Congrats on the launch, @rozzie. Although it could be used for a variety of use cases, who was your target demo in the beginning? E.g. businesses vs. consumers.
@rrhoover I've had the good fortune to have experienced and learned, early in career, that there is real value in helping people to work together more efficiently (less miscommunication, fewer iterations) and more effectively (new ideas, better results). Whether individual 'pros' who see value in their daily interactions, or teams/orgs who see measurable value in what they do together, people are willing to pay for things that improve coordination. And so I would answer that we targeted both individuals & teams from the start, but those primarily with 'social productivity' needs.
That said, for any communications product 'network effects' can both work for you and against you. If paying subscriber A needs/wants to work with user B who may not be able or willing to be a subscriber, B's lack of payment can become a barrier to A's usage. That is why there must always be a great free version available - so as to enable network effects to never be an inhibitor.
Finally, I should also say that I don't believe that there's a bright line anymore between business and consumer. We're all just people. We have people with whom we wish to communicate and get things done: people we need, and people we love. Business apps classically suck the life out of you. There's no more place for such apps in this world. We sought to build something that people would feel great about using, regardless of context.
I hope you folks find that we've hit the mark in your own experiences.
+ 1 and some @rozzie, that third paragraph should be painted some walls. We are gradually emerging as a species out from under marketing 101 segmentation. These segments never really existed they were buckets used to average people out and they resulted in average experiences.
@rozzie well said. I like this graph, which comes from agile methodology:
Talko touches multiple points on the graph, from asynchronous text to real-time voice communication, to provide people different ways to interact depending upon the context.
Considering that our entire life is constant social interaction, it would be a big deal if we can improve the efficiency of communication even by just 10%.
I hope you're enjoying the product. The team and I are really happy with how our early users have received and engaged with it. (We've been testing it with several hundred users and about a dozen businesses for the past 12-14 months, refining & simplifying.) Please let me know if I can answer any questions; happy to do so.
Here's a lovely animated GIF, taken from @ryanlawler's coverage:
Talko's been in development for over 2 years (which seems like an eternity in internet years). I just took it for a quick run and it seems very polished, certainly more feature rich than most voice communication apps on day 1. Although I love the scan-ability and asynchronous nature of text, it's much slower and carries less emotion than speech.
I need to play with this a bit before I can formulate much of an opinion.
@rrhoover is the speech searchable? Auto transcription would be the killer feature here I imagine, to differentiate with other voice products in this space. nnAnd I do agree with you that asynchronous text has room to be more emotional; hoping to share with you soon!nnMeanwhile I'll be checking Talko out for sure...
@dannyjespinoza unfortunately voice isn't searchable but that's a great idea. Probably a power user feature but particularly useful for business use cases.
@keithbarney
Hi Keith,
Talko offers the same Push-to-Talk functionality seen in iMessages. In addition to that Talko offers live voice conversations with the ability to send photos & texts while talking live. This creates a very exciting show and tell experience that isn't possible with iMessages.
"Live & asynchronous voice communications on mobile"? Sounds like a telephone :p
Seriously speaking though - this looks pretty neat. Probably some great use cases for customer support services.
I was definitely interested to see the revenue model - are there other apps that have successfully used the idea of converting content from ephemeral to permanent as the free/paid line?
We launched integration with Slack today. The integration allows team members to start a team call in any Slack channel by simply typing "/talko". The calls work across mobile (iOS now; Android coming soon) and web. And, as with all Talko calls, there's the ability to replay key moments so that anyone who couldn't be there LIVE can easily come up to speed on decisions, etc. You can read more about it here - https://medium.com/talko-team-ta.... And get it here - https://talko.slack.com/services.... We'd love feedback!
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