The Biz

Industry Revolution

For those unfamiliar with Voices.com, I open all lectures with the story of how Stephanie and I founded what was then Interactive Voices.

The idea was simple: What if we could build an online community that brought together freelance voice talent from around the world and provided them with job opportunities?

The challenge was significantly more difficult in that we needed to revolutionize an industry and inspire people to change their hiring habits - from the old way to the new online approach for finding voice over talent.

Building an Online Business, One Page at a Time

In those early days, we wrote all the HTML for each web page on Interactive Voices. Profiles were created, edited and updated by Stephanie or myself and voiceover demos were sent via email, then uploaded to our web server.

Even MP3 files for voice over auditions were sent by email, then we'd upload them to our server for the clients to receive. We even built a simple user-interface for the clients to listen and evaluate the voice talent that had replied to their job posting.

In short, it was far from elegant and we quickly realized that our process wouldn't scale to thousands of job opportunities as we had envisioned.

Building a Team

The first people we hired to help manage the growth was an outstanding Web Developer and System Administrator, Wesley, and a compassionate Customer Care Manager, Carol. Since then, we've rounded out our team.

Re-Branding & Making the Transition

One of most-significant changes over the past few years was the acquisition of the domain name, Voices.com and the re-branding of our company. Seeing as our customers were already familiar with us as "interactivevoices.com", moving to "voices.com" was easy for people to make the leap. Simple names work online.

The Growth of Voices.com

Since completing the move to Voices.com, the website and the community has flourished. At the same time, the industry has exploded, too. The voice-over industry is now a $10 Billion industry and with more uses of voice in audio, video and multimedia, I'm confident this growth will continue.

OIART Student's Predict a Mobile Technology Revolution

Near the end of the presentation, we discussed how social media, blogs and podcasts are changing the media landscape. I also posed the question, what's next? To my surprise that prompted a 10-15 minute discussion on how technology is becoming increasingly personalized and mobile.

I found this particularly interesting as this was the same day that Steve Jobs was giving his keynote presentation introducing the iPhone 3G.

Business Resources

To wrap up the session, we blasted through an outline of a business plan (PDF) as well as a number of websites and software tools for operating a business.

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