Croak.it launches ‘Talk Button’: Will let users speak with you on the site
Croak.it is a start-up founded by two IIT Kharagpur graduates, Srinivasa Teja and Protik Roychowdhury. Croak.it allows users to discover, collect and convey thoughts and expressions on-the-go over voice in 30-second audio snippets called ‘croaks’. (Read their complete story)
Having been completely a completely B2C product till date (100,000+ croaks in 10 months), Croak.it has now forayed into the B2B space with their ‘talk’ feature. The ‘Talk Button’ for businesses is a tool that allows businesses to let customers interact with the company right on their websites. Use cases include one-click customer care hotlines, voice reviews, interactive consumer surveys, discussion boards, project collaboration platforms etc.
Launched in May 2012, Croak.it! quickly captured the imagination of the consumer internet market space with its MVP recording over. With the launch of the new feature intensive site, Croak.it! has seen increasing interactions with the count of croaks recorded soaring past 220,000 by the end of May, 2013.
We got in a quick conversation with the founders to learn more:
1) What made you build this feature?
Our aim is to make online communication easy, real and personal for every user. The Talk Button allows websites to become "croak-enabled" and let their users talk on their website, be it for customer support, feedback, reviews or discussions. With the numbers from our consumer web (web and mobile apps) backing us up, we decided it was the right time to take our Talk Button to the market.
2) How is Croak.it shaping up as a product? How much traction do you have right now?The new platform (web and mobile) is more feature intensive which allows a user to create, discover, collect and share sounds from all over the world. Since the launch, we've soared from 100,000+ recording to over 220,000+ sounds from all over the world in the space the last two months. Before that, we got voted by teachers in the US as one of the top 4 free iOS apps in Education AppMadness13, and are currently being used in over 60 schools in the US. Browsing through our hot and trending lists, you will find amateur singers, kids, musicians, voice artists et al using Croak.it! These are exciting times.
3) What revenue models are you exploring?
We still want to keep our consumer web products totally ad-free, and are looking to monetize through our Talk Button, which currently has 2 plans, but will be expanded upon later. Since we unveiled the Talk Button a couple of weeks ago, we already have a few paying customers on board.
4) You've been getting a lot of media attention, how is all that reflecting for the product?
Media attention has definitely been good. We launched the web and mobile apps at the TNW Start Up Rally, where people had a lot of good words to say about Croak.it! The second day of the conference actually saw us recording the most number of croaks in a single day, with 20 recordings a minute during peak hours. That was insane. We also came out of there with a number of websites who wanted to use the Talk Button. So, it's pretty much been good!
5) How big is the team now?
We have a lean mean team of 4 now, with tech, design and business capabilities all covered. We probably will be hiring a couple of interns in a few months.
6) What does the road ahead look like?
Well the last two months have been a mixture of hard work and good times. Our next aim is to expand into Europe and the US with our Talk Button. We already have over 85% of our activity on the consumer web from those regions.
Croak.it! has seen massive uptake in the education sector especially with over 50 schools in the US and in Europe using it regularly as a classroom teaching tool. Check them out here and stay tuned for more updates.