Case Study: BoldVoice CEO Anada Lakra Says That Solving Arguments With Data Leads You To Product-Market Fit

Solve arguments with data, not opinions. Adopt an experiment mindset and A/B test your way to product-market fit.

Mar 07, 2022

Introduction:

Lakra is the Co-Founder and CEO of BoldVoice, a speech coaching app that helps immigrants speak English clearly and confidently. As an immigrant herself, she is passionate about leveling the playing field for non-native English speakers to help them thrive professionally. Prior to co-founding BoldVoice, Lakra built a career in tech and product at Peloton, McKinsey, and high-growth startups. She is a Forbes 30 Under 30 alum and graduate of Y Combinator. She holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and a B.A. from Yale University.

Executive Summary:

Problem: Figuring Out How To Package Expert Speech Content And AI-Generated Feedback Into A Learning Tool

Lakra and her BoldVoice team faced the challenge of how to properly combine expert speech content and AI-generated feedback in such a way that users could benefit and continue using the app habitually.
Market: Immigrant Knowledge Workers Stand To Benefit The Most From Accent Learning Applications

While there are hundreds of millions, if not billions, of non-native English-speaking individuals globally, Lakra found that immigrant knowledge workers stood to immediately benefit from using an app like BoldVoice. Clear and confident communication in English clearly is a key skill for these professionals, making the BoldVoice product a must-have rather than a nice-to-have for them. Additionally, targeting this particular persona made building the app easier given that Lakra is included in this category.
Solution: Let The Analytics From User Feedback Shape The Product Roadmap

Lakra and her team took great care to define what success looks like in the form of metrics, and then collected qualitative and quantitative feedback to guide what features they should prioritize launching first.
Team: Ensuring Alignment At The Micro And Macro Levels Of The Business

It’s not enough to move fast - you also have to ensure you’re moving in the right direction. Lakra and her cofounder, Usorov, stay on the same page with their “state of the unions,” or key meetings where they can sure their vision is aligned at every level of the business.
Fundraising: Pick Investors You Want To Work With The Next Decade

When you have an oversubscribed round like BoldVoice did, take your time and select the investors who you can build with over the next decade, not just the next year.
Takeaway: Solving Arguments With Data Leads You To Product-Market Fit

Lakra says it best, “Solve arguments with data, not opinions. Adopt an experiment mindset and A/B test your way to product-market fit.”

Case Study: BoldVoice

BoldVoice co-founder and CEO Anada Lakra.

Problem: Figuring Out How To Package Expert Content And AI-Generated Feedback Into A Learning Tool

Tell me about a problem or set of problems that you’ve had to solve on your journey to product-market fit.

One critical aspect of our journey to PMF was our ability to execute the product vision. From the outset, BoldVoice was conceived as a tool that would be as effective as working with a 1:1 speech and accent coach – no small feat. We needed the specialized know-how of top-notch coaches and the technical ability to automatically provide users with real-time feedback on their speech.

We solved the first part by recruiting some incredible coaches to help us develop an effective learning curriculum with bite-sized video lessons. On the second point, we built a speech AI tool that does indeed deliver on the promise of instant, accurate feedback on something as nuanced as accents.

Why were these problems so critical to solve? What was it like personally struggling to overcome these challenges to achieving PMF?

Both product aspects were critical. We knew at the outset that we didn’t want BoldVoice to be a purely AI app: we wanted our users to learn from the best speech coaches in the industry and feel like they were working with a real human. Without expert content, the product wouldn’t effectively help our users acquire the skill of speech clarity and confidence.

With that said, we also knew that users need instant feedback for the learning to work. Since we couldn’t do that with real coaches at scale, the automated speech AI solution component was needed to provide users with feedback so they know how they’re doing and if they’re improving.

These challenges were tricky on a personal level. As an immigrant, I benefited from having strong founder-market fit, and as a product manager, I had a strong product vision. But I was neither an accent coach nor a speech AI expert, so it became clear to me pretty quickly that I needed to recruit a talented team to accomplish this vision. By focusing on bringing the right people around the table (and being generous with equity), we could surpass these challenges and build a product that delivers on the promise.

Market: Immigrant Knowledge Workers Stand To Benefit The Most From Language Learning Applications

Let’s get deeper into the pain point or points you were trying to solve. Imagine I’m a customer thinking about using your product or service. How do you go about understanding my pain and creating a solution to address it?

We’re helping immigrant knowledge workers in the US. They typically have a strong command of English but feel that they’re not very clear and confident when they speak. So they’ll be in a meeting and struggle to pronounce a particular word. They will be in a job interview and feel nervous because they are not speaking as confidently as they would in their native language. They might be in a group setting and choose not to speak up because they don’t think they’ll be as clear as others. For these users, we have created BoldVoice to help them speak English clearly and confidently to advance their careers. We specifically focus on spoken fluency and pronunciation, giving users specialized lessons and feedback personalized to their main goals and challenges with speaking English.

I have a natural advantage to understanding the user’s pain because I’m, in a sense, my own user. While that empathy helps, listening to our users is key. We often conduct user interviews to better understand where and how they’re using BoldVoice and make it better integrated with their daily lives and communication objectives.

Assuming you’ve managed to address the pain points I face as a customer, what additional information did you discover in your journey to PMF that there’s a large market in need of a solution to the existing problem?

First, there are over 1 billion non-native English speakers in the world. With globalization, a big fraction of these people work in an English-first setting, even if they don’t live in an English-speaking country. So the number of people who we could help is in the hundreds of millions.

Second, having an accent, unfortunately, holds you back professionally. Research from Wharton and Yale shows that bias is prevalent, and accented speakers are on average ~20% less likely to get hired or funded. So this is a huge problem for working professionals, as they could be leaving a real chunk of income on the table throughout their career.

How did you narrow your scope of what portion of the market you wanted to tackle first? Who did you decide would be your first beachhead customers and why?

As I mentioned, the global market for this is huge, but clearly, we needed to start somewhere. Our beachhead customers are knowledge workers born internationally who moved to the US for work and feel like clearer English pronunciation can help them advance professionally. In the future, we want to tackle the broader market beyond the US and explore more B2B opportunities.

Solution: Let The Analytics From User Feedback Shape The Product Roadmap

How did you build your solution to maximize its relevance with the customer and ensure product-market fit? If you haven't found PMF yet, what have you learned? What are the blockers for getting to PMF?

The key is listening to our users. We are obsessed with analytics to see user behaviors and parse out the path to becoming a dedicated user. We have many users who have an unbroken streak with BoldVoice – they’ve been on the app every single day since they downloaded the app. We study their patterns to make it easier for other users to form such a strong habit. We pair the data insight with frequent user interviews to dive deeper into the nuances. Our product roadmap is heavily prioritized according to user feedback.

What are some of the things you did that “didn’t scale” to shape your solution today?

Many. One example on the product side is that before we had the speech AI piece built, our coaches sent out manual feedback to the users early on. We also did many “things that don’t scale” in terms of user growth; for instance, we launched on Product Hunt, where we found a great initial community of supporters and did a lot of similar grassroots efforts to build a following.

What did you learn to best engage with your customers? How did you build a tight feedback loop with your customers to rapidly improve your solution to their problems?

Having a close feedback loop with our users is what I’d attribute most of our success to. We’ve built several channels to get user feedback—two quick examples. When you sign up for BoldVoice, you get an email from me and can respond to it directly. You can also send us a message through the app.

Additionally, we have identified a core set of power users who are a goldmine of product feedback. We also often reach out to other users who display interesting behavior on the app to uncover new opportunities.

Walk me through how you landed your first few customers as you were building your product or service.

The user base kept growing partially through word of mouth / organic referrals and partly through press and awards. Our first few customers came from the grassroots efforts of the team in finding communities of international professionals and ex-pats. Many of these users came from the Y Combinator network, which we graduated in Summer ’21, and from ProductHunt.

Team: Ensuring Alignment At The Micro And Macro Levels Of The Business

If you have a cofounder, walk me through a time that you two had a conflict. What was it about? How did you handle the situation? What was the resolution, and how did it impact your working relationship with your co-founder?

My co-founder Ilya and I are very aligned on the vision and high-level strategy. Of course, sometimes we may disagree about details. Recently, we discussed the importance of a particular feature that we were considering building. We were each using a different set of assumptions and reaching different conclusions. We negotiated on building a scaled-down MVP of the feature and letting the users tell us whether that mattered to them.

On a more macro scale, what’s also helpful is having dedicated weekly catch-ups to discuss the “state of the union” and recalibrate our overall approaches as needed. We’re building a company for the long run, so it’s important to make sure we both feel good about the working relationship and the direction.

What key qualities did you look for in key early hires to increase your chances of discovering product-market fit, and how did you prioritize what types of hires you needed to make first?

A scrappy, experiment-driven mentality is a must. In the search for product-market fit, the name of the game is “shots on goal.” Meaning we don’t yet know what works, but the more shots we take, the more likely we are to score. With time and data, these shots become more informed and likely to succeed. Therefore a great hire is data-driven, quick on their feet, has strong opinions loosely held, and can learn quickly from many small experiments.

We also focused on hiring smart but humble people. There’s no room for big egos at a startup: you do what you have to do to make it work.

If there was a potential employee of your startup reading this Case Study right now, how would you convince them that joining your team is the next best step in their career?

Joining BoldVoice this early in our journey will expose you to an incredible array of exciting challenges. Startups are all about fast iteration cycles, which means condensed and fast-paced learning: 1 year at BoldVoice will teach you more than three years at big tech. Also, few things are as motivating as making a tangible impact on real users – at BoldVoice, we feel incredibly privileged to help people gain more confidence and better career opportunities.

Fundraising: Pick Investors You Want To Work With The Next Decade

How did you set expectations with investors at seed and Series A? What is the main difference in those expectations as your company grows from one stage to another?

We focused on finding partners who believed in the team and the vision for fundraising. We were lucky to have an oversubscribed round and interest beyond the capital that we could accept, so we picked the partners we wanted to work with for the next decade. Our partners recognize the early stage of the startup and trust us to make the key decisions while providing helpful advice and connections where needed. When we move into the Series A stage and go from proving the business model to executing/optimizing it, I expect the process will get more formalized. Still, the spirit of the relationship will stay similar.

Takeaway: Solving Arguments With Data Leads You To Product-Market Fit

What are the key lessons have you learned so far from your journey to achieve product-market fit?

Talk to your users. We made a process of lining up user interviews every week, so user feedback is always part of our DNA and decision-making.

Solve arguments with data, not opinions. Adopt an experiment mindset and A/B test your way to product-market fit.

What’s the hardest problem you’re facing now after solving the prior one(s)?

Now that BoldVoice has grown to a critical mass of engaged users, our main challenge is setting up repeatable, scalable growth channels. With iOS privacy restrictions and paid channels generally becoming more expensive, we’re obsessed with chasing an exponential, not linear, growth solution.

Click Here For BoldVoice’s Startup Secret!

BoldVoice Startup Secret: Running a product process

Having a well-run product process is key. Our philosophy at BoldVoice is to maximize shots on goal, and we consider each sprint as an opportunity to get closer to repeatedly scoring.

Click For BoldVoice's Startup Secret!

Three Cool Founders You Should Know About:

Lakra: Here are three founders you should check out next!

Jeff Wilson, Founder of Jupe: Jupe is an incredibly well-designed alternative living space.
Rune Hauge, Founder of Mentorcam: Mentorcam is a product that allows individuals to connect with high-profile mentors for career advice and more.
Ken Babcock, Co-founder of Tango: Tango is a workflow documentation tool that helps teams work more effectively.

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