E60 Voices-com

BS With Bob Schmidt

The BS with Bob podcast featuring entrepreneurs, business people and marketers this week talking with David, David is the CEO of voices.com and is a voiceover person myself is pretty cool to be able to talk to the guy that's in charge of probably the largest place to go to get that to get voices David, welcome to the program. Thanks much Bob thought glad to be here and tell some stories. So how did you get in that the whole voiceover Dick everyone finds her own path and my nose is pretty unique. Actually I see with sound go out and share about how Bob had an old record player and dad had a shortwave radio so I always could tinkered with you technology if you could call it that went to school and got a degree in in audio engineering that I opened up a small recording studio, so this was an opportunity for a reported music bands and so forth, but actually got my name in the newspaper on my birthday and I was actually that article brought in some local businesses that were looking to how the female voiceover reported done for phone system that actually met a young woman, just the day before, who was a classically trained singer and that that ladies and now Stephanie is now my wife and cofounder voices.call that time she was a classic between singer and I asked her to do these voiceovers and so she did a phone system and some local radio commercials and that was the problem referred to it as well. Instead of us doing the production. Why don't we become this. The connector between the voice actor in the client is looking to hire them and so we got out of the production ourselves and really reinvented ourselves as as this marketplace that connects the businesses with those voice actors and that's what we been doing for much the last decade and how did you score the name voices.com we actually didn't start as voices.com we we began as as interactive voices, which wasn't exactly the greatest website name the pigeons will listen to new media or interactive media. It was around the height of what was then the Web 2.0 movement when you know everything was big bright and bubbly on the web about flashy colors and and companies like twitter and Flickr were like dropping bowels from their name and as we want to be part of this movement so we were set on changing rebranding. In effect, so I did with many entrepreneurs do you pull up a browser you Google the domain name of your choosing of your desires and we had landed on a website called as a medical Journal club silencing the critical voices in your head is a medical journal that had been updated since about 2000. And so we reached out actually through a lawyer sent an email to this owner and asked what he saw the name and if so what price and he came back he said initially said that $50,000 and then know you know through some negotiation offered six payments of $5000 can of every quarter every three months with them another $5000, and for that he went to the deal. So we were able to almost like a lift and shift their business from the old servers to the new servers and redirect all that traffic that's been actually evolved one of the biggest turning points for us. It was a name that is short. It's memorable. It's easy to spell it, since what we do in a nutshell, so it's been the it's been really great for my from that standpoint. So how does something like voices.com work for the end user so it must have a business and I want to get a voice and looking for a male voice and female voice. Can I use voices.com to have auditions with different voices or how does that. How does even work. The process is very simple. You sign up for freeing you create an account and its most points will we call client feels people are looking to hire a talent have that project in their mind and so you after signing up you can do what we call posting a job was free to post the job and that is where you outline just as you said in looking for a male voice and a female voice I you know I might be enormously particular language so into this case English will allow you to pick the accent even consider certain regions that have many thicker, stronger accents than that others you can go through and then pick each range. This style of performance. Maybe that particular role. If you want a superhero or a sports announcer or a villain that corporate executives and this helps the actor ultimately deliver auditions for the persona that you want to have you to perform the voice and then of course you attach your script what you want. Auditions is a couple even a couple sentences is fine. You pick a budget which is somewhere between you know start to the hundred to $250 and goes up depending on the duration of the recording and the complexity is of the recording itself and then your deadline when you want your auditions back is something like the dating profile or dating service for voices audios a really challenging medium because there's often not the shared language or lexicon for how we describe what we want. We know it when we hear it, but what kind of words you know are people using we seen some really funny artistic will be called artistic direction or creative direction. Your client will say all he wants me to sound taller. What is that mean then you need you know from you know you have the you know the rate dating radio and and an invoice of yourself you get this knees or these conflicting messages of you know we want you to sound your professional but also sarcastic and humorous was like okay well where's that line of my favorite all-time know is somebody want to sound more purple and I think that Mike is a more passionate is it you do fear liquid is purple sound like a Viking fan is that you so that's problem or or or Barney the dinosaur from the 1990s reference, but nonetheless that is why that job posting is such a critical part, because it provides a common understanding for what the client is looking for and then artistic direction for how the talent is supposed to interpret this and deliver initially a great audition in hopes of landing the job. But then it also serves as the basis for, you know, here's what we what we want you to sound like this is really CEO of voices.com, you know, one of the big questions I have is is a voiceover talent myself trying to break into the business is how I get my stuff out there. You know I've got a tape that I did while it's not tape anymore. It's digital, but I've got you know that I've got some projects that I've done I put them together a string them together like I used to back one is looking for a radio job but I do know how to go about taking what I have now and putting it out on something like voices.com so after that initial acting classes that you've taken you know often the deliverable at the end of that of the culminating event is recording a voiceover demo as you said sometimes is referred to as a demo reel are EDL, so however it seems it's an audio file, usually an MP3 that is a montage of a number of spots for ads that is was necessary because when someone searches on voices.com. They want to hear samples that are as close to their project that they have in mind. I mean a bit of a silly example, but you know someone producing a phone system and this set on you to update my phone system brings you not to send the monster truck rally commercial because it's it's good to miss the audience in the styles is is is all wrong. So you know you end up with this portfolio. If you will of a number of demos for each of those major categories and those can be uploaded onto voices.com again completely for free so we have a free account or you can upgrade to a premium membership but really treating a great profile and uploading those demos, which can all be done for free is the absolute best first step in terms of like practical. What can I do to help market myself on a platform like this today. Davis is really from voices.com joining us this week on the BS with Bob Schmidt podcast so the next question I have, I guess is is the talent, then in charge of doing the editing and breaking down the commercial and putting the music behind it, and all matters that go to somebody else for postproduction. Yeah, great, great question, so most of the reeds and the voiceovers that her daughter what's it's a bit of a bit of jargon here which was referred to as a dry read, meaning there's no additional processing or music that's being mixed in some clients may ask for that but usually in most cases, they just want the voiceover as a clean file with no extra attention done to it and that you know some some clients may ask for brass to be edited out some I mean that's that's can be a lot of extra work. Often times, so it's, it's, you know it is. I see it's a clean read where it sounds as natural as possible. The editing out of breath and we don't see is as much done anymore, but what is required is a is a clean recording with no kind of background noise and then he can produce or whether it's a curriculum designer at you know Microsoft putting together a series of corporate training videos or product demonstration videos there probably to have their own music selections on the backend, and so they would be making those making those choices. What about the different quality of voices I'm not voices, but the different quality of studios because I know that my studio sounds different than your studio sounds different than Johnny down the street studio how you go about matching or coming up with the right sound for the specific client. One of the memorable phrases was trust your ears and that's what we [e-mail] to encourage our clients whether there are creative producer that is hiring voice actors all the time, or perhaps a small business that's just getting a phone. Their phone system greetings done a voicemail and some on hold messaging to ultimately trust their ears know some of these projects, let's say meet much more high-stakes are going to air on radio and TV. Other