Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Voices.com CEO David Ciccarelli (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: It was basically a recording studio business model, right?

David Ciccarelli: At the very outset, yes. This is where the story gets a little bit more interesting. When I opened the studio, I got my name in the local newspaper. What I didn’t realize was that my wife was a classically-trained singer. She’d sing at weddings, funerals, and special events. She was looking to get a demo CD done of her voice.

Her mom, being quite the savvy marketer, saw this newspaper article and cut it out and left it on her bed for her to read,encouraging Stephanie to come down to the studio and record that three-song demo. That’s exactly what she did. Stephanie and I really hit it off at that first meeting.

Because of that same newspaper article, there were other small businesses in town that wanted voice recording. There was a hair salon that wanted commercials done. There was an event management company looking to get some phone system recording. Both of them wanted a female voice and I knew only one girl in the city at that time. That was Stephanie. I called her up and invited her to come back down to the studio and read the script.

I remember offering her to split the money. She doesn’t remember that part. It was a couple of hundreds bucks each for us. I suppose that was the first pivot. It was shifting from recording garage bands and aspiring artists to doing commercial or business work with myself as the engineer and Stephanie as the voice talent. We were officially in business together. Stephanie would record voice-overs for commercials and phone systems and short little videos.

When we realized that we were having a modest degree of success working together, we actually put together our own website. In those days, there was no WordPress or any point-and-click solutions. We literally went down to the local public library and took out web design for dummies, and taught ourselves how to code from scratch. That was our first foray into the marketing world.

Sramana Mitra: What were you trying to achieve? With this online presence, what were you trying to achieve?

David Ciccarelli: We realized very quickly that we could operate a business from the comfort of our own home, servicing clients who were mostly ad agencies and video producers from around the world. The gateway to be able to connect with those clients on a national basis was having a brochure website.

I heard once that you should always be embarrassed of the first version of your product. If you’re not embarrassed, you waited too long. If you’re embarrassed and looking back, you’re probably quite ashamed that you would dare put something like that online, that probably means that you moved. You took action and got it out there. That’s what we did with that first version – tell the world that this studio recording website was open for business.

The impact that it had was it soon attracted other voice talents. There was a fellow in New York. There as a man in Quebec and a gentlemen in Los Angeles who did celebrity impersonations. The common refrain was, “Can I be on your website?” The answer was always yes. Before you know it, we had a few dozen voice talents. That was the genesis. It became the ‘aha’ moment.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Voices.com CEO David Ciccarelli
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