Interview with Voices.com's CEO David Ciccarelli on minimum project budget drop...

In this special edition of VO Life, I talk to Voices.com CEO David Ciccarelli about the announcement to drop minimum project rate to $5, and the issues this presents for Professional Voiceover Artists. See below for Transcript.

Toby Ricketts

Hello and welcome to vo life with me Toby Ricketts a special edition of vO life today actually, we're talking to David Cirelli, the CEO of voices.com, the world's largest voice over marketplace or pay to play as we like to call them. Recently, they had a bit of a bombshell press release, when they said they were going to drop the minimum project fee from 100. US dollars down to five US dollars, which is a pretty contentious move for voice talent. The race to the bottom, as we've always said, maybe upon us. So thank you to David to come and ask some questions here on the podcast. Hey, great to be here, Toby. Thanks for inviting me on and Yeah, happy to cover that and the rationale behind the decision and kind of what some of the other, you know, facts on the ground that we were seeing. So yeah, let's let's do it. Fantastic. So I mean, you know, voices.com has, has sent out these kinds of messages before which have suddenly sent ripples through the voiceover world, there was the acquisition of voice bank, of course, like back back in the day, there was there was a bit of sort of bombshell news with the sort of the double dipping saga as it was called, where I think you had a sort of a few people within the team that were taking more of the NFS Share that kind of thing. And that was all kind of dealt with at the time. And also that there was a recent announcement about the platinum plan, basically being devalued in terms of like, you weren't able to access everything on the plan anymore, and you didn't really get much more for that money. But I don't think we we talked about the time, it's also got a lot of positives, like it's, I'd say, you've got the best platform on the market. You know, you've been out there for the longest. I like the fact that you're the ability on voices.com to set your own rates, like even if the jobs posted for like $100, I can go and post $500. And I've won jobs like that, well, you posted way above the budget and still instill one, which is which is fantastic. And and you've got such great reach into, you know, the clients and lots of beginner voice talent. But this latest announcement came as kind of a shock to me. And I know when something bigs happening, because lots of people email me and say, you know, this is a huge step backwards, like you know, so take us back to sort of when this when you first started considering this because like the $100 mark has that been since the beginning? It has been since the beginning is actually

David Ciccarelli

when we started in 2005 is actually when we incorporated and we had actually kind of started up the company the year beforehand. And one of the things I had done was connect with a number of coaches and one of them was James all Berger from voice acting.com and asked him Hey, what is it that we might be able to do differently on voices and he's like, listen, every year, from the union, to professional industry associations,

everyone's tried to fight, if you will, to maintain professionalism and a certain kind of threshold, if you will, for rates. So why don't you just have this entry point at 100. So I'll certainly credit him with kind of being the catalyst of us thinking that way. But you know, here we are going on almost 20 years later that this is all we've been doing is running this online marketplace voices.com. And I think some some things have changed, I think in the industry. But what prompted it, then is maybe a different reason of what was I think important facts of how kind of the industry worked back then. Whereas maybe it's you know, we've recognized that it's changed now and kind of going forward. So maybe for those kind of watching and listening, there's really two parts to voices.com. The one that we've always run, we call it the talent marketplace, it's where, you know, talent, like utopie are well familiar, a client comes on, they post a job. And then we match those job requirements up and invite the most suitable talent based upon the information really that's in your profile. And then of course, you reply with an audition and a quote. And so part of that job posting has actually been to the client would specify a budget, so that initial budget range was, you know, 100 to 250 bucks, and then it kind of goes up in increments from there with the top budget being 10,000 plus. So that's worked really well for all of these years. And I think what we then wanted to create, you know, almost like flip the model on its head, what if there was another way that clients could hire you as a talent? And so to complement the talent marketplace, we have a project marketplace where now talent, have control over creating a project listing that includes Yes, here's a sample of the work, but also a description of the work that you're going to do and the price so now clients can browse and buy if you will, projects available that for purchase that a talent would fulfill and the project IQ listings, which was just launched the summer of 2022. Later in the summer, and the project listings, you know, kind of abided by this same $100, minimum. And talent had kind of three tiers of pricing. So let's say you have a, you know, a radio commercial project, you could have almost like a good, better best type pricing, what we call essential, enhanced, and elite. And you can start at 100. But some people started at 200, or 300, and kind of go up from there. And what I think one of the things that we realized very quickly, and what we observed in the market, and clients telling us saying two things. One, I can hire the same talent on another kind of gig style marketplace, where they also have projects or gigs, if you will, at a fifth the cost of let's just call it a fraction of the cost. So why is that the case, the other situation we are running into is, there's lots of times where clients wanted like something very, very small and limited in scope. And so there wasn't really an accommodation for, let's say, a kind of a personal use phone system greeting or a funny voicemail being laughed, I mean, these are not the kind of bread and butter of what we do at voices, but there were requests that were kind of coming up. And then And then the third one was us realizing that there's actually been more clients will initially talent signing up and kind of Southeast Asia, and clients looking to hire them, where we have the good fortune of living and working in Canada, US, New Zealand, Australia, UK, where $100 us is, is you know, kind of reasonable for many people in the world that is just out of reach to pay for production. And for kind of a small project of them themselves are kind of just getting going. So we kind of looked at the competitive landscape, kind of the customer feedback, or the customer feedback, as well as the kind of global realities, and really asked ourselves, is this the best thing to kind of continue upholding going forward? Or is it actually can we solve some of these other needs, by kind of getting rid of this arbitrary $100 minimum, which was really centered around kind of like that really centered around an idea that I think we've grown grown beyond?

Toby Ricketts

Okay, so just to take those those points? Because I feel like there are like, there are different ways to solve some of those problems like that I would have maybe you can talk through why you didn't decide these, but like, small jumps factor, I mean, you know, there are stores you go into, like if you go into like a fairly nice restaurant, and you ask, you know, can I just have an apple? Like, they're probably they don't stop that kind of thing. They're like, we'll go to the grocery store next door. Like there's a, there's a kind of an appropriate place for certain amount of products. And I think maybe did you did you anticipate some brand damage, because voices.com has spent a long time saying, like, we've we've got the best voice actors on our platform, with industry leader, we're not going to lead to the race to the bottom, you know, they put a lot of effort into that messaging. But for a lot of people that suddenly come true, and they're kind of like no, this that has been the rest of the bottom. And I feel like you could have offered the small jobs with like a subdomain that's like voices light or something. And it's like, literally just the tiniest jobs, perhaps it's for talent that are inexperienced, and there's like a place like a training ground or a sandbox that they can kind of play in and you keep this premium voices.com product for your kind of like higher paying clients. Was there a reason that you didn't decide to split those two proposals if you'd like to the clients? And

David Ciccarelli

so we find that clients often start with a small project. Because and you know, we call it the trust sale, right, the clients got to trust? Is voices even the right place for me, when they post a job? Are they even gonna get responses? Am I gonna get responses kind of within like a reasonable, you know, a price range for the scope of work and what they had in mind? And can the talent actually deliver on that? So the there's definitely a track record, I'm going to call it a like a pattern of behavior, where clients start small and then grow large over time. And so to further prove this, oh, we actually ask clients, hey, are there ever and we have a whole research team that kind of tries to uncover answers to these type of questions? And the question was, do you to the clients who conducted the survey? Do you ever hire talent for under $100? And what we discovered was a 30%. So call it a third of our clients and these are existing clients, from time to time do hire talent from under $100. So did we want to be the pool At least they could kind of do some of their work, not all the work because as soon as they but or rather, would we, let's be that definitive destination the go to place where irrespective of the size of the project small or large, you go to one site, and you can you can get that done. But you couldn't have done it was kind of the reason, you know, we wanted to talk to the clients to know if they if they have other work? And the answer was yes. And then but they weren't bringing it to us because of this, this kind of threshold, which often means whether it's an existing client, and then you have to think well, there's probably new clients out there that are maybe just, you know, doing something for the first time that we're literally putting up a gate or a roadblock for them to even engaging and they never have the potential to grow up to be some of the most recognized and most frequent job posters on voices.com.

Toby Ricketts

Yeah, I mean, they kind of make sense, but I still feel like there there would be like, rather than just just lowering the entry point, you could kind of put up some some, you know, some some barriers to say, look, this is this is special pricing for whatever reason to get you on board like a loss leader effectively. And then once you know we've we you get into the professional talent, you can do this, but this The insinuation that the optics, I think of this decision was like that it's muddied the waters, that suddenly it's like we've got the best professional voice talent and you can hire them for $5. Like the actual you know it, you've got to be very careful with your messaging around where that sets, you know, why this decision has been made? Because it does, it does worry us, you know, a voice talent that use voices.com. That, that is kind of starting to get brand damaging, because we don't want to be associated with like the bargain basement kind of version, you know,

David Ciccarelli

so So let's talk about how the budgets even are determined. Right? Right. So we discussed the project marketplace, where the talent are actually deciding what the rate is going to be. And if you don't want to list a project at all, then I, then you don't have to, if you because you don't want to put any pricing information out there, then that's certainly up to you. If you want to start at, you know, 200 or $500, for your project listings, and let's be clear, these are only non broadcast jobs that we're referring to. If you don't want to get into, you know, if you want to start your price points much higher, then that's certainly, you know, certainly up to you as well, too. So we're not, you know, we're not marketing $5 or anything along those, those lines, it's actually would be the talent kind of listing that themselves. So so that is the project marketplace. Okay, so

Toby Ricketts

the $5 only applies to the project marketplace, it isn't in the audition kind of the traditional sphere. I'm

David Ciccarelli

not as of yet, but that we did put that in that email that that we want to have that as a opportunity for clients as well, under certain circumstances, which would be non broadcast. But even even still, even still, Toby, how does the client even pick a budget? Well, there's three ways that you know, when they're filling out the job posting form, that they actually pick a budget, it used to be just a little drop down menu. But now what we've done over the last year is we have what we call a budget recommendation tool, because there's been a lot of calls for, hey, you need to voices.com needs to educate the clients on what the fair rate is for said project. Well, as they're filling out the form, we're learning about the category, the length, the use, kind of any licensing means they might need. And so when they get to the bottom, behind the scenes, what we're doing is we're looking up all the comparable jobs, and saying, here's the going rate that a talent actually was hired for, for a job that looks similar to yours. And here's the average number of responses that you can expect to receive in the next 24 hours. So this is what we call a project recommendation. So it the system actually defaults to that being selected. So of course when we're not going to be defaulting to the low end of the budget $5 to 249, because in most situations, the actual going rate was higher than that. So we're using our own, you know, the talents, activity on the site for what you guys quote, as kind of like feeding it back to the clients to say here's the here's what the going rate is. So that's the budget recommendation. Then we have the budget range, which again just kind of goes up in those brackets. We didn't we felt it was best not to create a distinct bracket of $5 to $100, but rather Just extend the entry level point, which as you said, there's title clients or just pick that because it's the first one, but then quote, cool higher, and they're going to those who are considering quality first and foremost, like most clients do, when we ask them, What are you listening for? How do you make your hiring decision, it's always the quality of the voice is like, far exceeds, you know, saving a few dollars in here and there, that's, that's not their primary motivation. So that's the so that's the budget range, they can pick any number of them kind of disregarding the recommendation. But we also believe talent will kind of set the client straight, if you will, if they're like, look at you've got way too many words, way too much word count here, or, you know, the effort is going to be huge. I can just tell because it's a, it's a medical read, it's a technical read, okay, the talent will kind of course, correct the client if they happen to pick a lower lower budget. And the last one is like a fixed fixed budget. So if the client says comes and says I only have it's a, it's a scratch read, or it's for a student film project, or whatever the nature of that kind of use case is, and I have 50 bucks, well, now they can actually go ahead and get that kind of get at least have those auditions kind of come into them, for those who are interested in doing that kind of work at that range. So that's, I think, a really important distinction, having the awareness for the talent community, that we have a budget recommendation that basically is a self reinforcing loop. It's the amount that actually the work is getting hired for, we kind of, you know, feed that back to the client and have that as the default. And over time, what we've seen, and it's lives out this notion, you might have heard me share before this notion of shared success. Over time, what we've seen is that the more successful kind of on a job by job basis, the average selling price is kind of the numerical are the metric that we look at, the average selling price has actually increased across the board. So the better the talent do, the better that we do as a platform. And therefore, that's how we're living out this notion of shared success. The budget recommendation is just an example of, of how we do such a thing.

Toby Ricketts

Okay. Yeah, I mean, pricing, voiceover is, is one of the hardest aspects of being in this game, like because, you know, new talent come to me all the time saying, I don't know what to charge for this, you know, so it's, it's like, there are rate cards out there, there's the gravy for the brain rate card, there's the GVA, there's, you know, that there's a few, you know, rate cards out there, the voices don't come one over time has kind of, like I know it, you released a new rate card and a head broadcast, it's quite low. And I remember getting in touch, and then it was subsequently fixed to sort of, you know, to boost it up a bit, which could have been just an oversight. But like, it's, it's one of those things where you, you are striking a balance between, like clients, on the one hand, who obviously want a good job done quickly and cheaply, you've got new voices as well, who are coming onto the platform, they're inexperienced, so they usually like to charge less, because like, that's, that's generally the way you sort of get into an industry is by going in sort of like, and doing it for for less than someone that with 10 years experience, and then experienced voices, of course, you do this for a living, and we're on there all the time and, and use it. And like, you know, they all like so you've basically got this the center made up of those two people, those three people who, you know, want different things. And like the point where they will meet is effectively kind of like the the sales price or the kind of vibe of where everything's setting. And I just worried that like with the lowering this, like, you know, really lowering that is that it sort of drags that in the side of the clients and possibly the new voices area. And so you do expect to see attrition from your experienced and voices who make a living out of this, because they feel like suddenly, you know, it's the voice industry separate separating out into these trophic layers if you like, because I always talked about this trophic layer theory where, you know, you've got your fiber on the bottom, because it's always just been basically, you know, they, they say what they are, it's $5. And then you've got your sort of mid tier, which I've sort of always put sort of voices.com and then some of the other voice marketplaces and then sort of agents and stuff. So you're talking in that top layer, it's sort of like, you know, two and a half 1000 to sky's the limit for big TV commercials. And you know, where there's a lot of there's a lot on the line, it's high value. It's all high stakes. And then the mid tier, which you know, you've traditionally sort of existed in for sort of like your, like medical narrations and stuff that's not broadcast, but it's not, you know, you want a really good job and then the sort of bottom layer. Do you feel like that it's just like, again, coming back to the sort of brand damage thing that it kind of drags you down? I know you want to drag rates up but and you said before that your average rate has increased by by by marking this and putting a marker in the sand and saying like we've now extended this budget, I feel like that won't necessarily happen even with this feat. Back engine where, because to get good work, people are going to quote a little bit less, and then everyone's gonna see that one's quote in less than then quite a bit less. And I feel like an algorithm could, you know, run away with that kind of pricing.

David Ciccarelli

So I actually agree with the stratosphere ring of the of the industry, I think that's a great way to describe it. Sometimes we kind of use the, you know, a barbell approach where there are new aspiring talent, who at present, you know, struggle, because they've got to get their first job. But if they're up against Toby Ricketts, then good luck, you know what I mean? That's just and even if, you know, case in point, even if they're quoting, for a fraction, you know, if you're 1000 in there, 100, it's still the client chooses the voice, first and foremost. So they're having in some situations, and probably more than anyone would like, frankly, a challenge kind of getting that first star rating, which then kind of has the, you know, gives them the impression like you see it in the search results, you see it on your profile, to frankly, the confidence that like, okay, great, I landed one, I know how this works now. So that would be kind of the new and aspiring talent. And then you're right, there's the professionals along same professionals, you asked the question, if we, if we're concerned about attrition, I certainly hope not. We love our talent, we hope that they stay around, we think we've got great things in store for all of you in the next couple of months, as well as the, you know, the roadmap for next year. So we've got some great stuff upcoming. But this is just sold for a need. That's frankly, not, you know, designed really at all for the professionals. This is new clients with tiny projects, that we've really want to be able to bring that client on board. And so if they have to start at $75, or 50 bucks, so that they sign up, go through the process, and the client goes, Okay, I get it. Now I can trust you with my larger campaigns and national work. You know, the high stakes work, as you put it told me that they've already kind of gone through the motions that they that they're more apt to kind of continue and proceed with the platform, because they built up a history there. But if we never get that chance on the small stuff, they're never going to grow into the into the bigger work. And there's lots of use cases like that this scratch reads is often probably one of the biggest requests, they're like, Yeah, but this is this isn't for, I need to use it in a client pitch. But it's not the actual ad, you know, we're gonna change. And they're like, I don't have 500 bucks to make for that. Because as soon as they go through, and they say, this is, you know, this is the use?

Toby Ricketts

Yeah, $100 is reasonable for that $100 is a great price. But $5 For scratch rate, even that is like, you know, I mean, even I can't envisage a job where it's worth me opening my studio for $5, then again, so, yeah, it wouldn't,

David Ciccarelli

and I certainly, I think we're, you know, at risk of kind of, you know, getting hung up on the $5. Just because it's the low end of it, I don't think, why would a client go through the motions of that? It's like, well, we had to come up with some minimum, that wasn't going to be one and it wasn't going to be zero.

Toby Ricketts

So what was the what was the decision tree for that? Because $50 probably wouldn't have attracted so much controversy, but because it's five and I mean, let's, let's be honest, Fiverr is the actual nemesis of the voiceover empire. As soon as you say your voiceover on Fiverr. It's like, well, you know, you're not a professional voiceover because I mean, I know there's people that do lots of work on that it's generally low value, and they're doing like 10 or 20 jobs a day. And then making the same as someone who probably charges, you know, the sort of moral industry, right, and does one or two jobs a day sort of thing. So, and those clients, I don't know if this is your experience, but the clients that paid the least are generally the most of a pain in the ass, in the experience difficult to work with. So are you kind of willing to take on because like, Okay, let's go back to the $5. How was that reached? Was it to compete with Fiverr? Was it because that's the kind of lowest thing you ever charge on the internet? Like, how was that reached?

David Ciccarelli

Um, so we we looked at 0, 1, 5, 25 and 50. And zero would make no sense because we didn't want to have free requests, right, then then it's just like, so now you're kind of using everyone's resources and time to get a free request. And the counter arguments wallet, if it's a charity or a nonprofit or some good cause, that even still, there's probably some nominal, you know, token amount that could be provided in in terms of compensation. You know, one is, you know, the first kind of positive integer that it would make sense that it would kind of have a transaction would go through because we also want to make sure that there's a valid credit card on the Other end of that transaction, the person is who they say they are. So, but that also felt candidly, you know, lower than any other site that's out there. So that would be weird. Five would be on par, because it's already well established. 25 or 50 is like, Well, are there situations where it's going to be? It may be lower than that. So where are we, whereas for there's some, as you know, we've had these other creative categories around audio editing, and translation, where we had already established $5 as a minimum in those other creative categories, instead of having two sets of rules, because audio editing is often, you know, built out on an hourly basis, as opposed to a usage and license basis. But because this because the system was already designed to have a $5, you know, entry point, if you will, across all of the other categories, we're like, well, let's just harmonize that. So it's the same entry point, irrespective of which category the client posts the job in, or which category the talent lists their project listings in.

Toby Ricketts

I mean, yeah, it just seems like, you know, if you're, you're still the same 20%, I assume you take on that on that $5, even if there's not a different sort of split at those lower levels, is that so we can effectively only making $1 on each of those jobs, if they come through at $5, which just doesn't? You know, it doesn't seem like...

David Ciccarelli

it actually, it actually costs us $1, something to send out each payment. So that was another part of it like, well, this, you know, imagine there was a huge frequency of these Well, paying $1 to send out $1 Doesn't make any sense for anyone. And so, you know, I think what we've we've learned over the years is two things. One, let's try to get out of the way, rather than impose more controls and restrictions. Because when we get out of the way, it allows the market to, in a lot of ways government govern itself and market market, I'm referring to talent and client, you know, coordinating transacting and communicating on your own. So let's try to get out of the way. Let's also try to, you know, and by that, I mean, you know, these kinds of types of controls. The other thing is, a lot of these kind of worst case scenarios rarely transpire the way that, you know, we all might think I mean, years ago, you know, well, I mean, I could, I could go through the, the list of items of kind of the worst case scenario, you know, kind of game theory type being played out on a lot of improvements that we've made over the years, and rarely has one kind of been, you know, long term sustainable, or sorry, long term damaging, and, in fact, quite the opposite. We found, you know, that, in the end, if we truly believe this guiding principle of let's make decisions that are based upon shared success, for the talent, the client, and voices as an organization, then let's make sure we have that kind of first and foremost, and things do do play out. It's the, it's the gap in between the announcement and having actual data and evidence, where a lot of emotions, you know, kind of gets get stirred. And it's kind of almost like daresay, like the fear of the unknown. Like, we're afraid the whole industry is going to go a certain way. Well, that's actually not in our best interest, it's not in your best interest. So why would we push it that way? Now, I know, that's a hard thing to kind of ask yourselves and maybe realize that, you know, we want what's best. And that's what we're trying to do is help new clients enter help new talent, kind of get their feet under them. And and then have them both of them grow into be, you know, you know, professional talent who are working with, you know, amazing clients on the platform.

Toby Ricketts

How do you measure success? Is it the number of voices you have? the number of clients, you have? the number of jobs push through? the average sale on the platform? Like, what are the kinds of KPIs that you and and how do you think this is going to affect that, because it has been suggested that, you know, you will receive less investment money, you know, way back, and they're sort of putting pressure on, because, like, it's all about, you know, site visits, and like, you know, then you can be acquired for something, and that's kind of like, you know, maybe that's if we take a big step back and talk about pure business. Is that something that's that you consider, like, how do you measure success? And well, yeah, so we

David Ciccarelli

it's called the Northstar metric. So what is our what is our guiding Northstar? And we call it hired jobs. So jobs that are fulfilled not just a posted job, not just a project order that starts but those kinds of both converge into a job that's fulfilled, whether it be search someone's profile, the project listing or The job posting, there's kind of like four paths that all converge. The job then gets offered to the talent, saying, Hey, we're awarding you the job, or we've placed this project order for you. And in both situations, the talent is reviewing this spec, and clicking accepts right on the on the agreement. And then and then the work is done and delivered through platform, that is a higher job. So that's how we measure success. We don't to be candid, I don't care about the average selling price on that kind of thing. Because, you know, having a you know, you could have very few hired jobs right? At an insane average selling price. But that's not enough to kind of go around for everyone, or you go to the other end, you don't want to have a bunch of them where it's like, really, really low. So you're kind of like you're, you're you're balancing out what that is. But ultimately, it's more much more throughput and volume. Nothing to do. I mean, if our website is, you know, art, let's say a website was advertising based, where you have banner ads, and so forth, then you really care about pageviews. And how many visitors and so forth. I mean, that's not something that we that we look at, because that's not the business model, the business model is a transactional business model, just like as you described, Uber or Lyft, or Airbnb. So therefore, in a similar way, it's what's known as that core interaction on Uber, it's the ride that actually is taken on Airbnb, it's the the book stay, that actually is completed, right. And on voices, it's the job that gets fulfilled by a talent.

Toby Ricketts

But yeah, if you're going for, like, you know that as many of those as you can surely want to be making money off them, I just won't worry that like at the five, if you take it to the extreme and say and make a straw man about you know, so every job suddenly gets posted as $5, you're not making any money, which is not ideal, but maybe it's a loss leader for you, you know, maybe that's your rationale behind it.

David Ciccarelli

Well, we definitely don't want to be we're trying to capture a portion of the market that is not being served@voices.com Right now. Right? These are, these are not about clients who, that, that that are going to go kind of downstream, this is about they have these jobs already, they're getting them fulfilled by some talent out there on some, presumably some other platform. So this is about kind of like net new jobs, kind of aligns with that Northstar metric I described net new jobs coming to voices that weren't previously there. You know, that that's the that's the intention. But you know, those if, if those listening can kind of hear the, the conviction in these two concepts of shared success, and the most higher jobs, then you can see how these things start to align, because we're basically turning away jobs right now by saying, you have to meet certain parameters and so forth. We want to invite those clients onto the platform.

Toby Ricketts

I still feel like the two arenas model, I'd love to see someone try it. And I've suggested it to some people that do have, you know, a premium model is to have that sort of budget thing, like you have, you know, the budget and Avis model or something, you know, you have you you can capture two areas by having the same company with different branding over the two, which which might not be have that brand crossover. But I mean, I I also understand the fact that you've got to like it's easier to brand one thing and do your marketing, etc. But I feel like that might have been a missed opportunity. But then it's not my company. And you're you're welcome to do what with your company, what you like, just a couple of small things from what you said as well, like in terms of local currency. And I that was a really interesting point. Because I've I've said to people in terms of my rate card, it's like if I if someone asked me to quote TBC in India, and I quote, you know, 4000 US dollars, that's like someone's entire annual income, like there's just not reasonably, like they, they're not going to be earning that much off that ad. So you know, it's ridiculous. But maybe a way to do that is to have like, local currencies that you charge rather than you because US Dollars are always very strong in that and the market shifts all the time is to like have local local currency versions. So it feels like you're charging in a different currency because you kind of are you know, have Did you consider that at all? Because it's always been the US dollar

David Ciccarelli

right now, it's a single currency platform, you know, we work with customers in 160 countries around the world, yet, the entire platform is all in US dollars. And so to get to let's play this through to localize the currency, that's one thing but then to still have a minimum threshold of $100 equivalent to $100. US it's still like we can say it's in rupees but

Toby Ricketts

this maybe, maybe, maybe it shifts if you're paying in local currency, but then I guess you get people buying rupees and doing American jobs. That would be confusing

David Ciccarelli

You know, or the other way I want to pay in, I want to hire a, you know, Indian based talent? Do I, you know, like, what's the driver? Is that? Is it the buyer who's deciding which currency it is? Or is it the seller? So that's where the underlying, candidly infrastructure issue we had. Was this this rule, if you will, that didn't allow for transaction to happen in other in other countries, because everything was anchored to $100. Us, which just made no sense. So thank you for, you know, really kind of acknowledging that there are different price points for different clients around the world and that currency and the need to kind of go below what Americans, North Americans would go, I would never do anything for less than $100. Well, the job will doesn't it's not worth that in those other countries around the world because they can't afford it.

Toby Ricketts

Yeah, yeah, it is. I mean, I acknowledge, it's a really tricky problem in that in that you do want to capture more of the market. And there's this kind of this tech leader, kind of libertarian view of like, we'll just like, let everyone at and the market will decide. And, and it's an it's an interesting tension between that and having some kind of like, not the Union, but something like a union where voice actors say, Look, you know, this is the minimum, we we want to charge because the trouble is, if you if you devalue work financially, you do value it conceptually, in terms of like the, you know, if you pay less for something, then you inherently value it less. And I feel like the the reaction to this has been, we've we're proud of our craft, we're professional voice actors, we do our best. And this is, and this does sort of like acknowledge the fact that professionally, people will put jobs up to $5, and people will go for them and getting fulfilled and everything. And just having that all in the same pot, it becomes very difficult to separate what where those values are. So I mean, just in sort of, in terms of wrapping up, because I think we've gone through, you know, quite a few of different facets of this like, to the people like who have emailed me saying, you know, that they might leave voices.com, after this professional voice talent that have been there on for years, like what what would you say, to try and like to keep them on the platform, you said this in scouting, exciting stuff coming up, which is a bit of a bit of a kind of like, what's in the box? But, you know, what would you say to say, what's your long term vision? And how does this strategy sort of, you know, add to that?

David Ciccarelli

Well, voices is always aimed to be the definitive destination where, you know, stories get told, right, and really, we are the mechanism to kind of bring the two people together, but you are the ones actually telling the story, it's your words that are brought being brought to life and someone else's script. So that, that remains the same, you know, some of the things that we've we have on Deck are, you know, there's a lot of kind of just hygiene improvements, which is what we refer to them as just improving the overall usability of our voices. There's a big package around, showcasing and highlighting the top talent on voices. So those who have done very well in the past, we want to continue to kind of reward and recognize those talents on platform where they become, you know, almost something to aspire to those who are kind of just getting started. That's certainly one piece and that can, you know, look anything like, you know, badges, recognition, you know, different programs for top talent on voices. And because clients, as you know, sometimes just want to go just show me and give me access to the best. And then there's other clients who are saying, I can't afford the best, so I need, but I still want someone who has the equipment at home that's kind of better than me doing it might be kind of their thought. And they want to just get get get started with, you know, a semi professional or an aspiring talent. So you're right, it's there are they are two different communities of talent at different ends of the of the journey, those starting and those that are thriving in their career. But yeah, that next year, I think, because maybe maybe might be worth doing, you know, an upcoming podcast or video on what 2023 looks like. But hopefully that gives you at least an early glimpse of building into into the talent, those new ways to be found and discovered and be featured on the platform all kind of about bundled within the same premium membership.

Toby Ricketts

Cool, fantastic. Well, thank you very much for your time today and going over all these points. I hope that the sort of the the gamblers it works it feels like a bit of a gamble kind of kind of pays off, and that would there is shared success and we can all find a way to still, you know make to Have like shared success on the platform as you say so it'll be interesting to see how this how this all pans out thank you for your time today thanks so much Toby

Interview with the CEO of Voices.com - David Ciccarelli

Voices.com is the world’s largest Pay to play voiceover marketplace. It has the most talent and the most jobs. While there has been some controversy in it’s past, Voices pledged to increase transparency and create a model that was mutually beneficial to talent and the platform.
I sat down with co-founder and CEO of Voices, David Ciccarelli to talk about his platform and the state of the voiceover industry and we covered the following topics;

The sale of competitor Voice123
Does it change your strategy?
How Voices measures its size and success
How clients are attracted to the vdc platform, and why that is important
The race to the bottom hasn’t eventuated, is there a pressure from clients to reduce costs?
Does voices.com want talent to bid lower or higher rates?
Any other pressures that come from clients?
Are P2Ps responsible for setting prices?
What have been the milestones or key moments in the evolution of voices.com?
How Voices achieved a capital raise to take the site to the next level
Where was the investment spent, on site development or on obtaining clients?
How talent receive no feedback from clients – why is this?
How new talent can improve the quality of auditions
Why are there so few jobs for New Zealand and Australian talent?
Why did Voices change the terms and conditions to own any voice files talent upload?
Is Voices Training an AI voice using auditions?
What are the reasons behind some of the other changes to T&Cs recently?
Why did you launch your new creative services stream recently? Is this complementary to voiceover?
Does voices.com allow talent to get in touch with clients directly?
Would you do a discount or a free month for talent returning after 3 or 4 years to try it out again?
What’s the split between professional services jobs and self-service jobs? Do you try to encourage either?

TRANSCRIPT:

Toby Ricketts 

Welcome to VO LIFE brought to you by Gravy for the brain Oceania. My name is Toby Ricketts. I am your host, we talk to the big thought leaders in voiceover and related industries. And I'm very excited to have a guest today, who needs no introduction. Really? It's David Ciccarelli from voices.com. How are you today? David?

David Ciccarelli 

I'm doing great and better now that I'm here, Toby, thanks for the opportunity to to have a conversation really, and to talk shop, as they say about all things VO.

Toby Ricketts 

absolutely. Exactly. And I mean, hot off the presses one, it was great timing, because then announcement by from one of your biggest competitors voice 123 has been acquired by backstage. So right off the bat, any sort of like thoughts, this has changed the industry at all, in your in your view?

David Ciccarelli 

Well, you know, I think the industry over like many, over the years is certainly, you know, players get bigger and eventually consolidate, there's new ones that come, you know, new platforms that emerge. And, you know, I think that was a, you know, perhaps an inevitable outcome at some point. And she, I mean, congratulations to both backstage and voice 123 even pulling off, you know, a merger or an acquisition, like, that is certainly quite an effort. And we can talk about our own experience of voices doing making similar moves. But you know, backstage just being, you know, an authority and leader in the on camera world, you know, but first and foremost through their, their magazine, their print magazine, which they had run for, I believe, almost 50, more than 50 years. And then now with online casting in on camera, predominantly. And, you know, we, as Stephanie says, really my wife and co founder of voices she once wrote for backstage as well, too. So I think they were interested in entering into voice acting, and in a bigger way. But backstage actually has maintained a, let's call it a house of brands type of approach. They don't necessarily merge everything, all together, there are other music websites that they have acquired over the years, and then run them as standalone entities. So, you know, if history repeats itself, they'll probably do the same thing. With with voice 123, at least for at least for a while, and, you know, but it'll be interesting to see how it all plays out.

Toby Ricketts 

Yeah, absolutely. And it doesn't change your strategy in terms of voices being a kind of a, you know, it's like you're the two biggest players, it doesn't change your your, your thinking,

David Ciccarelli 

not not at present, you know, we we maintain, you know, more than unless it's actually an entire, you know, a lot of software or technology companies maintain these 10 competitive intelligence platforms, basically, news clippings, web analytics, and insights, that analysts reports, these type of things that, you know, it's all public information, but it does serve as repository. And so types of things that we look for are, you know, changes to key pages on their website? Are they hiring in new positions, right, that might indicate a change in their strategy. And so those are the types of things that that we look for, but given its, you know, recent news, you know, we'll certainly keep our, our eyes and ears open. And who knows, I might, it might actually open the door to another relationship with backstage for us, given we've actually been in dialogue, you know, every time I'm in New York, and specifically Brooklyn, you know, visit their offices and say hello, and, and try to keep a cordial relationship going.

Toby Ricketts 

Fantastic. Wonderful. So you've been the CEO of voices.com, for 16 years, you know, it's a it's it's the biggest platform in the market there. What kind of metrics Do you have around that sort of business? Like the number of voices, the number of clients? How do you sort of measure your place in the industry?

David Ciccarelli 

Well, the first and the first and foremost is actually just looking at just pure number of registered users, how many people are kind of putting up their hand saying I want to participate in the industry in some way or another. And, you know, recently we crossed over, actually was just last year, we crossed over 1 million registered users. And since the onset of COVID, I think it's ushered in a whole new wave of aspiring talent, people who maybe you've always wanted to have the dream, they want to get into it. Unfortunately, perhaps they were even laid off from their previous position and found themselves at home saying I have skills and abilities. How can I be, you know, pursuing a career I've always wanted to, or, or generating income otherwise. And so that, I think, again, is has ushered in, you know, another million registered users. Now when I say registered users, really, these are people who've signed up. Maybe they've uploaded a demo which obviously is a critical prerequisite, as you know, but you know, a lot of people are just trying to gain information. But in terms of, you know, to, to, you know, what matters, candidly, a lot more is actually the volume of job postings that are coming to the website. So we're kind of just north of the 5000 job postings a month, coming to voices, you know, across, you know, all manner of industries, all types and genres of vo. And, you know, there's this kind of core group of about 40 42,000 clients that are posting jobs on on a quite a routine basis. And so those are just, you know, some of the metrics just to give a sense, but really the other day, it's like, we're doing our job if we're bringing jobs to the platform that all of you talent can can pursue audition for, and, and obviously, hopefully, when that work,

Toby Ricketts 

absolutely, I mean, lots of it seemed like for a while there, a new p2p would start every week and telling everyone that they were the new the new kid in town, and they were going to be the biggest of the year. But it all comes down to jobs like that's, that's entirely what what voice talent want to see on the platform? They don't they kind of don't want the stuff around the edges. It's just like, is this going to feed me? What do you think has been your your strategy and the successful behaviors and activities that you've done that has led to us sort of being having the most jobs of any p2p?

David Ciccarelli 

Mm hmm. I'm so glad that you, you brought that up of the the number of new entrants, right, and this might sound like a page of a, you know, Harvard MBA, but there's this concept of like, you need for a marketplace like this, you need supply or service providers who are all the talent, you need the demand. But you have this other force, which you're like, you know, you have your existing known competitors, then you have this other force of these new entrants that come in constantly, that create a lot of kind of hoopla, and candidly, a little bit of a distraction. And, you know, having been doing this for, as you say, 16 years, I've counted, at one point, I had a list of over 100 sites that have kind of come and gone. And it's, it's like, literally, they're just repeating the same playbook, which is, we're going to be the best site for talent. But what the, the secret sauce actually is, in order to be the best tight site for talent, it's not about having the most beautiful profiles, or kind of certain gimmicky features. It's actually the site that can win over the clients that are bringing, you know, bringing those jobs to the platform, we run surveys, to our, you know, top tier Platinum talent to premium talent. And we always ask, like, what, what do you find most valuable is that great customer service, these excellent downloadable resources and more of it, and they're like, these are all nice to haves. But the only thing in terms of measuring a talent success on the platform when they the end of the year, like do I renew my subscription? Are we going to continue with this? Everyone's just going Did I make two 310? x my return on my on my subscription? That's kind of the the mental math that we see people go through? And so to answer the question, how do we try to kind of live that out and fulfill that need, and almost to the exclusion of like virtually everything else, we we market, we build products with a dare a bias towards bringing more clients onto the platform. It's not that we're neglecting talent, we just know that you can build things for talent, that sound nice. But the way we're being held to account and our measure of success is did I get a return on my investment in terms of volume of volume of work? So there is that tendency towards clients, we love the talent community, we spent a lot of time and energy and outreach in trying to build one on one relationships. But we've just found that sometimes that tiebreaker needs to be what is is this client going? Or is this going to help a client go through the process faster and easier, and come back again, to hire yet another talent? And so that's kind of been one thing, and that that permeates Toby? product decisions, hiring decisions, marketing campaign decisions. And and so those are, it's just having that it's not going to be a 5050 split, it might be more like 6070 80% of our time and energy might be on the client end of the business so that it can ultimately we can we can satisfy the needs of the town.

Toby Ricketts 

Do you see clients at all kind of like, defining like changing the way voiceover voiceover voiceovers are behaving like that. There was lots of talk about this kind of there was this race to the bottom about sort of three or four minutes this this this phrase that got thrown around the race to the bottom, which I think no one can say has actually happened, like, there's definitely been a fragmentation at the very bottom of the market, which was always going to happen. Because you get, you know, everyone suddenly needs a video on small businesses can't afford, you know, $5,000 for a video, for example. So there's going to be a lot of small jobs. But I don't think the race, the fears of the race to the bottom have actually occurred and voices.com certainly hasn't been like, hasn't, you know, driven down prices? From what I've seen. There are other pressures that come from clients, that would negatively affect your service, do you think or I mean, you're kind of the the gatekeepers in a way, who are looking at trying to, you know, you're trying to look after both parties. At the same time, you don't alienate talent, you do want to alienate the clients, because that's where the word comes from. Do you see any sort of big, big changes in the industry in terms of how clients are requesting voiceover these days?

David Ciccarelli 

Well, you will, if I may, I love the unpack the race to the bottom. No, hypothesis, let's call it that. And thank you for acknowledging at least, you know, anecdotally, from your perspective, not seeing that happen. Either we we measure this concept actually very, you know, numerically called ASP average selling price, what is the average selling price that we can get a job fulfilled on the platform. And just because the entry level budget range was 100, to $250. us US dollars, doesn't mean every job is 100 to $250. Sure, call it, half of them are, but the other half are five, you know, 250 to 500 500, to 750. And then it goes up from there. Now you get the few whales that are in there that are the 10 and $20,000, that's going to bring up the average average selling price. You can think of that as like the amount that the job kind of, as they say, cleared for which was ultimately hired for what we because we measure that we are also incentivized, and I'll you know, be very Canada with this. And it's not just a phrase, it's a belief that we have that our business actually is based on shared success with the talent. So just think about this, we want talent to be quoting higher and higher and higher, because we generate a 20% platform fee. Upon that success, if we can if we can find that client a talent that they want to work with, and they hire them, then at the higher and higher prices year after year, the talent becomes happy we dispel this myth of race to the bottom. And voices, likewise, is is increasingly generating more revenue that we obviously go to invest into winning over the next client to bring them onto the platform, as well as you know, product and development improvements as well. So I actually think that our intentions and our outcomes are aligned, in terms of voices in the talent, we want prices to go higher. So how might we do that? A couple examples, we have a rate sheet, which is barely just a, there's lots of great ones out there. The GVA has a very, very detailed rate sheet. Ours is just kind of a quick tear sheet like you need a quick and dirty reference of what something might go for. It was to answer a question, what do I charge for x, that's really all the rate sheet was on voices. But we've actually increased kind of like the budget ranges over the years, like something might might have been in the 100 or 250. bracket before. But now we we nudge that up to the next bracket. So that's kind of a soft influencer. The other one is the, when the client goes to post a job on voices, we actually have a price recommendation engine. And so what it does is when they're filling out the job, we say, hey, based upon other jobs that were similar to yours, we recommend a budget range of 1000 to 1250. And by providing that it actually overcomes a lot of anxiety for first time clients, they've never hired a talent before you're a junior creative producer at you know, said ad agency, you know, you've been asked to hire a talent for the first time, you know, you're doing some research, your main objective is to hire the talent, but you also want to get a good quality talent. I want to therefore quote appropriately, I just don't know what so this price recommendation engine is is another way to do so. And so I mean, those are kind of two tactical ways that I think demonstrate hopefully to the community that we actually our incentives and our outcomes are completely aligned. So we haven't seen this, you know, you know, proverbial race to the bottom. And lastly, if I may, I think it actually is this this concept, which you know, maybe some of some of the viewers have actually heard me speak about before, which I call the Goldilocks effect, which is when you're a client, and you're seeing and listening to talent, and you're seeing quotes of all of these ranges, you know, you can You know, talent have five stars, they're great. Why would I go with, you know, the lowest the lowest quote, on on the responses list?

It's kind of raising some red flags, you know, it's like, you don't want to be too hot and over quote, you also don't want to be under. So what we've seen invariably, when there's this, you know, a range provided invariably, the, the, the winning talent is within the middle of the range. Now, it's not, you know, precisely in some kind of odd numbers, but it's, it's, it kind of averages out that it's within the range, it's certainly not below I think that scares clients off to go, are there some other? You know, do you have to go book a studio is, there's something else I don't know, is this a new talent that really doesn't quite have the skills to be able to deliver it. And then if you're over quoting, you might have priced yourself out of the market, because if they're competing, you know, you know, and I use air quotes on that term. But if if there are three talents that are like, you know, equally good, then the clients probably going to go for one that, you know, maybe a bit less, but they tend to get scared. We've just seen kind of that behavior, they tend to get scared at kind of going right at the low end or below. So we always advocate just, quote, within the middle of the range, do your best read, deliver, deliver that, quote, what you want? That's kind of part of the idea is like empowering the talent to to quote where they want. But yeah, I mean, a long winded way, I guess, of saying we've just not seen that play out, mostly because we believe our incentives are aligned around shared success.

Toby Ricketts 

Absolutely. And I asked this question to, to both Armin and Rolf who have previously had on the into have p2p marketplaces. And the question was around, you know, free market economics, and whether there is a role for like, voiceover marketplaces, to start telling clients what they should be charging, or whether to leave it up to free market and economics to sort it out. And you've kind of gone over some of this already. But you know, do you think it's the place to educate clients on what they should be paying? Or is it just what what someone will pay?

David Ciccarelli 

Well, we've taken the approach to I mean, not to be too forthcoming about it, but we definitely take the approach of guiding that because we need to, it's one thing to get the job posted, okay. It's another thing to get the job fulfilled, yes, we need to have appropriate talent that are able and capable to do it. But the talent will only do so if the budget range is attractive enough, right? And, sure, we might say, Oh, well, there's, there's always a talent who will do something for $25 or $5. It's like, but that's not the type of client that we want to attract. And I think that would degrade the kind of premium brand that we're trying to create at voices that has not only the most jobs, but hopefully the highest paying jobs of online platforms. And order to achieve that, yes, we need to, you know, inform and educate the client. And we do that through, you know, marketing collateral blog, post these one pagers, as well as practically when they're going through that job post, if you never read any marketing material, and don't look at a blog, when you're at the moment of truth of posting that job on voices, we need to make that recommendation there. And that's actually improved than the, you know, the going back to this, this metric, this average selling price by just nudging up those prices, and the clients seem to be happy with the caliber of talent, because it's attracting a higher budget is going to attract the higher caliber capable talent on the platform as well.

Toby Ricketts 

Fantastic.

David Ciccarelli 

So I got to say, sir Toby, I think we have a light touch on that. I don't think it's forceful. They can override that recommendation, they can ignore it. But I think it's a light touch approach. At that moment of truth.

Toby Ricketts 

Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, there are lots of resources for new talent to find out what to charge on the internet, as well, I want to throw into the ring the the greater the brain rate curve, which is at rates of growth for the brain, calm. And, and everyone. It's that funny thing where we're in this industry, it's very exciting because it's, it's, it's a disruptive industry, it's changing so quickly. There's this new stuff happening all the time and rates is one of those things which has been affected, and everyone's kind of got their own spin on how to make it work. I've got quite an unusual one, which I've shared with a few people before based on sort of company size, but no one's really nailed the way to accurately price a job in the digital era, I think is the key thing, because when it was broadcast, it was kind of easy, because it would be like you know viewer ships and you knew all that stuff. But now you can voice something and it can just completely go viral and have been 5 million views or can have 500 views. And so it's difficult to price it at the outset and outset and give people certainty, but I don't To get too bogged down and rates but but yeah, it's definitely an interesting time. How has voices calm? What do you think some of the key moments of the evolution were in your business model because you know, you've been around for more than 16 years, you've really seen the voice of industry go from a complete bricks and mortar institution where people had to live close to a studio that didn't even have home studios. Now, you have to have a home studio, I live in the middle of the New Zealand jungle and managed to carve out this voiceover career, which would never have been possible even probably five or six years ago. has voices.com been a part of that evolution? And like what have been the key moments for you? And in shaking things up and changing the industry?

David Ciccarelli 

I think the one you know, the first instance, was actually the acquisition of the domain name voices.com. Some people might recall, we actually started as interactive voices calm is a mouthful, you know, you would have, you'd have a profile URL like Toby Ricketts dot interactive voices.com is really long. People didn't know if it was singular or plural. So I wanted to change the domain name, and rebrand. And the short version of the story is rather than a wholesale Vox CO, or vox.com, we thought rather a name simplification, what if we could just be voices like voices.com. And so we were successful in obtaining that name from another from another website owner at the time, and basically, you know, rebuilt and redirected, you know, the website on this voices.com URL, this address. So I think that was critical. Toby, after that, we had reporters from CNN contact us, we had great search results, kind of just became more memorable, short and memorable and unlikely that someone could misspell it. So I think that was very helpful in establishing the identity early on. And then so that was, you know, something that was memorable to me. And then honestly, we actually kind of, you know, stuck to our knitting for a good, you know, you know, 1012 years, and, you know, had aspirations for creating a, you know, really a global, global platform for voiceover, in, in which case, we realize, you know, financially, probably just couldn't continue to pull this off on our own. And so we sought out a, an investor, which a lot of tech companies are going to say, Hey, I can I can get this kind of proof of concept phase, and then you achieve what's referred to as product market fit, meaning you've got a product, a platform, or what have you. And there's a market out there voice talents, clients who are looking to hire them, do we have something that's working? And is it working at the scale of like, 10,000 20,000, like, there's enough volume there, that with additional, you know, sales and marketing dollars, like, you know, can we go and acquire 10 times as many customers onto the platform. So that was really the, the journey that we had was to realize, yeah, we probably need a sophisticated partner. You know, and I say, we, as in Stephanie, and I, who were the two owners, and, you know, no board of directors or anything along at that time. And, you know, as many as many of you know, we ultimately ended up raising what's called a series A, which is kind of the first first money invested into the company, institutional money invested into the company, with Morgan Stanley, a global investment bank, you know, well regarded prestigious Wall Street firm, and it was out of their San Francisco, Silicon Valley office, and they look for, you know, high growth tech companies. And so we fit the bill. And, you know, in a, we're able to, to secure that investment, as I say, of $18 million. And so, part of that, you know, the outcome of that was, you know, you when you when you go in through an investment process, you actually have to fundamentally answer three questions. You know, how big is the market? And, you know, we had done our own research and build this called total addressable market analysis, and we put it at $4 billion globally. And then, you know, and subsequently we've kind of since validated that with other third party research firms, and so, you know, in the multi billion dollar so big, big growing space, well, why you why you voices, why are you going to be the ones that lead the way and that could be great domain name, you know, great traction so far, you know, positive feedback from customers that they're going to keep coming back, you know, time and time again. So we got to prove why, why we were going to be the ones that would lead but the critical One was okay, even if those are true, the investors and in this case at Morgan Stanley was critical to knowing Well, why now? Why wouldn't we wait and let you grow a little bit more? And why is now the critical time for us to invest in you? And the answer was actually we had started conversations with with a company called voice bank, which for those who are maybe unaware voice bank was a similar online marketplace, more of a directory, but similar type of approach that connected ad agency producers, mostly at ad agencies, with the kind of traditional talent agency. Now you couldn't go on to voicebank as an individual talent, your agent had to register you. And so Jeff Hickson, at the time, who was who was the founder, he started that in 1998, believe it or not, and arguably kind of the pioneer of online marketplaces, I think he was, he was ready to to find a partner and, you know, pursue other other career opportunities. And, and so we, you know, we made an offer and, and he liked the looks of it. And so we ended up actually acquiring acquiring voice bank. So that was a big, the capital raise with Morgan Stanley, and then 30 days later, kind of tying up this deal with with acquiring voice bank. And, and so those are kind of some of the big milestones over the last couple years. But yeah, huge trends that have happened around AI voices, and just the amount of freelance work, you know, the pandemic, I mean, there's lots of paths, we could we could go on, but those are some of the highlights and memories, from my perspective,

Toby Ricketts 

absolutely fantastic. And, I mean, the two key parts of you know, spending, so you get all this money into the business, one of the you know, and your decisions with what to do with that money will be critical in terms of, you know, the success of it, you've got to look after your talent. And look after development of the side, which I was gonna say at the beginning, is, is like, I think of beauty, like the interface that you have built with voices, I don't think anyone in the industry could say that it's not, you know, it's the top pay to play in terms of the interface, the way that people can take jobs right through from the posting right through the payment and everything, like it's a complete, I often recommend it to new voice talent, because when you're getting into the industry, it offers that completeness, step by step, this is how a job works. This is how you get paid. And you don't have to start doing overseas bank accounts, everything like that. So then this thing of beauty, and you've obviously spent a lot of money in building that, and you've done a lot of development work. But you've also had to develop that with, like we were talking about before client acquisition, having people calling clients trying to get people on board to use this beautiful platform you've created. What's been your your priority? Is it has it been in the in the client acquisition? Or is it been on the development or assist This is a balance, we both have to rise at the same time.

David Ciccarelli 

It's, it's, it's, you know, what I jokingly call, it's the chicken and egg problem, right? It's like, you need the you need a platform that is usable, and then you need people to use it. And this tension can sometimes occur. Now what I've learned over time is, you know, with through through the guidance of a board of directors, you develop an annual budget, this is all like big business stuff, probably tremendously boring. But you develop a budget at the beginning of the year, and say, here's where I'm gonna make the investments. And, you know, you try to pick a handful, because you don't want to do the peanut butter approach, and you just spread it so thin, that there's nothing that really has an impact, you try to do kind of one, two, or three things in a meaningful way, over the next year. But you know, the initial infusion of capital was, you know, your thinking, thank you for observing that as well, too, was we, you know, we weren't really a product company in the same way we had developers, we actually didn't have a vice president product, there weren't really designers on board. So it was mostly a there was a real need to overhaul that experience. So I'm going to call it like, one of the uses of proceeds was all around technology, there was the visual user interface and then I would say the user experience user interface is kind of what you see and what you're clicking on. But the experience is that sense of flow as you go through step by step the the emails that you receive to kind of guide you along the way so that's kind of the user experience all that definitely needed to be kind of updated and it was there but there were these like moments of friction kind of like the pebble in your shoe that you're just like ah if we could just get rid of this you know it would people could go through the process so much smoother so that that is that certainly taken a couple years and we're continue to be on on that path as well too. There's a lot of behind the scenes investment, you know, namely around kind of job match, like how do we make better matches on the platform, redoing a search engine, just things that no one's necessarily going to see, but again, makes the whole thing more efficient. So those are two, like, you know, areas of technology that were that were key investments. And then you're right, it's like the the outreach, to generate demand with the clients. That was really kind of a sales and marketing investment. And so, you know, we actually do kind of pursue both in a continuous and continuous way. And I think that's actually been, you know, really key is that it's not kind of all in on one side or the other all talent, because you're right, Toby, that every change or improvement that happens on the client side, we fully recognize that there's a complimentary or sometimes, hopefully not, but an adverse effect for the talent and vice versa. We do something just because somebody wants a request to happen from the talents, you know, the talent is requesting a change to happen. We also have to take into account the ramifications that might happen with the client. And one if I may, that's just kind of recent, there's probably nothing more it's assigned for more jobs, that talent one or like, I will, if I didn't win that one, tell me why. Or at least let me listen to the winning audition, who won the job? And how much do they get paid? It's like, well, I don't know if the talents okay with that. And even if they were, I don't know, if the client would be okay with knowing because a lot of the clients are like, it's a nondisclosure, you know, confidential campaign, they don't want the audio leak, they don't want to know who want it, they don't want anything like that. So it's that kind of tension that we feel kind of pulled between, these are really good ideas. But every every, you know, initiative kind of has like, it affects both sides of the marketplace. So we just try to be thoughtful about about making those changes. But yeah, those are the kind of areas that we're making, you know, technology investments, and then marketing.

Toby Ricketts 

That's so true. I'm glad you brought up about the talent feedback thing, because that that's, that is number one of the number one thing I hear from especially new talent who haven't necessarily won their first job yet. And they throwing auditions at the wall. And they just feel like they maybe get a like, and so many new talent are basing everything they do on how many likes they get. And I mean, as like, I don't, I tend to throw auditions at all and never look back. Like I don't even know if I get likes or anything, I just kind of move on. And if I get a job, it's a nice surprise. But when you are starting out and looking for any kind of data point to improve your performance, the pdbs aren't really much help because it is literally there's just no data coming back at you. Which is why things like growth for the brain. And coaches are so important to give that feedback and make sure people are improving. Is there a way to perhaps like gamify it for clients so that they're rewarded for when they do give feedback. And I've done casting, I know how exhausting it is when you get like, at auditions to listen through. It takes a long time just to listen to the middle and give feedback. But if I know they were able to give spot feedback, I'm sure you've done work on this, to see how feasible it is and whether it's

David Ciccarelli 

we've tried, we've tried a few things, you know, and one in particular is we actually called it audition feedback is when they're going through. If they if they add to a shortlist, or they click Hide to kind of remove it from view. It's like either popping up a window that says, Oh, well, you know, and it has to be very objective feedback. Because as soon as it's subjective, then it's like, the client doesn't want to have to rationalize or explain why Toby, they loved her didn't like your voice for this. You know what I mean? They're just, they just feel like they're opening themselves up. No one wants to kind of write the thanks. But no thanks letter, if you know what I'm saying. So I think there's the hesitation from client from the client to do so. And so the audition feedback was like, I hear plosives too much sibilance background noise, noise floor reflective space, like it was things that hopefully the client could hear when they're going through through those auditions. But the uptake of that was like a, it was like 0.1% of people even for like have jobs even like got a single audition feedback. We're like, this is this is kind of becoming one of those pebbles in the shoe to to for the client who's just like, Can I please just hire the talent and kind of get on with it? So I think we've concluded that you're right, Craig for the brain, other coaching facilities, an individual coaches are really the best channel in our experience to get that personalized one on one feedback. And one way to do that would be downloading an audition. You know, you know if the clients got a job posting, if it's not confidential and, you know, show that show your coach, here's the job, here's my audition, how might I am improve and For a while, we actually had an on site audio engineer who would, in effect, do this, you know, pro bono voices. And the number one thing that made the difference in the audio quality is literally just, I wouldn't resort to like a normalizing. But it was literally just the perception that clients perceive loud auditions to be better quality, rightly or wrongly, it's just you're not competitive, if you if you sound like this, and you're whispering, and I can barely hear you, you know, versus, you know, literally leaning into the microphone can be the difference between that presence that sounding now I'm not advocating that I'm a I'm a culture, you know, anything but like, that's what we found was this perception of sound. loudness, was actually what clients viewed as, like better quality versus not so good quality. So that could be using a compressor, it could be making sure you have a limiter on there as you're not, you know, cracking out. And it could be just working the mic a little bit closer to give it a little bit more of an intimate read that has more presence. So hopefully, those are helpful tips. But you wouldn't know that there's no technology that's going to identify that. That's why again, talk to a coach, given some auditions. It's like, Oh, I'm hearing a lot of your room tone, like, how far away? Are you from your microphone? Take a picture of that setup of your setup, like a selfie. And like, Oh, I normally, I normally stand back here when I'm recording the auditions like, Oh, well, that might be the problem. There's three feet between you and your microphone, you know, it's, you would be surprised. And so those kind of quick tips, take a photo, send it in or an audition and your coach, hopefully they can provide some guidance.

Toby Ricketts 

Yeah, absolutely. And that's, that's great. And it's very useful to hear that you went down the track about feedback. So that's super useful. Just to go back, this is a quite a specific piece of feedback and sort of a question for the Oceania region, which I obviously look after for growth for the brain. I'm based here, I have lots of students here who use the voices.com platform, and have had don't see that many jobs for Australia, New Zealand accent requirements and things. I wondered whether you have a very North American focus, do you do you intend to be like a global company providing global voice services? Or are you sticking to your knitting until you kind of dominate the America? And then you'll go global and go into Europe and go into the Oceania? Or what's your kind of strategy globally, for getting to work?

David Ciccarelli 

Well, you know, that one of the challenges is, the barrier to be kind of a true global company, would be just the simple fact of language. So right now, the entire platform is all English. We transact only in US dollars. So right away, we kind of are predisposed, if you will to serve the needs of a predominantly North American clientele. And so to put some numbers behind that, despite us working with clients, and who, you know, in 160 countries around the world, 76% are in the US. 8% in Canada, right. And well, it's 10% Europe, and I'm just glancing down on my screen, because I wanted to be prepared around this kind of whole whole notion. While it's 10% in Europe, of clients, most of them in the UK. So you start to see this theme, it's like it's basically English speaking countries, even though 4% in what we just call Asia, Asia, Pacific or APAC, it's 4% of clients in a pack. So there you go. Totally right away, it is definitely a much smaller portion. But even even though it's all a pack, truth be told, it's basically Australia, New Zealand, and 2% in Latin, Latin America, when it comes to the languages of jobs that are posted and filled 83% are in English. Now, there's a number of kind of accents, you know, requested underneath there. We've got some work to do, you know, this upcoming kind of period next three months on cleaning up this like, accents lists, we've in languages, but think nonetheless,

Toby Ricketts 

I've been to that for so long. It's that I

David Ciccarelli 

know. Yeah. Well, it's because, well, one, I mean, you have a, I think built a personal brand on a global accent, which is like how do we like honestly, these conversations come up, like how do we enable that to happen? You know, not only for Toby but you know, recognizing that sometimes clients have this like I this this jenis acquire I don't quite know what this worldly accents familiar, but I don't quite can't pinpoint it. But you know, professional and bold, speaking of like the voice of the future type, type accent, and they just don't know how to kind of pick that. And so that is this this we just want to have the languages English and Then a separate drop down for all of these regional accents. So that is, that's, that's definitely upcoming. And you can imagine, once we make that improvement, you know, talent need to update their profiles to make sure like, hey, you've got this data structure so that when a client invites you to a particular job, or post a job, I should say, you know, you get invited, it's creating some strange invitations that are happening with the current structure right now, which we're well aware of. And I think it's just, it's just overdue. I think it's gotten to the point. But yeah, I mean, it's so you know, again, to answer your question, it is vast majority North America, just being Canada 83%, English, 5%, Spanish sprint of French is 4% of all the jobs, and then kind of goes down the list from there. So for the time being concentrated, but you know, we do run, you know, Google ad campaigns, trying to reach clients in the UK, in Australia and New Zealand. I just think kind of like, just from there, you know, sighs the US continues to be the dominant market that, you know, that the platform resonates with?

Toby Ricketts 

Yeah, absolutely. No, I mean, I do think that the marketplace in Oceania here is is a number of years behind the US, you know, the US has really, you know, took the online voiceover thing first and really run with it. And Australia especially still seems to be caught in the the ad bricks and mortar agency model, I talked to look down to one of the leader of our MK, which is one of the biggest agencies there. And it still seems very, like everyone's very happy with that arrangement. And so for big sort of, you know, national campaigns, it's not going to change in the short term, but I feel like there's, there's, there's a lot of little tiny, you know, seedling companies coming up that are just small at the moment and can't afford to go to an agent. And so like the pay to plays fill that that perfectly in terms of like, low to medium budget jobs, they, you know, they need a broad spectrum of talent, especially, but they just, they don't necessarily know about the online voiceover thing. So I, I kind of wondered whether there was going to be a marketing push into these areas where maybe some phone calls going out or something. So that, you know, more of more of that work could come for these voice artists to investing in voices.com. But not really seeing that many jobs posted, unfortunately.

David Ciccarelli 

Yeah, we I mean, we we do have a small global sales team, that, but again, we're more responding to inbound inquiries, as opposed to part of the, you know, challenges that we're just not aligned on. You know, timezone, you know, like, when we pick up the phone, we don't want to calling people in their sleep, and vice versa. So it's, but it's interesting, you bring that up that Australia, and we actually found that to be the case in in Japan in particular, because we're like, wow, it's like world's number one enemy market, this is going to be great. And they're like, nope, everything's in person. Nobody has home studios in Japan. And we were just like, wow, if if the kind of structure on the ground isn't conducive to doing business, through these online marketplaces, like I, I don't know how to change that, where you're, you know, good observation that there's almost this, this willingness to plug in a microphone to download software, you know, from a certain group of people who seem to be you know, predominantly in the States, or like real go getter, aspiring voice talent, or like, if, you know, if I can't just go, go get an agent, I'm going to have to kind of like, enter into this into this industry, kind of using the newest, latest, greatest tools, and I'm going to have to probably learn it all myself, and then not necessarily, no one's going to kind of, you know, teach me completely free, I'm going to probably get the first go through the first couple, you know, videos, lessons, you know, tutorials on how to use Audacity or Adobe Audition, or whatever the software is, you're gonna have to put that effort in yourself. And then, you know, maybe Wait a client or two, I think then, you know, agents are going to be certainly more likely to be taking taking your call.

Toby Ricketts 

Yeah, exactly. Cool. Want to switch tech a little bit? Because I'm aware that we're having such a great time talking that we're not getting to some of the questions I wanted to ask and some of the, the talent on the grapevine had their questions as well. One was around the, the voices.com Terms and Conditions A number of years ago that there was a big update to terms and conditions that said something along the lines of you know, like we own any audio you upload and we can use it for whatever purpose I mean, I I get that like these days, this this is an aside from the paid players and agents and everything. There's been this this this pressure from clients that they want to own the audio, they're paying for it, they want to own it and use it for whatever they want. And perhaps it's a it's a response to that but But Is that still the case that the terms and conditions for for voice How to say that, you know, anything got loaded platform we can use whatever we want cuz people were worried that it was a TTS learning algorithm thing and that you know, auditions were being used to train AI voices. Can you put any of that to bed? Is that?

David Ciccarelli 

Yeah, no, I trust me. I love nothing more than that. First off, I mean, our business is to run a marketplace, we're not a tech company. We're not, we're not, you know, we're not going to compete with Google and Amazon to create synthetic voices or AI voices. I mean, listen, they're there. They have 1000s of engineers working on this kind of project. And they're decades ahead. So I, you know, that's, that's never been our heart's desire to even enter that space. The reason why, and so we haven't, for exceeding clarity, we've not sold data sets, we've not, you know, have auditions. You know, no desire, nothing on a strategic roadmap, to even enter that space. I think, you know, to reuse the phrase of sticking to our knitting, what are we really good at? You know, and we ask ourselves, it's like, what is it that we do, it's like, we run a marketplace that connects clients and talent, to fulfill these jobs. And that's, you know, as simple as it is, we're kind of a straightforward, very candid, you know, clear, simple bunch, you know, smart people, but it's like, some of this stuff is just, I think it's, you know, I think it's, you know, speculative at best and like, kind of fear mongering at worst, which is not constructive for us. And I've just learned a while back to, you know, not engage in trying to defend all of this, it's like, let's just keep doing our thing. And it was actually, one of our board members, he gave me a great line totally, which is, there's kind of, you know, two different mindsets you can have, especially as a leader of a tech company, you can be, you know, the competitive mindset and be fearful and worried about what so and so's doing, and what are they building and what someone said about you, but that can really bring you down, right, you're kind of always looking over your shoulder, or you can have the creative mindset. And the creative mindset is like, here's our vision, here's where we want to go, here's how we're going to build on our strengths. And we've just opted, and I think collectively agreed, let's build on our strengths of what we know, instead of anywhere kind of dabbling in, you know, unknown areas that are highly controversial, that actually don't support our core business. And so here's kind of the other funny thing about that. speculation that they were even ever going to enter into the space. We've, I'm very proud of what voices and the team here is built, we built an incredible business, why would we cannibalize all of that by building a synthetic or AI voice? You know, it's, it's literally trading dollars for pennies, it doesn't make any sense. Because you build that machine once, then it's just going to crank out automated voices for for pennies, where we used to be able to live out a vision of providing income for talent, and as well as for all of the employees here at voices. So it actually undermined our core business operations. So that was kind of point, point, point number one. But if I may, I think, you know, like, Well, why did we have anything in the terms of service at all, the only, you know, the only reason we needed to, is because like, Listen, no one's waiving their rights, and giving us indefinite use of of their audio, what was happening is, the client would, you know, Ghost disappear. And we would say, Oh, you owe us for, you know, you know, that it would be on a credit card, the credit card would fail, they would still use the file, and we would have to chase down that client. And then we would be getting into these disputes that the client would say, well, you don't have the right Why are you reaching out on behalf of the talent? And we'd say, so that we concluded with, you know, advice of our, you know, law firm, it's like, you need to temporarily own this as the file passes through your system, right? You're having this file upload into your system who owns that? And we say, well, we will own it until it's paid for. And once the clients paid for, then it's a transfer of ownership. So you can for those who are interested, they can look up a transfer of ownership. So it's this kind of like, almost like Clearing House temporary state that it sits in. So that in the unlikely and hopefully doesn't happen situation that the client does

you You know, payment doesn't get fulfilled all the way. Sometimes we issue terms where the client can pay us 30 6090 days later, we've paid out the talent that on the on the Friday, but sometimes there's this kind of holding period. If for some reason, we need to have the legal recourse to actually go down and chase that client to recoup the money that we've already paid the talent for. So that was the entire spirit of what we were trying to achieve. I think it was around the same time of a lot of other AI voice companies. And this whole voice first phenomenon and smart speakers and Google Home launching like all of this stuff, that I think Unfortunately, some might have connected dots that just that just weren't there to connect.

Toby Ricketts 

Absolutely. With that thank you for for putting that debate bits. Because that's that's that's, that was an answer. I wasn't exactly expecting. But it's like, there are these funny things with with fine print and legal stuff, which I'm completely allergic to, I have to say like I don't read, who does read tends to get this. These say they're about 67 pages long. But but it was something that was mentioned to me in preparation for this interview that that was, you know, that was something that sort of turned people off a while. So it's very interesting to hear that perspective.

David Ciccarelli 

Yeah, there was a there was a there was a clubhouse as well, that I was that I popped in on it was like the same question. And same concern. And I like rightful legitimate concern. If you haven't, if maybe somebody doesn't understand, again, I'll use the term like the spirit and intention behind what we're trying to do. So any, any change that we're going to make to the terms of service, it's, it's really to provide better protection for the job, and all three parties talent, client and voices. Some examples are we actually, when we acquired voice bank, we actually had to add a whole section in for union jobs for at which the time we were facilitating union jobs through the through the platform. And then later, we had to do a terms of service update when we remove that, because there actually wasn't as many union jobs as we had thought. We recently added around usage rights and better and clear definitions around usage, you know, 113 weeks, one year in perpetuity, you know, different. So we need to define those terms. And then last one, if I may, just as an example, is around it's called COPPA, which is the child online Protection Act. And we basically recognized that we didn't have a adequate way to without just kind of asking, like verify people's ages on the platform. And well, there are sites that are just like tick the box and agree we didn't feel comfortable with that. So you know, now the requirement is you need to be 18 years old to use voices. And that was a bit of a heartbreaker in and of itself, that we you know, refunded child memberships, unfortunately, told some kids parents that we can no longer support their their kids online, we just wanted to provide kind of a more robust parental controls, we just didn't have the infrastructure, I think these are all kind of growing up and coming of age of our own. And unfortunately, they get some of them are included in terms of service, you know, updates that despite kind of best efforts. You know, most as you said, most people don't care, the legal ease. And if you do, it's like, oh, if the assumption is, well, they're trying to do something nefarious with them, it's like, again, I'll go back to if the if really our business is based upon shared success, why would we try to squeeze something like that into a terms of service? It's, it's actually a disservice to all parties. So, um, thanks, thanks for letting me just give a couple examples of like, when and why we make Terms of Service changes? Sure. Absolutely.

Toby Ricketts 

So, um, we are getting towards the windows, it's been a fantastic chat. And hope you got a few more minutes just answer a couple questions I have. I feel like we need to cover as well, your most recent launch, like because looking, you know, this is the presence looking towards the future. You've just launched, you know, Creative Services, which is a big change, for voices calm, taking the model you've done with voices and then applying it to translation and translating it to audio production as well. So tell us about how that came about. And sort of like what and what the now that it's been a month or two since it launched, like what kind of feedback and what kind of uptake Have you seen on the platform?

David Ciccarelli  

Yeah, I mean, so you know, how it came about is I think we were looking at this, this platform that we've created and, and also the incredible talent that are, you know, call voices home, if you will, and looking at these profiles and how people describe the their artistic abilities, what you can do and so we did this kind of big data look, to develop what we call a skills inventory. We took all the profile information of like, what are the keywords that are coming up and is it just vo or people saying, Oh, actually, I can edit audio? I can mix Music, you know, I've speak three languages, and I can also translate them. And now as you know, I want another one of these aha moments to realize the hardest part is probably, you know, or one of the hardest parts is like building up a community of people who are talented and multifaceted. And hear all the informations kind of sitting there at the ready. And the question then is, well, you know, would any client want to actually hire, you know, a talent for another creative service. And when we look back over the years of, again, the jobs that were being posted some jobs and say, I'm actually looking to have my script translated, and then recorded in Spanish, and we realize, okay, they're actually asking for this, but it's two services kind of bundled in one, might they actually post two different jobs, maybe you want a translator, who has certain industry expertise, like pharmaceuticals, or financial services, or healthcare, and so that kind of, you know, got us thinking, if we have the talent, and it looks like there's clients that are that are wanting additional services, then perhaps we can, you know, leverage and utilize this infrastructure we already had, I mean, voice is going to be, you know, the heart of the production, it really is, you know, I use this phrase all the time, like breathing these words to life. But inevitably, there's pre production services, writing the scripts, translating it, and then the vo gets done. And then perhaps, or, you know, perhaps even inevitably, there's some post production services as well, it could be as simple as you know, converting file formats, it could be editing out breaths, it could be chopping this one long recording into chapters for eLearning, modules, that type of thing. So there might be some audio editing, mixing music, and so forth. And that's where like, I felt that was consistent with kind of creating this definitive destination that we're, we're not, we're not veering off into, you know, hiring any freelancer, web developers and executive assistants, it's creative talent, and let's call it creative talent that are in these, you know, circles, if you will, of influence around the human voice. And so I think we're, you know, we've started to struggle to get kind of too far out there with, you know, potentially others. But writing seems like a natural one, like, that's actually a big challenge for clients, like I've done, I want to do a podcast ad, that's great. Do you have the voice but like, I need someone that I can just talk about my product interview and have them write a script. And so we don't really offer that kind of writing right now. So that might be something that we're you know, we're contemplating. But I think we've kind of got the the essence of it. Now, the hope is that all of this drives more vo activity, because it's kind of like pre and post production, give client that great end to end service. And hopefully, they they come back and, you know, are looking to hire another creative talent in the future.

Toby Ricketts 

So you still see, you know, voice is definitely at the core. And these are going to, like complementarily, sort of add work for voiceovers as well. And I mean, like myself, I also offer audio production, because I'm from a radio background. So it's another sort of an income stream for people. Yeah, exactly.

David Ciccarelli 

I mean, you're not alone. That's what we find them. And that's exactly what we also describe them are complementary and adjacent categories. It's like, oh, what's kind of like one next to what is currently there? You know, and so that's really where where we see that, ultimately will build into kind of more and more robust voice of voice jobs themselves. You know, perhaps one day we'll like a client will say, I'm going to create up a project folder, and then have multiple jobs in here where I can kind of better organize the type of creative work that I want to get done. You know, another example would be what we're seeing is that brands have not been thinking they are. Let me take another crack at that, that brands have been thinking of themselves only in visual and visual terms for years, color, shape, space, you know, layout. What they haven't been thinking about is what their brand sounds like, until really the last couple years. Now they're thinking, do we need to have a sonic logo or an audio logo to go to coincide or to complement the visual identity? What's our Sonic identity? And so that might mean like music kind of composition, we're seeing some of these jobs, you know, startup as well, too. But for all of this, I, you know, I'm excited with the whole world of sound. I think it's early days still where, you know, we're not necessarily going to be If there's any time we're fatigued from being in front of, you know, screens, it's probably over the last 18 months. I, you know, there's lots of times where I'm just like, I just want to listen, right? I want to learn, I want to be entertained, entertained, could be a podcast could be an audio book, I want to listen to some training or university courses. So I think there's a kind of a, you know, a whole other world of audio only, or audio exclusive opportunities both for for brands and organizations that are trying to get those important messages out there. So you can be a small part of that,

Toby Ricketts 

yeah, well, audio is really coming into its own, isn't it, like you say, with the rise of podcasts with the fact that audio is found its advantage, in that you can do something while you're listening to audio, especially with podcasts like an audio books, I find like I cannot sit down and read a book because my mind wanders, and I want to do other things. But if I can drive, or do the gardening, or do some building and listening to an audiobook or podcast, then like you get two things done with one stone. And I really enjoy, you know, that that kind of experience. So and I'm glad that you know, the voices is seeing that and, you know, using the platform to kind of leverage that, to for audio professionals like myself to do more work, it's fantastic. I want to get to some of our member questions, a few of these are sort of, you know, I think are answered more on your sort of help like how to get 100% voice match and stuff, which we haven't quite got time to go into, but is I think dealt with with your talent services team. Now, one of the big ones was some of the pay to plays are very guarded some more than others about whether a client with invoices can work directly with the clients, like after they found them on the platform like like voice 123, obviously, you know, just puts you in touch with the client and you're left to your own devices, do your own invoicing and everything and it can go wrong, or it can go right, which it does most of the time. Whereas voices.com has always had this sort of like, you know, you deal with the client through the platform, which is very convenient. But it also sort of you know, it keeps the talent and clients separated. But recently, it seems like there's been a softening of that voices calm in terms of you know, clients getting in touch with talent, and then after the big job maybe working working directly after that. Is that something that voices.com? is allowing or endorsing? Or is it still preferred that you keep everything you do sort of through the platform?

David Ciccarelli 

Yeah, it really, it really is preferred to keep everything through the platform, there's, there's a couple of reasons on that. You know, one, I think we cultivated that client in the first place. And we, you know, want them to come back not only to hire you, but perhaps another colleague, maybe they're looking for a female talent, the next, the next go round, or a different language. So the more they can kind of learn and embrace and understand how to get the most of the platform, I think that actually benefits the community as a whole. The other reason is, as you said, sometimes the transactions don't go as expected. And in those situations, talent would come to voice and say, Hey, this, this client, you know, still owes me the money. We're like, well, we don't see the job on the platform. And then, you know, puts us in a bit of an awkward say, Oh, they hired you once last year. And they're like, No, no, I just got got hired by them last week. And we're like, we don't see it. So I think if we can be helpful and supportive in that. That's one. But there's actually a pretty big reasoning. Why, you know, if I could be so bold, why talent would want to keep, you know, clients hiring them through through voices, it builds your ratings and reviews, you get more compliments, which again, are additional signs of activity and credibility on the platform. You're at the top of what we've now rebranded the leaderboards. And a lot of clients just go right to these leaderboards. And just like show me the top 100, most recently hired favorites most listened to talent this week, this month, all time, it's kind of like a shortcut for them just to get access to now, if you keep the transaction on platform, you're going to be visible on those lists. So hopefully those those kind of a couple quick reasons. You know, both that I think we can be helpful. And there's a, you know, a rationale on some of the benefits for keeping keeping the jobs and that communication going through. Through voices.

Toby Ricketts 

Yeah. Fantastic. Oh, that's, that's, that's, that's good to know. Because it did come in a couple of times. And, yeah, the other thing about, you know, lots of pro talent, who might have, you know, tried voices in the past and left the platform, a few of them was saying, you know, we've heard that sort of voices.com has has sort of, you know, changed somewhat, or at least the perception has changed, the the attitudes have changed. We want to kind of try again, but we don't want to necessarily have to buy a year and then we're talking about, like, a free month for people who have been a member of voices before and then come back I said something you consider like a like a welcome back sort of deal or, oh, sorry.

David Ciccarelli 

I think I mean, sometimes we you know, from time to time, we might do a discount on the offering. But, you know, I actually hadn't heard that as kind of a welcome back. gift, if you will, because I understand the hesitancy is, you know, it's it's $500 for an annual subscription. Now, if you were successful on the platform before, then, likely, if you put in the effort in that first, you know, month or two, you're probably going to win a job or tuners. Good, okay? Now I see how it works, how it's different, how it's better than then maybe three or four years ago, the willing, you know, kind of, you know, to, to invest for the next year. So great feedback, something else we're considering would maybe be like a lower limited, you know, entry level membership, like $500 is a pretty big jump to go from zero to 500, maybe something like 100, but you're, you know, perhaps, limited in the number of jobs you can see or the number of jobs, you can reply to something along those lines. So I'm not sure if you want to relay that back back to the team, but because there's kind of the two constituencies, there's like, new talent that are just like, I want to give this a goal, but I'm not sure I have $500 to make a goal that for a year, I want to I want to do a sprint right for like 30 6090 days, huh? Well, maybe 90 $99 for a year just as a little bit more economically viable. But yeah, and then then there's the people that we would love the wind back, because I think there's, they were talented before, if you're successful, you know how it works. And hopefully we've, you know, overcome a lot of the, the challenges growing pains, call them of years gone by, and I would certainly love to, to earn the trust. And and and return that relationship with with all those talent who are looking to rejoin so don't don't be shy, send me an email, and we I'm sure we can, you know, I can add can answer any of those, you know, difficult questions that you want to throw my way. You know, it's pretty, pretty straightforward. I'd be happy to, to answer those for you.

Toby Ricketts 

Fantastic. Oh, that's, that's really good to hear. And, and you know, that, you know, transparency was one of those things that has really I think you've worked hard on in the last four years and has really come to fruition in terms of being transparent with on the platform, and especially the in the area of kind of, you know, manage jobs, or the I know, I always tell people this there's two kinds of jobs and pay for this self service and they can't manage jobs. One being bit more like a traditional voice agent or, you know, helping the clients along the journey once completely them on their own. That that when did you institute that service? out of interest? And and like do you? What's the kind of split of jobs between out just off the top of your head? If you haven't No, those figures? Oh, no,

David Ciccarelli 

yeah, we actually kind of obsess over this one as well, too. So to answer that the split is is about 9010. So with 90% of the jobs are now self service. This is I'm sharing a little bit of the playbook here. But it's what we call our platform first strategy, which basically is we should have, you know, a default or a bias to push as much of client activity to hire talent directly through the platform, that should be our default posture. It's only in those edge cases where the client is like, I don't have time, I don't want to do this hour, I've been working with a particular account manager for years, I've built the trust with them. But usually, it's in what we call these kind of more complex projects, they're not, you know, for the most part, you know, they're not 32nd commercials, sometimes they're like, 100 hours of corporate training material in like, you know, our 10 hours in 10 different languages kind of thing, multi voice multi language, you know, that's where we're trying to get to. So that mix has dramatically changed at one point, it was probably like 5050, which I think was kind of the origin where maybe some talent, were starting to get uncomfortable. That was kind of the direction. And we definitely corrected that, you know, I think we can get it to probably 95% of jobs are self service where we don't, we don't need to be involved. The intention is the old kind of, you know, teach a man to fish if you well teach that client, Mr. Mrs. client, how to use the platform. It's very intuitive and very straightforward at this point. And if we can to use a software term, like onboard that client appropriately, and using it using voices and get them through that first job, they'll realize, Hey, I can do this on my own. And so that's really been the approach that we've been taking over the last couple years. But it did come about because you know that this managers we can call it professional services. You know, internally, it came about because there were a couple of Fortune 500 companies that said we don't have have the ability like we did some searches, we don't have the ability to use a credit card. So there was this like payment friction, we want to hire somebody, but can you get on our vendors list? And then Can Can you send us an invoice for the person. So there's this payment issue, another client, it was a legal issue. They're like, we your Terms of Service aren't sufficient. You got to sign our legal documents. And kind of like you need to be, quote, unquote, on the hook for this particular transaction, if it were this particular project. So those are the reasons we started, and they were complex projects at the outset. And I think what we've found is, for the most part, that's why we've bolstered up the agreements, functionality on voices. It's, it's also why we've provided other payment mechanisms, clients can pay by all manner of credit cards, or actually request an invoice we have certain clients that are on those kind of special payment terms. And so we've addressed those two previous objections, like why why and needs that the clients had, why they had to go with professional services. So we're really just left with these like big complex projects. And I think they warrant having the extra attention and hands on. I mean, it's some of the projects have been like hiring hundreds of talent on like, massive projects, things that the platform on a self serve basis is just it's not, it's not the main reason that it's mostly small projects in and out pretty quickly. It's not the 100 hours of content, or hundreds of 1000s of words that need to be recorded. So that's kind of where strategically, we've shifted towards platform first. And as I say, it's 90%. Now, I think we can get that up to 95 in the next couple years.

Toby Ricketts 

Fantastic. That's that's, I wasn't expecting that answer. And that's actually really interesting to know that, that you are pushing that. But then again, it makes perfect sense that if you if you've built this, this this brilliant interface and website, which is which is a behemoth now and it's fantastically complex, I love the way that now I'm able to talk about my job page and really sought the jobs like in order of priority for my specific needs, because of all the metadata that's collected as well throughout the site. So well done for that. And I really congratulate you on that on that fantastic development there. So we've basically reached into the end of the interview, is there anything that you you want that we haven't sort of discussed that you wanted to go over?

David Ciccarelli 

Well, I just encourage any new talent that are interested in in the industry, particularly voice talent, you know, read those books, listen to podcasts, watch videos, like we have here today, I think what you'll find is that there's, there's no golden path to success, you know, every actor and voice actor that you, you know, meet or speak to or try to gain some advice from there, they all these little nuances along the way on some key decision or they're, they're kind of moment in time. That kind of led them to take that next step. So, you know, chart your own course Don't worry about replicating somebody else's, you know, and along the way, yeah, you should be getting a coach you know, someone to be your champion, measure your success, set those kind of mini goals and, and determine kind of what that what that next milestone is for you. But, you know, I would leave with that, you know, really chart your own course and developing your own career in this exciting industry of voiceover.

Toby Ricketts 

Fantastic. Thank you so much for your time, David. And I'm sure we'll talk again,

David Ciccarelli 

you got it Toby – thanks!

The Voices of the Industry come together...

I was very humbled and grateful to be included in the Voices.com first Industry panel which was recorded last week. The topic was about industry rates; how they are set, what you should charge, and many other interesting facets to this topic. 

It features some of the top talent in the industry including Bruce Kronenberg, Kabir Singh, Naomi Mercer, Kevin McDonald, Carrie Olsen, Tommy Griffiths, Guy Michaels, Ben Jackson, and Jim Kennelly.

You can watch  the hour-long discussion below;