Guest: Nikhyl Singhal - SayNow
Host: Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
So, who are you?
Nikhyl Singhal - SayNow
I'm the CEO of a company called SayNow. SayNow was started about a year ago by myself with my co-founder Ujjwal Singh.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
What's your name?
Nikhyl Singhal - SayNow
I'm Nikhyl Singhal.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
Yeah.
Nikhyl Singhal - SayNow
And I have done a bunch of early startups, and so I got excited about an idea that he had around -- basically Mobile and Voice. And so, for the past year, we've been experimenting with a bunch of different applications, I would say, in mobile and voice communications. And so, we got introduced, and I wanted to get a year, a chance to take a look at the some of the progress we've made, some of the experiments we've done and...
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
So what kind of -- you're involved in this role?
Nikhyl Singhal - SayNow
So, I actually didn't really want to do anything with Mobile, primarily because, everyone always talks about mobile as being very career (ph) centric, very device centric, and people I feel, use their phones for two things, primarily. Sending and receiving phone calls, and sending and receiving text messages, and besides that, there is a lot hype around it and a lot of other features, but they don't really apply to the general person. And so, when we were sort of talking about mobile services, I said, you know, "Boy! It seems so tough, to go after these things that don't involve anything beyond voice and text, because that's the way everyone knows how to do."
And my cofounder had an interesting approach, he said, "Well, using only text and voice phone numbers, I can do some really clever things that have never been done in audio." And so, my interest was to build kind of a web company, but, to do something a little different than your traditional web company has been -- historically have been done. And so, what we had in fact figured out is that, using phone numbers and text messages in a clever way, we can in fact, build a web company on the mobile phone. So, it's not a mobile company, as much as it's a web company that actually, resides on every mobile US phone today. And so, that sounds ambiguous and unclear but...
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
Yeah.
Nikhyl Singhal - SayNow
That's one of the -- the approach was that, we wanted to make it easy for people to send and receive voice messages.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
Right.
Nikhyl Singhal - SayNow
And the way our service worked, and what we originally came up with is, use sort of a better version of voicemail, if you will. But what we found is, so we very quickly hired some folks in January, put up on MySpace, and within a few weeks, we messaged about a thousand people, and just said, "Hey, you know we're interested in getting your feed back, use this service to receive and send voice messages to your friends." And people thought it was fun and cool, but musicians loved it.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
Why?
Nikhyl Singhal - SayNow
Musicians loved it because they wanted to get, believe it or not, fan voicemail, and they said, "This is a great way of us connecting with our fans." And fans started calling and leaving messages, and then, the artists actually hacked our site, pulled the audio out, and played it on their MySpace page in this case. And so, fans would hear, "Portland loves them" and then they'd leave a message saying, "Well, Chicago loves you too," and created this little bit of an effect. And, we started asking fans, well, why are you leaving messages for these guys? Part of it is, it's something that we can do and connect with these fans -- with our favorite artists. But also as if you really want to hear what they sound like? Because we hear what they sing like, but we never actually heard their real voices.
And so we said, "Well, that's really interesting," and hip-hop turned out to be big pull for us. We go a lot of interest from hip-hop artists that, almost over the rap, and I find an alternate way of communicating with their fan base. And so, around this time, it's about a month and a half in our service, one of our rappers, this guy named Lil' Fizz, Lil' Fizz used be in a boy band, in early 2001, and he put up a little badge -- what we call a badge on in his MySpace page saying, "Click and send me a voice message," and what would happen is, one would click, type in their cell phone number, saying I would call them, and then they would record a message for him, and he got 1,300 messages in five hours.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
Wow!
Nikhyl Singhal - SayNow
And 5,000 messages and users in five days. And so, his manager called us up and said, "We got to figure out a way to message his fans back, and he's not being able to do that, individually," and we saw all the good news is we have, of Broadcast Service. And so, what we started realizing is that, artists' love broadcasting messages to their fans, and fans love receiving this personal way of connecting with their artist and responding. So, initially they responded by leaving them messages, now they take polls or interact and contest and things like that, all from the mobile phone.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
So how did you get into MySpace?
Nikhyl Singhal - SayNow
So, MySpace was actually my product...
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
You're not young enough.
Nikhyl Singhal - SayNow
Yeah.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
To be on MySpace.
Nikhyl Singhal - SayNow
Yeah, yeah I'm certainly not cool enough to be on MySpace. We were just smart enough to be the angels (ph) here. We knew that, the mobile phone is really connected to the hip of most teenagers today, and email is kind of losing value amongst that audience, while voice and texting is very applicable. So when we knew, we're looking at target markets, we actually said, "Well, MySpace highly represents the mobile crowd." And so, we messaged the folks on MySpace, only amongst many other experiments, but they sort of took over. And what we've tried to do, form the company point view is, be very good at listening to how users are pulling our services, and how artists are connecting with their fans? And so, we've really let the market itself kind of pull us into these different apps and these different artists, and so on.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
Wow! So you've a demo for me?
Nikhyl Singhal - SayNow
Well, I just wanted to play you a little bit about what sort of it's -- like to use our service.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
Okay.
Nikhyl Singhal - SayNow
The point that I've found is that, voice is a really expressive form of communication.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
Yeah.
Nikhyl Singhal - SayNow
And, we started releasing voice mail and improved voicemail services. We realized, we made a really strong utilitarian argument. Hey, you know, voice mail is kind of broke in, people like a more better experience, and people merely put on their, well, and here are the alternatives to what I do today. But when we started working with artists, we realized there's no where else, you can kind of get that personal connection. And so, what we realized is qualities in voice that you can't get. So I'll play you a few messages here.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
Okay.
Nikhyl Singhal - SayNow
I'm just going to...
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
I'll take my microphone and put it in front of the speaker.
Nikhyl Singhal - SayNow
So this is artist describing.
Demo 1:
Hey, this is Morrin (ph) from Study Guild (Inaudible). Thanks for joining our mobile fan club. It's going to be a lot of fun.
Demo 2:
Hey, what's up? This is (Inaudible) and I would like to welcome you to my mobile fan club. I'll basically send you all the exclusives of my parties, mixed tape and my updates. Stay in touch and I'll haul it back to you.
Demo 3:
Hey it's Jonathan Clay. You got this message that means you're all setup to go with the mobile updates. So, keep in touch and I'll talk to you soon.
Nikhyl Singhal - SayNow
So these were a few samples that we pulled together of people, this is like you would hear, whenever you join a fan club. And you join a fan club by either calling a number, clicking on the web or texting it. So make it really easy, to people to reach their fans, whoever they maybe. These artists kind of describe, how they want to use this service, let me play for you, some of the responses we got -- some of these folks are mostly of the hip-hop genre -- play this out.
Demo 3:
The way you can just reach out to everybody through a phone call that quick, and that many people at one time, it's you know, Geez!.
Demo 4:
I just want to give you a shot at you; you are the best rapper I've ever known.
Demo 5:
Oh my God! I'm very nervous I wanted the best message theme (ph) ever.
Demo 6:
I just wanted to tell you, that you are the greatest and I can't wait for your album to come out.
Demo 7:
I love you.
Demo 8:
I love you, I love you, I love you, I
Demo 9:
It's a great idea, great concept and I definitely think it's the biggest thing next to MySpace.
Demo 10:
Hey, I just wanted to call you and let you know that, that's just crazy, it's pretty cool.
Demo 11:
I just found this site and I think you guys' rock.
Demo 12:
Oh my God! You know, I'm so happy right now.
Demo 13:
I was talking to a bunch of people about it tonight, and I mean, this thing is going to take off like -- like wild fire, just like wild fire.
Nikhyl Singhal - SayNow
It's a little self promotion there. I apologize but, I think that, the point is that, there's a quality in voice, it's very different. If I wrote down those things, the two things that we've observed is, when we see -- people see things in writing, one, it loses that emotion. And two, there's a sense that the artist, isn't really talking to them, there is a sense that the promoter is talking to them or,a handler is talking to them, there's someone in between the fan and the artist. Voice kind of cuts through that, because you actually hear the artist, and you can connect with them personally.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
Yeah.
Nikhyl Singhal - SayNow
We can play more content as well, we have some -- actually people that started singing, back to the artists, and I'll play that shortly and then we'll kind of move on.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
Okay.
Nikhyl Singhal - SayNow
We didn't anticipate, people would, like to sing to the other rappers, but they did.
Demo 14:
(Rapping.)
Demo 15:
(Rapping.)
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
So these are calls?
Nikhyl Singhal - SayNow
These are all calls, these are all fans that wanted to Rap for their favorite artists.
Demo 16:
(Singing)
Demo 17:
(Rapping.) I want to say it again; I've said it before, move off the way when I'm coming to the door.
Demo 18:
(Rapping)
Demo 19:
(Singing)
Nikhyl Singhal - SayNow
That's the content. So, it will be -- basically we'll be moving on to service in April. We started to get this kind of feed back, and what we realized was that, musicians did like the service, but we also started to get poll from other entertainers. So we had, models and comedians, some difference forms of celebrities, we started to get a politician, we have sports teams now that are using it.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
Wow!
Nikhyl Singhal - SayNow
We've had a NASCAR driver that's been interested, a Motocross team that's interested in using it. And we realized that, it's really a passion play, that today in the US, and even in the World, entertainers, politicians, sports and religion, are the four areas of tremendous passion. And they're the ones that are mostly interested in connecting with their fans, and using voice as its medium. And although the service and its underpinnings, is kind of a voice SMS -- asynchronized voice platform if you will, from a technical point of view. That's where we ended up building, and making it easy to go from the web, to the phone and back, what we've kind of been able to find is that, we've stuck a nerve I think, with these communities, and that's how we've been able to kind of see the growth so far.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
It's awesome.
Nikhyl Singhal - SayNow
Yeah.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
So tell me a little bit about how that service was built, what technically, what it --architecturally does it look like?
Nikhyl Singhal - SayNow
Yeah, so we've been -- we basically used our Open Source in a clever way. As you know that, sort of the web has pretty advanced set of Open Source products with JBoss, and Apache, and all the data base technologies and so on. But what's happening with Voice over IP, is that the same world is starting to emerge. And so we use, so -- HTTP in the web world is like SIP, in the Voice over IP world. And Apache and JBoss is much like what Asterisk is, in the Voice over IP world. So what we basically built was, a kind of a parallel web stack and a telco stack, and merged them together, and so we used Open Source to kind of deal with, getting the phone call into our system. So, we worked with the Voice over IP vendor, and it goes into our Asterisk, termination point, and at that point we wrote all the code, to connect to the media, and to deal with the group management, and the broadcasting, and so on. So, we built it fairly quickly, but we've a couple of people that are kind of experts in sort of the Web backend the Telco back-end.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
And how are you guys are going to make money? We are here in the US...
Nikhyl Singhal - SayNow
Well here, the Venture Capitalist and I feel the money is sinjing (ph) my ears.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
So, you can still hear tickling around your head and they don't let any (Voice Overlap)...
Nikhyl Singhal - SayNow
Someone had asked that question.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
Yeah.
Nikhyl Singhal - SayNow
What we found is...
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
That they don't let me even touch it, I'll take it home and you know...
Nikhyl Singhal - SayNow
They keep that in some locked areas.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
Yeah.
Nikhyl Singhal - SayNow
So it's actually been interesting that everyone of the artist that are little larger, are usually signed by labels or the NASCAR drivers have sponsors or the Motocross team has a group that is in charge of them, and they all have budget for promotion. And what we tell people is that, you pay us, a penny a message, that's heard, right? A penny a message is ten times less, than it cost to make a copy of a flyer. And the people that use your service; are the ones that have opted in, that we guarantee they've heard your message, and they're your greatest fans. Because they pay a little bit of money to the carriers for text and voice charges, right?
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
Yeah.
Nikhyl Singhal - SayNow
So we think we have ten times a more effective channel, at one tenth the price, and that's the easiest way to look at it. Turns out our cost model as we scale, turns out to be dramatically lower, than say, $10 or CPM, for sending out a message. But that's just the start of it. We did a poll last week, with one of our rappers, which has about 25,000 people in his fan club, and he happens to be our largest rapper. We asked him, we asked -- we played a little bit of a snippet of his latest single, and we said, would you like to have this as a ring tone? Press one (1), because this is an interactive channel, right.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
Yeah.
Nikhyl Singhal - SayNow
And with 1,200 people in the first hour, came back and pressed one (1), and they said, they're interested. Well, if you took a few pennies off of each of those, we would make $50 to $100 on every thousand messages we send, by people just clicking. If 50 people out of 1000 just pressed one (1), we made a dollar on that, we would dramatically increase the margins on our service. So, promoters and advertisers as well as content distributors, have real interest in connecting with their fans. And the Webs are noisy place, if you've ever been to MySpace page as you know; it takes a special kind of computer to bring that stuff up, that mean with the audio, and the video, as well as it's hard to cut through the clutter. With the phone, it's very much of what I call, lean in experience, you're really listening intently, and 15 second ad, that's placed afterwards. These people will run though walls, to listen to their favorite artist. So that's quality of the ads or the promotions that we can provide here, as well as the fact that, these are your best fans, the ones that will appear in your concerts.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
Yeah.
Nikhyl Singhal - SayNow
The ones that will be your evangelist, to bring other people on board. And to bring a new person on board, all you need to do is, to say, "Hey! Everyone call this number, you ought to join this guy's fan club because he is so funny, he is so great, he is so entertaining," it's that infectious quality that we are trying to go after.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
Interesting. What's your favorite of MySpace site?
Nikhyl Singhal - SayNow
My favorite MySpace, well I have to say, I'm little biased.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
But then you are an expert.
Nikhyl Singhal - SayNow
Oh there you are., I don't publicly admit, I spend a lot of time on MySpace but I hear it and MySpace site is clearly my favorite artist -- our Lil' Fizz site, because this guy has got -- he went from 2,500 friends in March, when he started using our service, all the way up to a 125,000, he's quite on basically 15X (ph) and he's touring now with Chris Brown, which is one of the big hip-hop artist. And so, I check out his site often because we get a lot of...
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
Do you get back stage passes?
Nikhyl Singhal - SayNow
We -- he doesn't come to the big area, but when he does, I hope so.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
That's a recruiting tool.
Nikhyl Singhal - SayNow
Exactly, exactly. No, no.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
Hang out with us, we'll take you back stage.
Nikhyl Singhal - SayNow
No, we just started to sign models, so you can imagine what that must be like.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
That will get you in marriage trouble there.
Nikhyl Singhal - SayNow
Yeah, so.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
What's next for you guys?
Nikhyl Singhal - SayNow
So we -- we are in the process of building up the company now. We've got about 50,000 users on our service, we...
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
Sorry about that.
Nikhyl Singhal - SayNow
Bless you, bless you. That's all right.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
You've 50,000 artists.
Nikhyl Singhal - SayNow
We've 50,000 users on our service; we are enclosed in right system. So today, when you come to the site, you're actually not able to invite -- to register unless you've been invited. So, we've been doing that, because over the past six months we've been tuning the experience. The couple of things we're doing on our product side, which will be like is, now that we have a bunch of fans -- we've 50,000, we even go in a process of releasing a Flash Wizard, that allows people to record a message, and it automatically appears right on the Flash Badge, which in this case will be on the MySpace page.
So, we're working with a label that's actually going to do a rap contest, given the fact that our fans love to sing to their artist. What they'll be able to do is, record a message, and it instantly goes up on their Flash Badge, which will be on the page, and then people will vote, this is my favorite rap of your fan base, and the winner is going to be flown to the artist's last concert. And so, we're going to do these type of things to drive more of a community appeal. So fans, often times ask us, we love listening to the artist, we also want to meet other fans, other people that feel the same way as we do. And for the first time, we're building these community features, so that they're able to kind of cross connect and find people potentially in their area physically, or people that feel the same way about the artist. And all privately, because we're sitting in the middle, we hide all the phone numbers; they can click a button and send a message to that person.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
Wow!
Nikhyl Singhal - SayNow
And they can respond, and we can hope that will create more kind of connections between the different fans, as well as, making some of the artists (Inaudible) work, to constantly drive content, the users can actually generate, a ton of content. You look at our greatest -- our largest fan Lil' Fizz, he's send about 10 or 15 broadcast on the channel, he has received almost 25,000 messages from his fans, almost every person has send him at least one voice message.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
Wow!
Nikhyl Singhal - SayNow
So, given that percentage, we're like wow! We're sitting on a ton of user generated content, and opening that up, and letting people listen, vote, and interact, is actually the next step for the company in my opinion.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
Wow! Well thank you for...
Nikhyl Singhal - SayNow
I appreciate your incoming feedback.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
For coming out and seeing me here in USBP land.
Nikhyl Singhal - SayNow
Yeah, absolutely.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
And sounds like really cool service, so I've to be invited in, right?
Nikhyl Singhal - SayNow
Yeah, you've to be invited in, but you get the big brother discount there, we'll get you in.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
But how do my viewers get in?
Nikhyl Singhal - SayNow
Well...
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
They have to bug me for inviting, I've had my racenote (ph) on there with emails.
Nikhyl Singhal - SayNow
Yeah. If you go to our home page there's a trick as well, if you join any of our broadcast lines, we actually work with Woot and the Onion and some of the podcasters recently, just -- instead of just connecting to artist that want to record messages, we've realized there's a lot content, that's out there on the web, obviously in the form of podcasting, which you know very well. What we can do is, we can connect that, our RSS feed, to our service, so people get text alerts, and they can call in and hear the content. So, kind of Mobile podcasting, so I can actually show you an example of that.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
Wow! That will be awesome
Nikhyl Singhal - SayNow
So the Onion for example, is in our RSS feed that we connected to, and in this case it says, "Onion news send you an audio message, 61 seconds, bird flue fear is forcing average Americans to stop handling dead chickens, dial this phone numbers to listen."
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
Wow!
Nikhyl Singhal - SayNow
So, any Podcast can actually use this service, and what we basically do is, attach this phone number to that content, and the best content is three minute content, short content that comes to flow very nicely in a mobile phone. And anyone that subscribes to any of the content, we have Woot, which is a deal of the day site. I can actually show you that, Woot is, a deal of the day site where they put, one item a day and we send an alert, with the title, the price and their calling number, to hear more about that item. Anyone that joins any of the Podcasts, or any of the clubs on our home page, automatically gets an invite. So that's the secret way into this service, for your watchers and listeners.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
Well thank you very much.
Nikhyl Singhal - SayNow
Hey, my pleasure.
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