weeks 6 - 9

ok, so here's what's been happening with Speakoro, and honestly, it's been a bit of a wild ride..

we pivoted.

remember how we built this whole platform to help speakers find events?

the idea was pretty cool: we'd crawl thousands of speakers, find their linkedins, analyze all the posts where they mention speaking at events, and hunt down the contact info for future editions of those same events.

we'd then sell speakers these email addresses for like a buck each.

sounds revolutionary, amirite?

nobody else was doing this at scale. some people were hiring VAs to do it manually, which is just brutal.

but then we actually talked to speakers.

and .. well, they weren't as excited as we thought.

their pushback was pretty reasonable tbh: "okay so i'm paying you upfront for email addresses... but i don't know if they're any good"

and they were right. they were absolutely right.

that's when it clicked.

i was reading this YC request for startups post about full-stack AI companies. the core idea: instead of selling your AI tool to businesses, why not just become the business? sell the outcome directly, not the tool. own 100% of the risk, but also own 100% of the upside.

wait. that's it!

we discussed it (Nathan, Ibrahim & I) and decided that’s what we're doing now: we don't sell email addresses anymore. we find you speaking engagements. and when you get booked, we take 10% of your fee.

think about the math here—speakers are getting paid $10k+ per gig. if we charge 10%, that's $1,000+ per success versus a buck per email. and honestly? if we send out a thousand emails, we're pretty confident we can land at least one booking.

that's the bet we're making.

will it work out? i don't know.

but we'll find out.

why this feels different:

i've built so many products where you hope people come, then spend all your time figuring out distribution. it becomes this exhausting grind. you get demoralized. eventually you sell it for $500 or whatever and it's just... a waste.

this time we're selling the outcome. we're saying "we will find you paid speaking gigs" and we only get paid when you do. no risk for them. all the risk on us.

so i don't know... the hard part is going to be actually landing those engagements—we'll figure out how much of that is AI and how much is just good old-fashioned hustle.

but i'm sitting here at the illy cafe at hte city center in bahrain, and i'm more excited about this direction than anything we've tried before.

let's see where this goes..

📱 autodial approved!
we got so pre-occupied with speakoro we almost forgot about autodial.

the app was finally approved, and we launched.

we didn’t get around to even posting about it (like i say, we were busy) so you can imagine our shock when we looked at the downloads chart and saw this:

wha????

how.

turns out, people were just searching for “ai dialer” on the app store and downloading our app — since it ranked for the term!

now, we’re focused on improving the app by talking to the users that paid and working on their feedback. just this week, we added support for making AI-calls in 100+ languages (in addition to squashing a bunch of bugs!). Download here on iOS (coming soon to android).

that’s it for now, adios!

— Yazin