Startup Spotlight #59: Blerp

Blerp is the search engine for sound bites integrated into your voice chats, messaging, and live streams.

Nov 25, 2020

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I got the chance to speak with Derek Omori, co-founder and Director of Operations of Blerp, about what he’s working on at his startup, and any advice he has for emerging entrepreneurs.

Blerp is building powerful products that empower people to create and express their digital voice through sound bites. The startup creates Blerp moments for our users when they share and play sound bites and understand how sound reaches places text and video cannot and convey emotion, tone, and rhythm. They’re currently focused in the gaming and live stream space with over 50,000 installs on our twitch integration 5,000 discord servers and growing by thousands of users a week. Blerp is furthering digital expression by making it easy to discover, create, and share audio bite content.

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Startup Spotlight: Blerp

Problem: Blerp makes it easy to find and share short audio clips.

Market: Today, we're focused on livestreaming and gaming, but we see sound sharing a powerful experience in any live medium and will focus our efforts on emerging live mediums in the coming years.

Solution: Blerp is a search engine for sound with over 500K+ indexed and transcribed soundbites integrated with livestreams, voice chats, and messaging apps.

Team: The team consists of Aaron Hsu, Evan Degray, and me.

Recent Success:

Omori: Blerp has brings sound sharing to over 30,000 monthly active content creators on Twitch, reaching an audience of over 2.5M unique viewers. Audio expression is not new, but the mediums we're introducing it to is. With Blerp we make it easy to find the right clip for the right moment and then share it. One of the many differences from Gifs is that timing, tone, and context are all necessary to share a good Blerp. Here's a video that highlights this experience: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEYlp_x5Jtc&t=26s

Recent Struggle:

Omori: Everyone wants Blerp integrated into the use case that touches them most personally. There are so many voices fighting for our attention its difficult to stay focused on what industry and use case will help us reach our end goal best. Additionally tracking our users across multiple integrations is quite difficult, so the creation and tracking of Key metrics have been an ongoing issue for our team. There are hundreds of things that could "help" Blerp but what are the BEST things for Blerp to focus on today.

Founder Advice:

Omori: It doesn't matter how much you know but rather how much you grow. Take tasks a step at a time. If you don't enjoy what you are doing it’s probably smart to step back and look at what's making your life suck. If what's killing the vibes is something in your control then change it.

Two Cool Founders You Should Know About:

Omori: Here are two founders you should check out next!

Greta McAnany, Founder of Blue Fever: Blue Fever’s mission is to create an online space for teenage girls that increases belonging, builds resilience, and reduces being overwhelmed.
Surbhi Rathore, Founder of Symbl: Symbl is the API platform for businesses looking to deploy conversational intelligence at scale.

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