learning for anyone okay it doesn't matter who you are um now i personally have a soft spot for you if you have dyslexia outrageously sure those are march my challenges by the way interestingly enough the most performing new ad that we have is a song that i wrote about my experience

16:18and that thing's converting i haven't seen that one yet you got to get me targeted i want to see these it's my favorite ads when they come up oh i'm happy to show you guys the first uh the first couple of lines but like that one's crushing it um if you search read to me on spotify read to me speechify is like blowing up right now or searching i mean i want to address this because when i first met you a couple years ago like you were not a meme uh and since then you've become a meme how like did you like i said initially you

16:47weren't in your creative right like you weren't i mean the the you hadn't crossed that ego line yet but at some point you were like you know what cliff's gonna be the star here like did you get pushed back on that did you feel weird about it it seems like it's working like how like what was the decision making tell me that story so here's the funny part i'm in like three percent of our ads really not many of the ads but i guess maybe it's the only ones that hit with me because i know you exactly we we only recently started to focus on brands so we just hired grant who's been

17:17a phenomenal driving brand at speechify um but if you see the speechify ads you know the blue color is consistent the name speechify is consistent but the app doesn't consistent but there's no like core you know camera except for i happen to be in a lot of the ads and i look funny um so what happened was you know i learned how to run instagram ads i realized that the most important thing is volume you put out 300 creative one out of three hundred will blow up but you don't know which one no one is a genius can tell you and if they tell them that's just that's just the

17:50algorithm like they just instagram decides which one is gonna be really effective when you say blow up you mean the conversion rate one that'll actually work yeah yeah yeah exactly so um okay but it's true for everything it's true if you're a tick talker or youtube influencer it's true if you're optimizing for seo and you're writing articles like no one is a genius and knows which one is going to be the best like at a certain point volume is what matters and so i was like cool i'm just going to hit valium how i'm going to hit volume i would exit gold's gym in l.a where i was living at the

18:19time i'd pull my phone up and like you know i'm just exiting goals gym finished the workout i listened to my medical textbook with speechify thanks petrified click the link below to

18:35[Music] editors downl then i started hiring you know other people to make content with us as well and do better product demos and this and that um now i'm in the process right now of hiring comedians to write ads so the best performing ads for us um are like seven to 14 second instagram and facebook ads used to be that demo the product really well it's like hulk valley valley pop valley prop call to action on youtube it's like me telling stories and me being funny and so you know for those listening if you come across me i usually wear a set of red headphones in the ads

19:18that's the meme that's the meme i'm talking about yeah and i play a character so internally we call this character oh yeah it's totally a character cliff definitely not related uh we call this character cruz silver so is a hyperbolized version of cliff he talks in a much deeper voice you know hi i'm cliff founder of speechify what is speechify well you get stuff you need to read and we read it to you instantly yeah instantly um and he's just like dead stare on the camera the entire time and and those convert really well because they're hilarious and a lot of that is either i find an ad that i

19:53really like so i duplicated this is hilarious so i was like what are good ads one of them is the dollar sorry the old spice commercial yeah um i'm on a horse so i was like who's got a horse and posted this to instagram turns out uh logan paul had a horse in his ranch so i ended up going to the ranch mounting his horse and shooting a bold spice commercial and it crushed it on youtube right like it's the more ridiculous have fun with it yeah i wanted to ask you about one specific ad so this yeah and and it's hard to tell from the outside like

20:28what actually hit and really drove the business versus maybe there was a different inflection point that happened at the same time but there was that one ad that was very dollar shave club where you're like in a pool and you walk out and you know um and looking at appendi's download figures that ad dropped in august 2020 i believe and and looking at app annie that seemed to be and and they're not always perfectly accurate but it seemed to be like a huge inflection point was it that ad specifically or did you actually turn on uh you know this this the uh ad spigot around that time no we had been running

21:05ads on facebook and instagram for a while before that um to our iphone app that ad was the first ad that worked on youtube so very weirdly that was one of the top 10 ads running on youtube driving downloads from mobile apps the only apps in that category that were not us were gaming apps coming from youtube right yeah then we launched the chrome extension the chrome extension has been by far one of the fastest growing extensions in the history of the crosstalk like in the usage on the chrome extension is like amazing and you know it's a so um i mentioned tyler i think earlier in this uh podcast

21:38my brother uh tyler's like an actual genius like he did his masters in artificial intelligence at stanford he gets 103 per assignment um he built an array of exceptionally high quality uh voices for speechify as well as advanced ocr advanced syncing you know gwyneth paltrow's voices on the app so and there's nlp that will identify the ads on the page it'll jump the page the ads it'll sync the audio you can dynamically change the speed so it can go up to 700 words per minute 900 words per minute um so when we released the chrome extension then things went bananas because there's very few people who can do performance

22:13advertising and advertising on youtube because youtube generally has horrible attribution but youtube is all by google and the chrome store is owned by google so attribution is better so we started sending a ton of people from youtube ad to the chrome store both on desktop and then i imagine a lot of that converts into if they convert and use it like they'll use the mobile app then too right right so so so that worked and there was like a series of other youtube ads that it worked really really well around that time um so again that ad even if i look in terms of our ads

22:44that's like number 20 in terms of like the most views there's like many many many pieces of content that completely outperform that ad but that is such a meme and i play such a character that it shows you by the way the difference between direct response marketing it's like interrupting marketing and brand building like there's some brand work that is associated with that project now is that the brand we want i don't know but we'll see did you know like like with that kind of ad and that take and like that was gonna hit that it was gonna become the cliff show because i feel like that was the moment it became

23:13the cliff show right like it kind of becomes you become part of the the marketing right you become part of the person the best again is ridiculous the best the best the best the best converting ad that we had before that was me shirtless in bed saying in medical school i have to read a lot so i use this app speechify to read my textbooks and then everybody's shooting on me this guy's clearly not in medical school um you know blah blah blah blah blah oh yeah you have good haters your haters are i mean that's why you're a meme like memes get haters like that's

23:46that's that's part of it i love reading the i love reading the hate mail underneath yeah well the funniest part is you know we have a lot of like very sweet ads about you know supporting kids with dyslexia and 50 of the comments are millennials are ruining the world this is so lazy like you know why are you not reading et cetera that's okay the funniest part is if you read you know hate comments um and you go consistently to all their stuff is spewing hate has nothing to do with you so every single time i do this i don't know if you saw i did a series of posts about this i just

24:16like come back to them with so much love and you flip them immediately and just like if you sure and then i'll go like everything on your instagram page um so it's not a not a big deal but uh yeah the so now the thing that i'm trying to do is figuring out okay how do i do this in a like actually intelligent way uh so we have a couple of wins here and there uh but again the the ads that i'm in are like legitimately less than five percent of the ads are we running it's just the most recognizable i i you mentioned you were like thinking

24:47about hiring comedians or like and it made me think of like how traditionally brands would outsource this right like you'd work with an agency they would be and and you're doing the opposite you're like the starring in the ads you're bringing them in and that seems i mean i don't know i i don't know i'm not as well read manchester united five more but like i don't know if this has happened if other company because even apple like the iconic advertising right they they would work with them but they use agencies right like do you how do you feel about that is do you feel like that's a strategic angle do

25:17you feel like this is a shift that like like brands need to own their creative and make it like part of their core thing so at speechify we have like really clear set values so the top four values on the company are extreme product quality speed leading with love and frugality so as a result of frugality we do not like agencies to begin with we love hiring internally so we're about 100 people at speech right now all in all about 70 engineers uh we have the android team the iphone team uh the black and platform slash api team the web slash chrome team and the ai team

25:47i have sat at the helm of every department at a different point in time so i was the first developer um and then we got to the point where like i suck you know i2 was ranked number three in robotics in india the like in high school got a full ride to brown did 17 citations in ad research as a sophomore uh was a cto of a yc company as a senior at brown graduated became ceo of that company scaled to 100 people sold and joined speech by the lead product simon was ranked number one in math in bulgaria in high school he wrote a textbook on neural networks he came

26:15and started off as you know head of ios then he became head of engineering now he leads operations recruiting rajiv led a 100-person engineering organization at amazon reporting for the cfo uh raquel and our team similar um anson was the smartest math guy two years ahead of me at brown uh worked for the nsa then he worked for palantir then he was the cto of a yc company called trade became ceo trade finally joined speaker fire like i'm not allowed to touch the code base at this at a certain point i'm not allowed either but it's for other reasons um then i lead product then i like design

26:45then i love recruiting and so the thing that i do is i love to jump in the deep end of the pool i will read literally every book there is about the topic and i will talk to every expert who has done it themselves and then i'll rewrite the playbook altogether my philosophy is a ceo sorry a founder your number one job is to learn how to code how to design how to talk to users how to do all that stuff how to market uh a ceo has three rules you know is there cash in the bank are the right people sitting in the right seats and

27:13what's the overall long-term vision so i spend a lot of time in vision and i've spent the majority of my time in hiring a small amount of time goes towards marketing and recently brand so marketing i went i figured out how to do it in terms of facebook instagram um you know youtube and like one of the people who i keep trying to get on the phone is the ceo of tick tock for north america and so i've gotten everybody underneath him and i've got like three of those so i'll get the call i'll figure it out we're going to dominate tick tock if you're listening see of tick tock you got a fan

27:42let's talk to you no seriously because again it's they're so good um but you know the api that we've now built you know it was gonna eclipse everything in terms of what we do in terms of performance um but uh and i've interviewed hundreds of people to come into speechify to lead marketing i just have yet to find someone who i think is sophisticated enough about understanding both the math and the creative so some people understand the creative but they don't understand roi and cac and some people understand roi and cac but they're not creative i mean it certainly feels like when i think about like you guys turn text into

28:14speech like every computer has this built in right like i mean you do it the best like obviously right but like marketing that that's a little bit of the magic right like that's a little bit of like explaining you you're like you i i think you said it you said it at the beginning of the call and i think it kind of just it's a pass by statement that text-to-speech is one of the most amazing technologies ever and you're

28:32like my computer could do it in 1995. but when you stop and you think about it you're like no that's actually true right and like you're actually bringing that to mass market right it makes sense but it's it's interesting that you're keeping it internally right and i think that's actually an advantage and i think that's actually a theme we've talked about enough a number of times on this show because b2c is so hard because like churn rates are so high like you can't you're not gonna get you're you need to have like a content advantage or like a brand advantage or like something right and like i think

29:02just outsourcing that to somebody to tell me like make ads for me like i don't think it's gonna work you know yeah and again we're just very frugal like i'm not gonna pay a margin of ads to uh agency now here's the thing so i have a youtube channel right even that is in-house you know we have a stable of really strong editors who do all the editing so i shoot with you know a teammate for two hours on a sunday that's the video for the week and it gets shot instead of you know hiring an external agency like god forbid we hire an external engineer as an agency like

29:30simon would murder me in my sleep uh and he'd be right to do that um now in terms of marketing the landscape ultra changes so fast tick tock wasn't the thing that people consumed information on two and a half years ago and now it all uses instagram right you know um i did not think that we could find roi on facebook because so many people had already advertised on facebook but then they honed their algorithm better right there's so much stuff going on in life cycle and push like you gotta be on the front edge and that's where you find arbitrage so that's important to know

30:03now with comedians yeah you know what i'm doing for that that i'm not even hiring classic comedians i'm finding i'm just going to i'm going to uh jerry seinfeld's house i'm going to sit outside so he comes out and i can talk to him no oh well that too is jerry stan steinfeld's wife uh just did her i think he was masters in psychology and she listened to the entire thing with granite poncho's voice on speech fight see i guessed it i guessed it all right larry david i really you're only you're only a phone call away you're only a phone call away actually like why we're talking about

30:33that i thought the larry david did a crypto thing for for uh i thought it was really good yeah like i care less about the product but like i said that too yeah yeah you should think about it the nice part about that ad is that there's so much existing brand behind the larry david character that it works there's no exactly right behind the cruise silver uh yeah it'd be harder to pull off yeah but what i'm doing now is finding people who have crushed it on tick tock making flight tick tocks and hiring those people to help me come up with the content for new

31:03ads because hey i'm funny but i'm not the funniest person in the room let me find the funniest people and well and then taste will change right like you're not going to be able to be on the on the you know even that old spice ad like that's going to eventually what is this this you know that's like the was up commercials from the 90s right like it's just eventually gonna ride the trends too which is something that historically i've not been a fan of because you know i don't read news i mean like history books like that's what i'm a nerd about um so i'm never like

31:32most up to date about the news and like i could care less um but what is culturally relevant is important so for example who's the most talked about person right now in this moment the celebrity that's uh definite as i was gonna make a joke with will smith right now okay right all right so we're gonna come out with a voice right so you guys there you go right yeah if you can yeah get uh bill smith uh i was gonna ask you you mentioned this youtube thing that you've been working on and i've seen these on you share them on linkedin and stuff it's a bit of a different tech

32:02you're kind of building some content that's around like the leadership thought leadership ceo leadership stuff that's like not necessarily directly around selling uh speechify i mean without without piercing the veil without ruining the cliff show like what is what is your intent with that like why was that exciting for you like why was that something you decided to do yeah so um when i was a senior in college i wrote a 30 page paper about my world views and the conclusion to that paper was that there was like a huge conclusion actually about dyslexia but i broke it down into the 18 principles that i live

32:36my life by that are different than most other people's and then i also kind of honed in on like my three top goals in life which had iterated and developed over time and they were number one be the best dad that i could possibly be to my kids in the future and have kids who are greater than me number two was maximize the love in my life whether it be uh partner you know my girlfriend um family etc um and the last one was create as much value as possible in the world and elevate the collective quality of life in the short term by building tech companies and in

33:03the long term by doing more mentorship so i'm the oldest of five kids um and you know i love being an older brother um and so i wanted to scale that a little bit more so that's something i've always been into even in college you know the reason speech if i took off is i made youtube videos about how to use text of speech that got hundreds of thousands of views i put them on just because i want people to know and then i lean into you know company building because 90 of my job today is hiring so it's great because a potential engineer it's basically every single person who

33:30comes on a call with me has already binge watched the youtube channel yeah and so it's like this is as if it's our third call right so that's the ben i mean not to make everything about quick pro quo but like when your time is very valuable and constrained like everything you do kind of has to have like it has to be you know sometimes it can just be fun but like it's best if it's also serving and i wonder it it's about hiring right and it's probably even good for you know execs all the way up and down the stack i would imagine um for for generating and generating

33:59stuff like that so yeah speaking of hiring we uh we do need to wrap up um and i believe you have a few positions uh you're looking to fill you want to tell us a little bit about that and yeah just looking forward to speechify um so we just hired uh a pm for uh mobile monetization but uh there's a lot of work to be done there so um here's how we look at things that speak to fight we do not care about your background so if you worked at facebook at google if you went to harvard or stanford i could not care less what i care about is that you

34:27learn really fast you are firing the belly for the product and hire loyalty to the team we love hiring entrepreneurs so people who have already built their own things so for example if you come into the product team at speechify you have to have built something that's used by at least a million people and you move that important kpi at least one percent ideally to install the trial or child paid um if it's retention then you're a god and come talk to me immediately and if you're and if you're a uh an engineer you know be someone who's fast um and and can learn quick so we're

35:00constantly hiring for engineers on ios android web um our stack is typescript mainly for web but we really we're hiring for for all positions and so if you're someone who fits that mold and you think uh ai and texas feature cool uh cliff speechify.com send me a message how how i mean you mentioned you said you're about 70 people now like 70 engineers 100 people what's your goal like are you trying to what's your goal to how big are you guys planning to grow in the next year um we will probably scale to 250. wow the scale of the goal is not to be that size the goal is to hit our okrs right

35:36sure frugality and all that right yeah exactly but um look so tyler just joined the team we're probably going to staff about 10 other you know machine learning engineers underneath tyler the growth team really needs some more sauce i'm looking for more product designers as well again anyone who's like a great editor who has success with performance marketing i will hire a heartbeat if they have the track record of getting good cac um again that stuff's really hard and then we hired just a lot of leadership recently um across b2b and enterprise um across the api across internationalization localization et cetera um so yeah it's every every

36:17position we're looking for people that's awesome that's awesome and y'all are fully remote as well right yeah we're fully remote so we've got folks who work for speed defined 25 different countries wow wow you got usb that's for sure dang that's awesome that's so great i love it i mean i think you know and just to like to back that up i think like of all the like consumer products i see out there like some some some of them have legs some some have figured it out i think you guys have one of the ones that have a huge opportunity like i think it's all straight ahead to you i

36:48think your culture has to be i'm a you know every culture is a reflection of their founder and it's like if you liked hearing from cliff you can probably imagine what working there's like and it's if that's right for you i can imagine it's a great opportunity like i would love to i would love to see what what whether it's like a day in the shoes at speechify so um hopefully we can help you out by far the stupidest person in the company like that's the goal that's the goal so yeah download the ios app for speech fight download the chrome extension shoot me an email check us out on

37:18youtube cliff weitzman medium and instagram as well at cliffwiseman um and also if you have a mobile app use revenuecat you know that has completely changed my life i used to do this manually i can't believe i had to do that um apple's subscription internal api is atrocious there's nothing better for you so install revenue account immediately we're just happy to be along for the ride that's all so thank you so much cliff yeah thanks for being on the show cliff yeah guys again to make sure you never miss an episode subscribe to the show and your favorite podcast player thanks so much for listening until next time

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