Speak with Long Zheng and Ed Hooper and you realise they’re the kind of tech entrepreneur with hundreds of ideas, and the ability to quickly bring them to life. They’re the kind of startup founder that put us non-techies to shame.
Zheng and Hooper are two of the co-founders of Melbourne based 121cast. We caught up with the pair while they were in Sydney for Tech23; they joined a bunch of other companies as part of Innovation Island. Together with their co-founder Andrew Armstrong, the pair say their ultimate goal is to build a product that allows you to listen to a personalised radio stream; with updates from your Facebook, the local weather, your iTunes library and the news. It would be curated individually, using text-to-audio technology.
“Our goal is to take written content and give you your own radio station,” says Hooper. “You can choose the content you want.”
Zheng, who acts as the product manager for 121cast, is also an avid blogger who writes most days. He is also one of the developers of MetroTwit, a popular twitter client for Microsoft. The newest version, developed for Windows 8, has been downloaded 60,000 times in the last few weeks; and that’s before the operating system has even been publicly launched.
Add Hooper’s experience with successful startups like Rome2Rio, Soak and larger companies like Groupon, and on paper it’s an impressive team.
121cast was nothing more than an idea when it attracted angel investment from Melbourne’s Adventure Capital, which also included use of desk space at York Butter Factory. Hooper says Zheng called him in January this year with the basic concept for a personalised radio stream. After a four-hour phone chat, they brought in Armstrong and put together a quick business plan and created a pitch deck. A few days later, they had received investment — albeit unexpectedly, says Hooper — meaning they could quit their jobs and develop an initial product. Their experience winning the 2008 Microsoft Imagine Cup, with farm-management tool Soap, provided the necessary experience in developing a product and pitching to different groups.
“We got a slide deck together in a week. I think we went through 15 different versions.”
They launched SoundGecko a couple months later as a minimum viable product to test the technology, and the market. It converts text-to-audio for news articles or websites. Currently it operates on iPhones, Windows, as a Chrome plug-in, and will launched soon for Android. Since June, more than 30,000 people have tried the service.
“We were focussed on making it really easy to try,” says Zheng.
“Originally people had to enter the link and they would get an email with an MP3 download. It was too much hassle for people, so we changed the product.”
Having now integrated with Google Drive and Dropbox, the pair have some advice for securing partnerships; or investors, for that matter — reach out to people before you need to. Long says if you know you’ll be looking for investment in the future, reach out now. You can find out what a potential investor thinks about your idea, consider what they think could be improved.
“Present the vision of the end use case. That indicates you’ve thought about how it will look and be built. It also indicates you have everything but the time and effort to build it,” says Zheng.
Hooper chimes in: “Then you can say, we met you six months ago, and we’ve addressed the things you raised.”
The pair are more coy when it comes to their text-to-audio providers. They say they use a few, and pay a fee for the service. It’s part of their ‘secret sauce’, says Hooper, so they can’t say too much more. They scoured the web for people who could help, leaders in the text-to-audio sphere.
Who are the users of 121cast? There are two groups, says Zheng. The major group are those between 20-30, who are working or at university, with a commute. People who are studying, or have lots of reading to do, are another significant demographic.
Zheng’s advice is to start friendly when approaching an investor, adviser or supplier; find out what they want, and make sure they understand what you’re doing.
Hooper agrees. He says reaching out to lots of people means you’re more likely to have success in contacting a few of them.
“Connect with 50 people or apply for 20 startup programs. It’s worth it if even a few work out.
“People say ‘wow you’ve done so much’, but they don’t know how many things we’ve applied for.”
The founders recently closed another round of investment, less than four months after first launching a product. The money will allow them to recruit two new developers.
Finding the talent has been tough, says Hooper. He says the team used LinkedIn and tapped into their own networks, but in the end had to wait for the right people to come along.
“We’ve taken a ‘hire slow and fire fast’ approach. We wanted to get the right person.”