What kind of future should startups create in the AI era? — Why Voicy is now declaring a 'Second Founding' —

Hello. This is Ogata, CEO of Voicy.

February is already halfway through, but since the start of the year, Voicy has been preparing to enter a new growth phase, both as an organization and as a service.

And at this moment, we are declaring a “Second Founding.” This is a major decision for Voicy to move to the next stage.

At the root of this determination is the conviction that precisely because we are in the AI era, the value of content overflowing with humanity will become increasingly important.

The essence of this is competing with humanity in the AI era. Bringing out and letting shine the charm of people who are full of humanity. I believe that is exactly Voicy's mission.

To that end, we will continue to thoroughly lower the hurdles to “speaking” and create a world where more attractive people can easily broadcast. Precisely because we are in an era dominated by AI, it is more important than anything to be particular about humanity and human warmth.

We at Voicy will specialize in enriching society. Rather than mindlessly increasing genres or spreading ourselves too thin, we will contribute to the richness of society by providing deeper, more dense value.

The exciting content overflowing in the world is wonderful, but Voicy will dare to specialize in its domain and establish a unique position. Of course, the cuteness of dogs and cats is soothing, and the stimulation of short videos is attractive. However, Voicy wants to provide value that is different from those.

We want to focus on things that resonate more deeply in the heart and content that enriches life.As a result, our target audience may not be a broad, mass-market one.

But that is exactly where the “real” people who are seriously thinking about and acting on “making their own lives better” should be. Providing a comfortable space for such people, with little risk of being “flamed,” is the kind of space we aim to create.

The key to winning in the AI era is undoubtedly hidden in the human element. This is where our opportunity for victory lies.

To that end, Voicy must also change itself. An organization where every member respects each other and can demonstrate creativity. An environment that values open communication and where everyone can easily express their opinions. And I want to make it a company capable of the kind of hard work (not in quantity, but in quality) that produces emotions that cannot be created normally.

As I pledge to restart, I would like to roughly look back on Voicy's history. It is a history like no other, so please look back on it with me!

Voicy's journey so far

Before we launched Voicy, audio content in the world was mainly radio. And there were only a few podcast programs. Perhaps neither had the momentum they have now.

YouTube is centered on talk content now, but at the time, I think there were many videos with strong visual impact, such as “I tried putting in an iron ball.”

It was still an era where it was difficult for individuals to speak and earn money. The only people who could do that were some celebrities and cultural figures who received fees for lectures and the like.

Voice content such as radio CDs existed only in some parts. In other words, for the average person, earning an income by speaking was almost unthinkable, a very limited world, I think.

The message “Live by what you love” was launched in 2014, a time when the word YouTuber was becoming established.

“From now on, it's video.” Voicy was born in that atmosphere.

The reason I created Voicy

I believed that human voices had much, much more value.

I was certain that the number of people who want to convey their thoughts through voice would increase, and that if there were a mechanism that allowed people to broadcast their voices and deliver them more easily, there would surely be people who could shine more than ever before.

What I thought when looking at content spreading on the internet was that the busier and more time-constrained people are, the further they drift away from broadcasting. It is precisely those who lead fulfilling lives who are not broadcasting important things to the outside world.

The reason is simply that the hurdle for broadcasting was incredibly high. Writing long-form text or creating videos with subtitles takes a massive amount of time. Among those, the people who can properly continue broadcasting are either superhumans or people with too much free time. I think most people probably couldn't be either.

I also think that the slogan 'living by doing what you love' actually resulted in everyone desperately spending all their time on video editing, unable to do what they really wanted to do in the true sense.

For a long time, it was an era where creators could not succeed unless they dedicated a large portion of their lives to content production.

I thought there was still room for a challenge there. I wanted information from people living more wonderful lives to spread much more throughout the world.

That is why the thing I was most conscious of when creating Voicy was to make it a service that anyone could use with the lowest possible broadcasting cost. I aimed for a place where anyone, from top creators to general users, could start easily without incurring large costs.

At the time of development, it was an era without AirPods or smart speakers, but the IoT trend was still heating up. I was sure that an era was coming where the internet would enter every aspect of life. At that time, the content that would become the most familiar presence would be 'voice'.

Busy modern people have their eyes and hands occupied, but their ears are still free. I was convinced that there must be a new medium born from that.

In September 2016, Voicy was quietly released. Immediately after the service started, it received almost no attention.

In fact, even after a year, there were only about 100 daily users. I was constantly worried by those around me, but some enthusiastic users were using Voicy every day to broadcast, or were listening and enjoying it.

Although the number of users was overwhelmingly small, we certainly had the feeling that it had become a service that really resonates with the people who like it.

In the fifth year, the first monetization feature

However, because there were so few users, I wanted to get people to use it somehow, so I involved people from news media and print media in Voicy. I forced them to read news manuscripts and distributed them as audio content. Even now, the content from newspaper companies that started in the early days is popular on Voicy.

Just at that timing, smart speakers began to appear. News content fit perfectly there. I think we were able to collaborate quickly with Amazon, Google, and others, and give a little push to the audio shift of media and publishing companies.

Wireless earphones like AirPods were added to that, and audio content became a more familiar presence.

In 2018, Voicy had its first turning point. Suddenly, many famous bloggers came to us. People who had previously broadcasted via text joined the fray on Voicy and created a new genre called 'voice blogs'. Thanks to that, the number of users grew significantly.

A lot of traffic came and there was a sense of excitement, but Voicy had always been a service in the red. That was because there were no monetization features at all.

It wasn't until 2020 that we began full-scale monetization. We introduced subscription and paid broadcast mechanisms to Voicy. This allowed personalities to earn revenue from audio content, and the curtain rose on the 'era of earning with just your voice'.

This triggered influencers who had previously been active in video, photos, and text to start entering the audio space. On Voicy, just speaking is enough to get your message across. You don't have to deal with tedious editing.

Some even began to decide that it was more efficient to speak on Voicy than to appear at lectures. As this movement to monetize the 'voice' itself accelerated, it created the soil for 'voice influencers' to emerge later.

Voicy also thoroughly re-examined the listener experience. We separated background music from talk, supported double-speed playback, and intentionally limited editing features. I believe the accumulation of such efforts became a new form of audio experience.

The arrival of Clubhouse

In the midst of this, at a miraculous moment, that 'Clubhouse' appeared, and an audio boom arrived all at once. It was the second divine wind, following the entry of bloggers in 2018.

With the sudden excitement around Clubhouse, the hurdle for 'speaking' dropped significantly. A sentiment of 'Why doesn't everyone just talk?' spread all at once.

The act of 'broadcasting one's voice,' which had previously been thought of as the exclusive privilege of radio personalities, was suddenly opened up to the general public. Of course, anyone could have done it if they wanted to via podcasts and the like, but the creation of an atmosphere where people felt 'it's okay for me to do this too' was huge.

What is interesting here is the difference in consciousness between broadcasting and receiving voices. From the perspective of the broadcaster, voice is more embarrassing than broadcasting via text or photos. But the receiver wants to hear the raw voice, including that person's embarrassment, just as it is.

Voicy focused on this psychological gap from the beginning and decided to capture and deliver voices as they are. The Voicy app does not allow recorded audio to be edited. This was to balance the ease of broadcasting with the realism that audio should inherently have. I think this was Voicy's major innovation.

Aiming to be audio infrastructure

In this way, many audio influencers were born from Voicy, and the arrival of Clubhouse further accelerated that movement. It feels like a lie that there was a time when we used to say, 'It would be amazing if you could earn 100,000 yen a month on Voicy.'

Now, it is not rare for personalities on Voicy to earn 1 million or 10 million yen in monthly sales. Voicy has truly produced people who 'make a living with their voice.'

Since Voicy originally aimed to become audio infrastructure, we wanted various companies to utilize it as well. In fact, companies like Globis began broadcasting on Voicy and were able to build fan pools.

I am proud that the movement of companies entering the audio market is a result of what Voicy has pioneered.

Recently, corporate broadcasting has also increased on podcasts. At Voicy, we have been conducting an initiative called 'Voice Internal Newsletter' to turn internal communication into audio for quite some time.

Unfortunately, we are currently forced to temporarily suspend it due to a lack of development resources, but we will definitely bring it back in the near future. The power of audio, which conveys a person's charm directly, should have a major impact on internal communication as well.

As a result of these numerous challenges, Voicy achieved 2.7 billion yen in funding in 2022, and our valuation exceeded 10 billion yen. Prior to that, I also published a book called 'Voice Tech Revolution,' and as the title suggests, Voicy has come to be called a 'revolutionary' in the audio content industry.

To take root in Japan's audio culture. I think we have surely advanced about 20 steps from zero toward that goal.

But when you think like that, you usually end up taking 8 steps back. I have also made various mistakes up to this point.

Deciding to return to our roots

Over the past two years, I tried to decentralize the Voicy organization and delegate authority, but honestly, it didn't go very well. I tried actively incorporating suggestions from shareholders and internal staff and leaving things to them, but that didn't work either. I ended up creating an organizational structure that didn't produce results, and the number of employees leaving increased.

After raising funds, I felt an impatience to be more aggressive and push numbers higher, so I had a sense that we steered toward areas that weren't really our strengths, such as just increasing genres, adding fun and excitement, or trying to boost numbers through data matching.

This included things like temporarily freezing the internal newsletter, renewing the app's home screen, or shifting toward voice dramas.

We launched voice dramas as a major strategy two years ago, but as a result, after investing several hundred million yen, we reviewed it andare now returning to our roots, focusing once again on our strengths. That means providing a user experience that only we can offer.

At the time of the release, I wrote in a note, 'We might swing and miss spectacularly, but that is what startups do—continuing to take on such challenges,' and that is exactly what happened.

I realize that cost-cutting, tightening awareness, and reducing revitalization measures also caused Voicy's organizational vitality to temporarily stagnate.

When an organization stagnates, it reflects back on the numbers. Over the past two years, the number of listeners, personalities, gross merchandise value, and sales have all been sluggish.

So, once again, we will invest in revitalizing the organization so that everyone can find their work interesting and improve performance.

Starting in the fall of 2024, we significantly changed our organizational structure, began verification and various measures, and started recording record-high gross merchandise value every month again.As a result of changing the structure and moving forward to rebuild, we have seen growth for five consecutive months recently.The number of new personalities has also been increasing rapidly.

'Second Founding' means an existing company entering a new growth phase by significantly transforming, expanding, or restructuring its business activities.

The means to achieve this include entering new businesses, changing business models, altering management structures, and rebranding, and we have already started working on all of these.

I have now reached the point where I am confident that we have properly created a growth phase once again.

Creating a massive future

And, including my own self-reflection, I will once again manage the company with a focus on'creating a massive future.'

From now on, I must become a 'manager who can talk about dreams' much more. In this regard, I cannot say I am even at a passing grade yet.

I will hire talent that possesses what I lack and increase the number of colleagues who will boldly throw tough opinions at me. But if I, as the president, get discouraged by that, it would be counterproductive.

In the first place, we are now in an era where even Masayoshi Son says,'If you give AI 10 million yen, it will propose a good business plan.'In other words, even a manager's rival is becoming AI.

To overcome that, we must be crazy. Bold ideas and instantaneous power that AI cannot possibly reach should be our weapons. We will no longer be able to win with mere brute force strategies.

What is important is to always talk about dreams like crazy, be extremely particular, and get extremely passionate. Having something you can be so immersed in that it defies common sense might be the way to survive in these times.

I believe that those who will survive are either large corporations with massive reserves or startups that are thoroughly unique and crazy.

Voicy will continue to be more unique than anywhere else, and even possess a sense of madness. I believe that is the only survival strategy required for startups from here on out.

Humanity is what will survive in the AI era

To repeat, the major reason for declaring a second founding this time, as I wrote at the beginning, is that“humanity is what will survive in the AI era”.

Actually, I have been saying this all along. But there were parts where I wavered. So I want to declare it again.

The era has arrived where all content is created by AI, and content that human creators could never possibly produce is being generated without limit.

I am convinced that the only value that cannot be defeated by AI is “humanity.”To deliver humanity, people have no choice but to speak with their voices. Most content will shift toward voice.

Our company is not an “ear-y” or “hearing” service; we are putting out a voice service called Voicy. It is not about “ears” or “listening,” but about “voice.”

We are entrusted with the sounds and words that come out of someone’s mouth.

To maximize the appeal of humanity, which is the only value in the AI era, Voicy is extremely specialized in having the person speaking express that humanity, and we are making it as easy as possible for people to talk.

If you want to express your true self in the coming era, you should speak on Voicy. Then we will deliver it to customers in various forms. I hope we can become that kind of existence.

The raw voice, which is the source of humanity, radiates a one-of-a-kind value in the age of AI dominance.I believe that serving as the gateway to that is Voicy’s mission.

Once again, the experience of people connecting with each other through voice and communities being born has truly immeasurable value.

From now on, Voicy might become a service that is, in a sense, closer to “Humanity” itself. We will draw a line between ourselves and the mundane content that AI can also create, and continue to pursue the value of humanity. That is my determination as an audio platformer.

In summary,

Voicy is currently in the midst of a second founding, a reconstruction. There are three main things I am thinking about.

There are many things I want to do and many things I must do.

• Providing the warmth of humanity and connection in the AI era

• Focusing on services that provide unique experiences and enrich daily life

• Growth comes from becoming a topic of conversation in society and delivering experiences that exceed expectations.

• Focusing growth on a personality-first approach.

• We have established a certain culture. From here on, we will build the business and the industry.

To achieve these goals, we are redesigning our organization, systems, mission, vision, values, and strategy.We are restarting once again as a passionate venture fully committed to the user experience.

Please look forward to the future of Voicy once again.

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Voice Editor's Note

After writing this article, I also talked about it in audio. Please listen to this as well if you'd like.

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