Welcome to HackerNoon’s Writing Prompts! Would you like to take a stab at answering some of these questions? The link for the template is HERE.
1. What is your company in 2-5 words?
“Your recordings become LinkedIn authority.”
2. Why is now the time for your company to exist?
Three things converged in the last two years.
First, because of covid years ago, everyone became comfortable with video calls. In order to capture the value of those calls, recording and transcribing tools became the norm. This means that every founder is sitting on an archive of their own expertise without having done anything deliberate to build it.
Second, models got good enough to make editorial judgments rather than just summaries, so generating text stopped being the problem. What’s difficult now is deciding which moments are actually worth publishing, and that only became tractable recently.
Third, standard AI used in isolation has stolen founders’ voices and pushed everyone towards the mean. Therefore, the people who sound the most human on LinkedIn will be the ones who win, and my method will help accomplish that.
3. What do you love about your team, and why are you the ones to solve this problem?
I am the only person working on SparkVox. So the honest answer to the team question is that there isn’t one, and the reason that is viable rather than reckless comes down to three things I did before this.
From 2018 to 2022 I ran a tech startup with a real org around me – COO, CTO, developers, QA, marketing, product. I was deep in the product myself, including the UI and UX. Four years of that taught me how a technical product actually gets built and shipped and, just as usefully, where the overhead goes. When you have done it with a team, you have a clear view of which parts genuinely needed the headcount and which parts did not.
During that time I also launched We Live To Build (my media company), which has enabled me to interview more than 325 founders running companies grossing between $1M and $1B in revenue annually.
Those interviews taught me nearly as much as acting on the advice myself, which I did daily. They also made me realize that most founders who looked prolific were sitting on years of valuable recordings, and almost nobody had a mechanism for getting it out.
Most people were writing it themselves which took forever, some were hiring ghostwriters or marketing companies for thousands per month, and some just did nothing at all.
I had that problem too because of the hundreds of interview transcripts collecting dust in my Google Drive folders for years.
The last piece is that I have spent the past few years learning and using AI tools like it was my job.
Over the past eighteen months, I’ve built and shipped over a dozen websites and applications in Lovable and then Cursor (I still use and maintain all of them too).
It’s because of my knowledge and experience that I find building SparkVox by myself to be very easy and enjoyable.
4. If you weren’t building your startup, what would you be doing?
I would continue to run We Live To Build, where we interview founders, advise them, and help them raise capital.
Roughly half the source material I feed into SparkVox comes from We Live To Build – the interviews and the advisory calls – and that becomes the content on my own LinkedIn profile and company pages.
The two feed each other. The interviews give me the raw material and the pattern recognition; SparkVox is what stops that material from sitting in a folder, which is precisely what happened to all my transcripts until I built it.
5. At the moment, how do you measure success? What are your metrics?
I measure success by seeing how many people absolutely love the look and feel of the application.
I love seeing them instantly understand the value and get joy out of it saving them time and money.
I also care a lot about how much people edit the posts (the less they edit, the closer to their actual voice it gets)
I’m also measuring how often they create projects, what percentage of the posts we create get published by users.
6. In a few sentences, what do you offer to whom?
SparkVox is for founders who sell through expertise, and whose buyers check LinkedIn before deciding whether to take the call. If your credibility affects your revenue and your feed does not reflect what you actually know, that gap is costing you.
You upload a recording you already made – a sales call, a workshop, a podcast appearance – or import it directly from Fireflies, Fathom, Granola, Zoom, or Google Meet. SparkVox reads the whole transcript, identifies the moments worth publishing, and drafts up to fifteen LinkedIn posts in your voice. You review and approve, and it publishes on your schedule.
Every edit you make and every post that performs feeds back into your voice profile, so the drafts need less work each time.
7. What’s most exciting about your traction to date?
Because of my experience with a bootstrapped consulting company doing 8 figures in revenue, then my funded tech startup, and angel investing, and all those interviews with founders, I’ve come to the realization that the right business for me is lean, which means I’ll bootstrap it forever.
With that said, the biggest lesson I learned from my last tech startup was to let revenue drive growth, so I’m purposely running SparkVox in the wisest way possible.
I’m really happy to see that despite only starting in late April, I already have a few paying customers, and more coming onboard every week.
It means that I have a really good vision of what the product should be, and people are seeing it help them solve a big pain point.
Beyond that, it’s fascinating to see how by being more consistent on LinkedIn (and writing posts using my lived experience as the foundation of truth), people are resonating with it and following me.
More so than that, they are also proving to me that my model works by reaching out to me for demos and becoming users. Other people are asking me to be a podcast guest, some want to refer SparkVox to their clients, and multiple Substack creators and LinkedIn Newsletters creators are quoting me about AI and authentic voice.
SparkVox is designed to put out content that gets those kinds of results, and it’s those results which turns those eyeballs into clients.
8. Where do you think your growth will be next year?
Two places:
Agencies and PR firms are the highest-leverage segment because the economics invert. One sale is ten or thirty seats, each author gets their own voice profile, and the buyer’s pain is quantified in a way founders’ pain often is not – they are already paying ghostwriters or eating the production cost on a retainer. They can tell me exactly what we save them.
The other is distribution through the notetaker ecosystem. Anyone already running Fireflies, Fathom, or Granola has pre-qualified themselves. They have made the decision to capture conversations and they have an archive accumulating with no downstream use. That is a much shorter conversation than convincing someone that recording matters in the first place.
9. Tell us about your first paying customer and revenue expectations over the next year.
My first paying customer was a former guest from my podcast. Don instantly understood the value and felt the pain because he also had a podcast (and a consulting business), and he wanted to use the content from both to promote through both channels on LinkedIn, but didn’t have the time to do it, and his employee was using ChatGPT to copy and paste and re-write over and over again, causing him to work inefficiently.
When his employee Asif onboarded, he was instantly in love with the look and feel of the product, and he’s been using it every day since.
This experience told me there’s probably tens of thousands of more founders out there with team members who have the responsibility of promoting their personal brand and their business, and helped me to narrow down my targeting to find the next Don and Asif.
I don’t like to project revenue because you literally don’t have enough data to know what the future looks like (yet), but I don’t mind telling you that from looking at my competitors, I know this can be an 8 figure annual revenue company, and that’s what I’m shooting for.
10. What’s your biggest threat?
Notetakers like Fireflies, Fathom, and Granola already have the recording, the transcript, and the customer relationship. If one of them ships “turn this call into a LinkedIn post” as a checkbox, they start one step ahead of me on distribution, although I highly doubt they will move in that direction. That’s why I integrate with all of them, and it’s the right move today and also a real dependency.
What I think protects us is that the recording is the commodity and the judgment is not. Their product is complete when the summary lands in your inbox. Mine is only starting there – the value is in deciding what is worth saying publicly, learning your editorial taste from every approval and edit, and getting sharper across projects. A checkbox feature does not compound. A voice profile with a hundred approvals behind it does.
The honest version is that this is a bet on the learning loop being a genuine moat rather than a feature. I think it is. I am aware that is the thing I would say either way, which is why I watch the edit rate so closely.
This startup founder interview template is based on HackerNoon Founder & CEO David Smooke’s ten questions for startup founders.
Would you like to take a stab at answering some of these questions? The link for the template is HERE.