How Speechpad Grew From One Transcriber To Thousands

When we started Speechpad, we had this idea that we could transform a large, established industry–transcription–by bringing it online, making it easy to access, and opening the work up to thousands of highly qualified workers with Internet access.

For a long time, every time I’d tell people about this approach to doing work, they’d ask me where the workers would come from. I’d tell them that with unemployment rates hovering around 10%, it wasn’t going to be that hard to find qualified people to do transcription work. The hard part was going to be getting customers.

But it turns out that one new use case is driving more growth in the business than just about anything else–video. Because people have high speed Internet connections, they can now get their videos–often very large files–online to get them transcribed.

Sure, they could extract the audio to get smaller files, but quite often the video contains critical information such as on-screen text that they want to have included in the transcription. Other customers are dissatisfied with their current transcription providers or want an online experience that’s easier and faster.

So I signed up a large initial customer. We based the initial version of our SaaS workflow and dynamic pricing system on meeting that customer’s requirements. For a while we worked on just making both sides of the equation work–supply and demand; customers and transcribers.

And then we started doing marketing. Existing customers started referring new customers. Customers with hundreds of thousands of minutes of audio and video signed up for Speechpad. We re-designed the web site and made uploading audio and video and getting great transcriptions back really easy. And suddenly we were on a path to grow 400% year over year. Demand was off the charts.

In a matter of weeks we had to switch from putting almost all of our focus on demand generation to scaling supply.

Sure, I learned about supply and demand in my Economics course at Stanford. Cross one index finger over the other and you’ll see the quintessential supply = demand rule of Econ 101. But there’s nothing quite like managing supply and demand in real time. It’s stressful and exciting all at once. 

The market required that we scale up supply to meet demand. And so scale we did. We went from a handful of transcribers to dozens, to hundreds, and then to thousands. Managing a rapidly growing supply side cannot be done with spreadsheets.

It requires workflow management–qualifications, ratings, review, practice tests, feedback, audit logs, and the other essential components of managing a very large pool of workers to meet the demands of customers with millions of minutes of audio and video. It also requires community managers.

And just as I love talking to customers, I also enjoy talking to transcribers, both new and existing. I especially like talking to our transcribers when we launch a new customer because I get to find out how we can make our workflow system better and more efficient for them to use. And equally rewarding is helping some of our transcribers move from doing transcription to doing transcription and being customer account managers–after all, they know the product better than just about anyone else.

That’s how supply and demand went from Econ theory to real-world practice. And it’s how we went from one transcriber to thousands.