“So as a team, it really depends on how you see us. If you’re thinking about us as the people that set the strategy of Voice123 and who really plan out the next decade, then we’re forward-thinking. If you’re thinking about us as leaders, we’re delivering memorable experiences and prioritizing inclusiveness.

But by the nature of how we operate as a company, then we can mainly side with being transparent. And being transparent is how we deliver memorable experiences; which is very important because it encapsulates what Voice123 stands for, progresses into and how we feel we should lead a company where we’re all equals. And going back to encouraging team members, we cannot do that without being passionate ourselves. So it really depends on the viewpoint that you take.”

We encompass all company values to be the strongest leadership team possible.

“Voice123 grew as a team in 2020! Even with COVID-19 and all its effects on team members, we’re super proud we expanded our team globally. 

Being prepared to restructure and re-strategize

It’s a no-brainer that the biggest challenge was the pandemic for the leadership team. Managing the potential outcomes of zero budget revenue; if push came to shove, we had back-up plans to let certain people go. And then we decided to share that with the team, too. It’s one thing to avoid/deflect, spin fairy tales and tell everyone it’s going to be fine. But we laid it out very honestly; we said, things might not be fine, but you can count on us to carry you as long as we can, every step of the way, we’re going to tell you where we are. 

Putting health first

That was very stressful, and of course, everyone’s tired, so it’s a matter of remembering to take care of yourself and others. Part of making sure the team was OK, we implemented activities like the virtual retreat, implementing new perks, and more.”

“Grow, grow, grow, grow. Our goal in 2021 is to become more invisible in the day-to-day and to put our team members in a position where they have full ownership. By removing ourselves in the day-to-day, leadership becomes more involved with recruitment efforts.”

“We’re resilient. We’re adaptable and flexible, and we always critically analyze situations in all possible angles and perspectives. Being analytical is so important to us because we know that the decisions and prioritizations we make will strongly impact the company vision and strategy.

We expect the best, but we’re prepared for the worst.

– Germán González, Head of Engineering

As engineers, we’re naturally attuned to solving problems, no matter how easy or hard. We need to be resilient and persevere when it comes to problem solving; choosing when we’ll take risks and how calculated they can be. We expect the best, but we’re prepared for the worst.”

Nathalia Avila, our newest engineer, pipes up.

“I would say forward-thinking is also one of the things that I’ve noticed with the team members, especially in technology. You have to think about what’s going to happen next. What’s going to be the upcoming trend, how to optimize your code, how to just make things better… just how to always think ahead.”

“After two years of continuous improvements, the team achieved a 99.99% uptime and 99.98% availability, which means that Voice123 site was down less than 5 minutes per month, even when we do daily releases of new features and bug fixes. And today, the Voice123 platform manages more than 1.5 millions of leads, 60,000 active users and around 100,000,000 monthly transactions.

For our team, this has been a goal in the making (over the last few years!) Ever since the huge platform change at the beginning of 2019, we had a lot of changes to implement and bugs to fix. But after that, it was a matter of stabilizing Voice123 and making it as reliable as possible for the voice actors and clients, while simultaneously developing new functionalities. So the fact that we achieved a 99.99% uptime and 99.98% availability, those numbers are proof of reliability. From a bird’s eye view engineering perspective, this is a really amazing achievement. Not only because we can provide the best user experience. Even though in theory, being available 100% of the time is something that people expect, it’s not that simple in reality. This is important because this allows us as a team to focus on developing more products and providing more value to others.”

1) “We want to make the platform expandable to other categories. Voice123 has been serving the voice over industry for more than 17 years. We are aware that voice overs are an articulated piece of content creation, and most of our talents are able to deliver other high-quality services to the media industry. We are committed to enable people to offer more services through our product and platform. We’re currently in deep research mode on what this could look like down the road.”

2) “Real-time notifications for system messages and marketing campaigns. E-mail has been proven to be an efficient way of communicating with members of Voice123. Our current system sends around 80,000 e-mails per day, but it is definitely time for an upgrade as most modern e-mail managers and applications provide instantaneous sends and real time notifications.”

3) “As a minimum requirement to achieving more projects, we’d like to double the size of our current team. We’ll continue looking into hiring inclusively, that is very important to us (also considering we are a remote-first company).”

Overall, we’ve got lots of fantastic (but currently top secret) projects coming out in the future!

“We’re really committed to delivering memorable experiences for anyone who lands on and uses Voice123. For that reason, every time we identify opportunities to optimize something, whether it’s improving our site downtime or fixing bugs that pop up, all of that is really important to us. This commitment is intertwined with our preference on quality over speed; we rather do something correctly once, than do it and have to fix it time and time again- that’s not delivering memorable experiences to those using our site.”

“We provide memorable experiences, and we always keep in mind to never lose the human touch. While we aim to make sure that each experience is memorable, we also take pride in trying to tailor each experience to the person. We’re also transparent and passionate. We’re always open and happy to explain how our system works. We know it can be confusing and we’re pretty straight up with how members of any tier can make the most of their Voice123 journey. We don’t hide how the ranking works; if you ask, we’ll tell you.”

“I have a lot of meetings during the week, usually one-on-ones with voice actors. I explain how our search algorithm works. People usually ask, “why am I not being found?” and we let them know that they need to, for instance, add samples, and secondly, the reasons why they need to add different keywords to their samples. 

If you work on your profile, if you take this as a business and do your homework, give it time, then change will come. These one-on-ones work very efficiently for me because as I do live demonstrations, those on the other end see the change.”

“We single-handedly implemented the secure payment flow in the company. Being built from the ground up, most of our work here is done by people and the people are mostly on this team. 

So, secure payment went from one single payment where basically, it was a completely manual process. We had to ask for permission from the voice actor, and from the client. And then we had to negotiate for the preferred payment methods from the voice actor. There was no technical innovation behind it whatsoever. But fast-forward to today- it’s nearly entirely automated!

The journey from our manual days to now has taken a lot of work, trial and error and a lot of ideas from everyone on the team. Partnering with the engineering team, it’s been a true and tried process of getting to the point to where payment can be processed without nearly as much input from us.

So yeah – we implemented a system that helps voice actors who don’t want to handle payments. A system was done manually, in attempts to avoid human error. But we’re proud to know that it was helping voice actors get paid in a more efficient way. There are a lot of voice actors that don’t know how to deal with payments with clients. Secure payment alleviates the stress that comes with having to bill a client. The customer success team takes pride in this because we knew that we were working on something that was helping people.”

“Coming from the CS team, hiring is the biggest thing that we’re working on. In late 2020, we hired another team member (Chris) to provide their services for another time zone. And in 2021, we continue to expand on more customer success associates.

Our goal is to help the company scale, which means the customer success team will have to hire people in a variety of timezones. We can now provide a longer live chat experience too!

But looking past the horizon, we want to collaborate with other teams to improve our educational offerings. We’d love to be able to help out with content on The Booth, or maybe even host our own webinars in the future.

We’ve rejigged our team structure so that we’re actively working on getting new clients to post more projects. It’s in its early days, but we’re trying to really find a way to make sure that our big clients and/or most active clients feel comfortable on the platform and that we are able to adapt our processes to meet their needs because they are very attractive to voice actors on Voice123, so having them be more prolific on Voice123 is key.”

“Just know that there’s a human on the other side of the screen. There’s a team on the other side that really cares, and they’re going to work hard to dig up the best answers possible, to fix the issues at hand and provide the information requested!

If anyone needs help, we can be reached at help@voice123.com.”

“We provide memorable experiences. This is something that really defines Company Operations. We always think of ways to provide the best experiences with an optimization mindset, “how can we improve what we’re doing,” and “how can we improve this experience?””

“We also relate to forward thinking, reflecting back to what we just talked about, crafting the future of organizational management in remote structures. And transparency as well! For instance, all our job postings include the salary; why hide that from people who are interested in joining our team? And to add, on a financial end, our budgets, forecasts; nothing is a secret and every document is accessible by anyone on the team.”

We initially stopped them for a bit in our third quarter because we felt that they weren’t working. And to see someone ask to bring it back? We were like, “deal.”

We also implemented a new process to support our Secure Payment services. The service was designed from a financial perspective, and alongside the Customer Success team, we built the processes to give the best experience to the clients and voice actors who are using it.

Finally, we also improved our data analysis for our financial models and forecasts to provide better information for decision making. We focused on our goal of improving the data we were providing to Voice123, stakeholders and/or leaders to make decisions. Being superbly data driven last year on our finances not only helped us triple confirm the accuracy of the information we were providing. But for the leadership team, it helped carve out an even more accurate strategy for the years to come.”

“We’re still working on defining a structured strategy for our social efforts. Even though the Virtual Social Hackathon was very helpful, we are working on solidifying our strategy for Voice123’s social efforts intertwined with Project Authentic Voices. We want it to be feasible for us to act upon!

And we’re also working on improving our internal processes for them to be more user-centric. Sometimes, we focus more on the processes and not on the final results. Part of the goals for 2021 is for the team to define our desired team experience, and the strategy around that. Improving our internal processes involves everything that’s to come in 2021. Our main focus for this year is to show the other team members that #werock. Voice123 provides a lot of support, tools and resources, but sometimes this is not clear to team members. We recognize it’s because our communication methods need improvement, and we’re looking to build a more user-centric approach to it.

On the side of our financial processes, we’ve got a similar goal of being more user-centric. We’ve been in compliance mode for so long that we’ve got that down on lock. Now we need to make sure the experiences are also enjoyable for those going through it first-hand. For instance, this could apply to voice actors and/or clients on Voice123, such as services that help with getting funds paid directly and in time by clients… we always ask,“what is the best experience for them?” and “what is the best way to do this process?”And in an internal team aspect, this would be finding ways to improve the quality and ways of communicating our financial reports and status updates to our team.”

“We are passionate about our work and supporting each other as a team. We’re always experimenting, taking risks to test our many hypotheses; really keeping in mind that we’re creating to engage with more users while driving traffic to our platform. We’re also very diverse, bringing different perspectives from both our personal and professional backgrounds. That in itself makes us more empathetic too, as we learn from our failures and celebrate our successes. We’re lucky to have this bond within our team. But it’s our collective passion that really drives it forward.”

“After years of tweaking, we finally built a team where all team members are working from their own strengths. 

We’re a relatively new team; Sandra joined for virality/growth around the latter half of 2020, Jo got onboard in the summer of 2020 and we really only kickstarted social media efforts publicly in November.

So yes, our proudest accomplishment? 2020 forged us together as a team more than anything else. The COVID-19 pandemic destroyed so many things, but it brought us together and served as a motivation for us to bond and establish what we have. After years of planning, we now have a dedicated content team, a well structured SEO team, and it feels for the first time, there is a long term plan!”

“We are ramping up efforts to make every member on our platform visible. With our SEO efforts, we are trying to find creative solutions, highlighting voice actors’ work experiences and quality and making sure that people can find them on public search engines.

With our branding efforts we are trying to celebrate voice actors’ careers and successes. All efforts are aimed at putting the voice actor in the center. For instance, we are also working on growing The Booth, our content studio. We’re transferring energy into solidifying our reputation as a platform that serves our users. We want to keep empowering people to speak for themselves. The voice has always been there, and always will be our primary means of community.

Finally, we are working on improving our brand reputation, and continuing to up our social media presence. There’s always a great deal being said about online casting platforms, and much of it points out the dishonesty and non-transparency of the entire business. Voice123 is 18 years old, but it still feels like a young start-up because we haven’t had time to really work on improving ourselves. We’ve kept coming off the poor second cousin that nobody really wants to talk about. Great analogy, right? Anyways, for the first time, it feels like it’s turned into a company that we’re proud to speak about.”

From Carel Cronje, Content Editor: “Somebody mentioned to me the other day, just after The Booth was launched, “you know, I find that most companies on the net are 2D, but Voice123 with the launch of The Booth, you’re creating this impression that you’re 3D.”

I thought it was a beautiful definition of the way we’re going. In the past, Voice123 felt terribly stayed and 2D. And for the first time, we really are starting to become 3D. We mean something and that’s great. That’s what we are supposed to be doing.”

“That is a hard one. Because at the core of everything, it’s memorable experiences. But we’ll go with forward-thinking because the main question we consistently ask ourselves is, “What is the impact of what we’re doing, and what does that impact look like on a long-term basis?” This is where all the magic on the platform comes from!

On the topic of values, we’d also like to improve on our transparency, in terms of openness in communications from the very start.

We want it to be clear that “this is the service and this is what we can do for you.” We know voice actors and clients already have their perceptions about us, and we’re striving to improve that everyday.”

We took the Product Team aside and had them play a round of We’re Not Really Strangers, a really popular conversational card game just to loosen the nerves and get a sense of the team dynamic.

“Both Gaurav and I (Laura) joined the team at different times during 2020. What the product team looked like in January 2020 was very different from December 2020. 

We were both involved in revamping the voice actor profiles, and we improved our cross-collaboration dynamics with the engineering team. That’s the thing, as a product team, we need engineers to get things going!

Finally, the team built a full dashboard for our clients to better manage their preferred voice actors and to keep posting projects. We realized that we had to re-envision the whole workflow. It took a fair amount of time, but now our clients are able to manage the relationship with voice actors in a better and meaningful way.”

“There are plenty of small to medium things we need to improve to make the lives of our voice actors and clients better. However, we’re working on a big feature that will be a dedicated page for all our voice actors to view their performance statistics on Voice123. You can check also check out what we’re working on via our product roadmap!“

“Definitely proactiveness. We wear multiple hats in our teams; sometimes we design, or research, or do product management. And this person should be comfortable putting forward solutions, for them to say something like, “hey, here’s a design solution for XYZ. I researched this, and these are the requirements from the product side.” I think that would add value to our team.

We also need someone who’s very user-centric because they’ll be connecting with people. Someone that can consistently remind the team, “hey, you know what, this is what I discovered. And this is actually the real problem for our users.””

“There are always questions popping up, like, “what do you do with the feedback received about Voice123?” And we’d like to emphasize that we hear you and read every single piece of feedback received. From NPS surveys, to user testing sessions, we identify the recurring pain points and prioritize our roadmap based on feedback. All those user testing and research sessions? We just want to get to know you and put ourselves in your shoes accurately. So thank you so much for all the feedback so far, and we’re always eager to hear more.”