Interview with Voices.com's CEO David Ciccarelli on minimum project budget drop...
In this special edition of VO Life, I talk to Voices.com CEO David Ciccarelli about the announcement to drop minimum project rate to $5, and the issues this presents for Professional Voiceover Artists. See below for Transcript.
Toby Ricketts
Hello and welcome to vo life with me Toby Ricketts a special edition of vO life today actually, we're talking to David Cirelli, the CEO of voices.com, the world's largest voice over marketplace or pay to play as we like to call them. Recently, they had a bit of a bombshell press release, when they said they were going to drop the minimum project fee from 100. US dollars down to five US dollars, which is a pretty contentious move for voice talent. The race to the bottom, as we've always said, maybe upon us. So thank you to David to come and ask some questions here on the podcast. Hey, great to be here, Toby. Thanks for inviting me on and Yeah, happy to cover that and the rationale behind the decision and kind of what some of the other, you know, facts on the ground that we were seeing. So yeah, let's let's do it. Fantastic. So I mean, you know, voices.com has, has sent out these kinds of messages before which have suddenly sent ripples through the voiceover world, there was the acquisition of voice bank, of course, like back back in the day, there was there was a bit of sort of bombshell news with the sort of the double dipping saga as it was called, where I think you had a sort of a few people within the team that were taking more of the NFS Share that kind of thing. And that was all kind of dealt with at the time. And also that there was a recent announcement about the platinum plan, basically being devalued in terms of like, you weren't able to access everything on the plan anymore, and you didn't really get much more for that money. But I don't think we we talked about the time, it's also got a lot of positives, like it's, I'd say, you've got the best platform on the market. You know, you've been out there for the longest. I like the fact that you're the ability on voices.com to set your own rates, like even if the jobs posted for like $100, I can go and post $500. And I've won jobs like that, well, you posted way above the budget and still instill one, which is which is fantastic. And and you've got such great reach into, you know, the clients and lots of beginner voice talent. But this latest announcement came as kind of a shock to me. And I know when something bigs happening, because lots of people email me and say, you know, this is a huge step backwards, like you know, so take us back to sort of when this when you first started considering this because like the $100 mark has that been since the beginning? It has been since the beginning is actually
David Ciccarelli
when we started in 2005 is actually when we incorporated and we had actually kind of started up the company the year beforehand. And one of the things I had done was connect with a number of coaches and one of them was James all Berger from voice acting.com and asked him Hey, what is it that we might be able to do differently on voices and he's like, listen, every year, from the union, to professional industry associations,
everyone's tried to fight, if you will, to maintain professionalism and a certain kind of threshold, if you will, for rates. So why don't you just have this entry point at 100. So I'll certainly credit him with kind of being the catalyst of us thinking that way. But you know, here we are going on almost 20 years later that this is all we've been doing is running this online marketplace voices.com. And I think some some things have changed, I think in the industry. But what prompted it, then is maybe a different reason of what was I think important facts of how kind of the industry worked back then. Whereas maybe it's you know, we've recognized that it's changed now and kind of going forward. So maybe for those kind of watching and listening, there's really two parts to voices.com. The one that we've always run, we call it the talent marketplace, it's where, you know, talent, like utopie are well familiar, a client comes on, they post a job. And then we match those job requirements up and invite the most suitable talent based upon the information really that's in your profile. And then of course, you reply with an audition and a quote. And so part of that job posting has actually been to the client would specify a budget, so that initial budget range was, you know, 100 to 250 bucks, and then it kind of goes up in increments from there with the top budget being 10,000 plus. So that's worked really well for all of these years. And I think what we then wanted to create, you know, almost like flip the model on its head, what if there was another way that clients could hire you as a talent? And so to complement the talent marketplace, we have a project marketplace where now talent, have control over creating a project listing that includes Yes, here's a sample of the work, but also a description of the work that you're going to do and the price so now clients can browse and buy if you will, projects available that for purchase that a talent would fulfill and the project IQ listings, which was just launched the summer of 2022. Later in the summer, and the project listings, you know, kind of abided by this same $100, minimum. And talent had kind of three tiers of pricing. So let's say you have a, you know, a radio commercial project, you could have almost like a good, better best type pricing, what we call essential, enhanced, and elite. And you can start at 100. But some people started at 200, or 300, and kind of go up from there. And what I think one of the things that we realized very quickly, and what we observed in the market, and clients telling us saying two things. One, I can hire the same talent on another kind of gig style marketplace, where they also have projects or gigs, if you will, at a fifth the cost of let's just call it a fraction of the cost. So why is that the case, the other situation we are running into is, there's lots of times where clients wanted like something very, very small and limited in scope. And so there wasn't really an accommodation for, let's say, a kind of a personal use phone system greeting or a funny voicemail being laughed, I mean, these are not the kind of bread and butter of what we do at voices, but there were requests that were kind of coming up. And then And then the third one was us realizing that there's actually been more clients will initially talent signing up and kind of Southeast Asia, and clients looking to hire them, where we have the good fortune of living and working in Canada, US, New Zealand, Australia, UK, where $100 us is, is you know, kind of reasonable for many people in the world that is just out of reach to pay for production. And for kind of a small project of them themselves are kind of just getting going. So we kind of looked at the competitive landscape, kind of the customer feedback, or the customer feedback, as well as the kind of global realities, and really asked ourselves, is this the best thing to kind of continue upholding going forward? Or is it actually can we solve some of these other needs, by kind of getting rid of this arbitrary $100 minimum, which was really centered around kind of like that really centered around an idea that I think we've grown grown beyond?
Toby Ricketts
Okay, so just to take those those points? Because I feel like there are like, there are different ways to solve some of those problems like that I would have maybe you can talk through why you didn't decide these, but like, small jumps factor, I mean, you know, there are stores you go into, like if you go into like a fairly nice restaurant, and you ask, you know, can I just have an apple? Like, they're probably they don't stop that kind of thing. They're like, we'll go to the grocery store next door. Like there's a, there's a kind of an appropriate place for certain amount of products. And I think maybe did you did you anticipate some brand damage, because voices.com has spent a long time saying, like, we've we've got the best voice actors on our platform, with industry leader, we're not going to lead to the race to the bottom, you know, they put a lot of effort into that messaging. But for a lot of people that suddenly come true, and they're kind of like no, this that has been the rest of the bottom. And I feel like you could have offered the small jobs with like a subdomain that's like voices light or something. And it's like, literally just the tiniest jobs, perhaps it's for talent that are inexperienced, and there's like a place like a training ground or a sandbox that they can kind of play in and you keep this premium voices.com product for your kind of like higher paying clients. Was there a reason that you didn't decide to split those two proposals if you'd like to the clients? And
David Ciccarelli
so we find that clients often start with a small project. Because and you know, we call it the trust sale, right, the clients got to trust? Is voices even the right place for me, when they post a job? Are they even gonna get responses? Am I gonna get responses kind of within like a reasonable, you know, a price range for the scope of work and what they had in mind? And can the talent actually deliver on that? So the there's definitely a track record, I'm going to call it a like a pattern of behavior, where clients start small and then grow large over time. And so to further prove this, oh, we actually ask clients, hey, are there ever and we have a whole research team that kind of tries to uncover answers to these type of questions? And the question was, do you to the clients who conducted the survey? Do you ever hire talent for under $100? And what we discovered was a 30%. So call it a third of our clients and these are existing clients, from time to time do hire talent from under $100. So did we want to be the pool At least they could kind of do some of their work, not all the work because as soon as they but or rather, would we, let's be that definitive destination the go to place where irrespective of the size of the project small or large, you go to one site, and you can you can get that done. But you couldn't have done it was kind of the reason, you know, we wanted to talk to the clients to know if they if they have other work? And the answer was yes. And then but they weren't bringing it to us because of this, this kind of threshold, which often means whether it's an existing client, and then you have to think well, there's probably new clients out there that are maybe just, you know, doing something for the first time that we're literally putting up a gate or a roadblock for them to even engaging and they never have the potential to grow up to be some of the most recognized and most frequent job posters on voices.com.
Toby Ricketts
Yeah, I mean, they kind of make sense, but I still feel like there there would be like, rather than just just lowering the entry point, you could kind of put up some some, you know, some some barriers to say, look, this is this is special pricing for whatever reason to get you on board like a loss leader effectively. And then once you know we've we you get into the professional talent, you can do this, but this The insinuation that the optics, I think of this decision was like that it's muddied the waters, that suddenly it's like we've got the best professional voice talent and you can hire them for $5. Like the actual you know it, you've got to be very careful with your messaging around where that sets, you know, why this decision has been made? Because it does, it does worry us, you know, a voice talent that use voices.com. That, that is kind of starting to get brand damaging, because we don't want to be associated with like the bargain basement kind of version, you know,
David Ciccarelli
so So let's talk about how the budgets even are determined. Right? Right. So we discussed the project marketplace, where the talent are actually deciding what the rate is going to be. And if you don't want to list a project at all, then I, then you don't have to, if you because you don't want to put any pricing information out there, then that's certainly up to you. If you want to start at, you know, 200 or $500, for your project listings, and let's be clear, these are only non broadcast jobs that we're referring to. If you don't want to get into, you know, if you want to start your price points much higher, then that's certainly, you know, certainly up to you as well, too. So we're not, you know, we're not marketing $5 or anything along those, those lines, it's actually would be the talent kind of listing that themselves. So so that is the project marketplace. Okay, so
Toby Ricketts
the $5 only applies to the project marketplace, it isn't in the audition kind of the traditional sphere. I'm
David Ciccarelli
not as of yet, but that we did put that in that email that that we want to have that as a opportunity for clients as well, under certain circumstances, which would be non broadcast. But even even still, even still, Toby, how does the client even pick a budget? Well, there's three ways that you know, when they're filling out the job posting form, that they actually pick a budget, it used to be just a little drop down menu. But now what we've done over the last year is we have what we call a budget recommendation tool, because there's been a lot of calls for, hey, you need to voices.com needs to educate the clients on what the fair rate is for said project. Well, as they're filling out the form, we're learning about the category, the length, the use, kind of any licensing means they might need. And so when they get to the bottom, behind the scenes, what we're doing is we're looking up all the comparable jobs, and saying, here's the going rate that a talent actually was hired for, for a job that looks similar to yours. And here's the average number of responses that you can expect to receive in the next 24 hours. So this is what we call a project recommendation. So it the system actually defaults to that being selected. So of course when we're not going to be defaulting to the low end of the budget $5 to 249, because in most situations, the actual going rate was higher than that. So we're using our own, you know, the talents, activity on the site for what you guys quote, as kind of like feeding it back to the clients to say here's the here's what the going rate is. So that's the budget recommendation. Then we have the budget range, which again just kind of goes up in those brackets. We didn't we felt it was best not to create a distinct bracket of $5 to $100, but rather Just extend the entry level point, which as you said, there's title clients or just pick that because it's the first one, but then quote, cool higher, and they're going to those who are considering quality first and foremost, like most clients do, when we ask them, What are you listening for? How do you make your hiring decision, it's always the quality of the voice is like, far exceeds, you know, saving a few dollars in here and there, that's, that's not their primary motivation. So that's the so that's the budget range, they can pick any number of them kind of disregarding the recommendation. But we also believe talent will kind of set the client straight, if you will, if they're like, look at you've got way too many words, way too much word count here, or, you know, the effort is going to be huge. I can just tell because it's a, it's a medical read, it's a technical read, okay, the talent will kind of course, correct the client if they happen to pick a lower lower budget. And the last one is like a fixed fixed budget. So if the client says comes and says I only have it's a, it's a scratch read, or it's for a student film project, or whatever the nature of that kind of use case is, and I have 50 bucks, well, now they can actually go ahead and get that kind of get at least have those auditions kind of come into them, for those who are interested in doing that kind of work at that range. So that's, I think, a really important distinction, having the awareness for the talent community, that we have a budget recommendation that basically is a self reinforcing loop. It's the amount that actually the work is getting hired for, we kind of, you know, feed that back to the client and have that as the default. And over time, what we've seen, and it's lives out this notion, you might have heard me share before this notion of shared success. Over time, what we've seen is that the more successful kind of on a job by job basis, the average selling price is kind of the numerical are the metric that we look at, the average selling price has actually increased across the board. So the better the talent do, the better that we do as a platform. And therefore, that's how we're living out this notion of shared success. The budget recommendation is just an example of, of how we do such a thing.
Toby Ricketts
Okay. Yeah, I mean, pricing, voiceover is, is one of the hardest aspects of being in this game, like because, you know, new talent come to me all the time saying, I don't know what to charge for this, you know, so it's, it's like, there are rate cards out there, there's the gravy for the brain rate card, there's the GVA, there's, you know, that there's a few, you know, rate cards out there, the voices don't come one over time has kind of, like I know it, you released a new rate card and a head broadcast, it's quite low. And I remember getting in touch, and then it was subsequently fixed to sort of, you know, to boost it up a bit, which could have been just an oversight. But like, it's, it's one of those things where you, you are striking a balance between, like clients, on the one hand, who obviously want a good job done quickly and cheaply, you've got new voices as well, who are coming onto the platform, they're inexperienced, so they usually like to charge less, because like, that's, that's generally the way you sort of get into an industry is by going in sort of like, and doing it for for less than someone that with 10 years experience, and then experienced voices, of course, you do this for a living, and we're on there all the time and, and use it. And like, you know, they all like so you've basically got this the center made up of those two people, those three people who, you know, want different things. And like the point where they will meet is effectively kind of like the the sales price or the kind of vibe of where everything's setting. And I just worried that like with the lowering this, like, you know, really lowering that is that it sort of drags that in the side of the clients and possibly the new voices area. And so you do expect to see attrition from your experienced and voices who make a living out of this, because they feel like suddenly, you know, it's the voice industry separate separating out into these trophic layers if you like, because I always talked about this trophic layer theory where, you know, you've got your fiber on the bottom, because it's always just been basically, you know, they, they say what they are, it's $5. And then you've got your sort of mid tier, which I've sort of always put sort of voices.com and then some of the other voice marketplaces and then sort of agents and stuff. So you're talking in that top layer, it's sort of like, you know, two and a half 1000 to sky's the limit for big TV commercials. And you know, where there's a lot of there's a lot on the line, it's high value. It's all high stakes. And then the mid tier, which you know, you've traditionally sort of existed in for sort of like your, like medical narrations and stuff that's not broadcast, but it's not, you know, you want a really good job and then the sort of bottom layer. Do you feel like that it's just like, again, coming back to the sort of brand damage thing that it kind of drags you down? I know you want to drag rates up but and you said before that your average rate has increased by by by marking this and putting a marker in the sand and saying like we've now extended this budget, I feel like that won't necessarily happen even with this feat. Back engine where, because to get good work, people are going to quote a little bit less, and then everyone's gonna see that one's quote in less than then quite a bit less. And I feel like an algorithm could, you know, run away with that kind of pricing.
David Ciccarelli
So I actually agree with the stratosphere ring of the of the industry, I think that's a great way to describe it. Sometimes we kind of use the, you know, a barbell approach where there are new aspiring talent, who at present, you know, struggle, because they've got to get their first job. But if they're up against Toby Ricketts, then good luck, you know what I mean? That's just and even if, you know, case in point, even if they're quoting, for a fraction, you know, if you're 1000 in there, 100, it's still the client chooses the voice, first and foremost. So they're having in some situations, and probably more than anyone would like, frankly, a challenge kind of getting that first star rating, which then kind of has the, you know, gives them the impression like you see it in the search results, you see it on your profile, to frankly, the confidence that like, okay, great, I landed one, I know how this works now. So that would be kind of the new and aspiring talent. And then you're right, there's the professionals along same professionals, you asked the question, if we, if we're concerned about attrition, I certainly hope not. We love our talent, we hope that they stay around, we think we've got great things in store for all of you in the next couple of months, as well as the, you know, the roadmap for next year. So we've got some great stuff upcoming. But this is just sold for a need. That's frankly, not, you know, designed really at all for the professionals. This is new clients with tiny projects, that we've really want to be able to bring that client on board. And so if they have to start at $75, or 50 bucks, so that they sign up, go through the process, and the client goes, Okay, I get it. Now I can trust you with my larger campaigns and national work. You know, the high stakes work, as you put it told me that they've already kind of gone through the motions that they that they're more apt to kind of continue and proceed with the platform, because they built up a history there. But if we never get that chance on the small stuff, they're never going to grow into the into the bigger work. And there's lots of use cases like that this scratch reads is often probably one of the biggest requests, they're like, Yeah, but this is this isn't for, I need to use it in a client pitch. But it's not the actual ad, you know, we're gonna change. And they're like, I don't have 500 bucks to make for that. Because as soon as they go through, and they say, this is, you know, this is the use?
Toby Ricketts
Yeah, $100 is reasonable for that $100 is a great price. But $5 For scratch rate, even that is like, you know, I mean, even I can't envisage a job where it's worth me opening my studio for $5, then again, so, yeah, it wouldn't,
David Ciccarelli
and I certainly, I think we're, you know, at risk of kind of, you know, getting hung up on the $5. Just because it's the low end of it, I don't think, why would a client go through the motions of that? It's like, well, we had to come up with some minimum, that wasn't going to be one and it wasn't going to be zero.
Toby Ricketts
So what was the what was the decision tree for that? Because $50 probably wouldn't have attracted so much controversy, but because it's five and I mean, let's, let's be honest, Fiverr is the actual nemesis of the voiceover empire. As soon as you say your voiceover on Fiverr. It's like, well, you know, you're not a professional voiceover because I mean, I know there's people that do lots of work on that it's generally low value, and they're doing like 10 or 20 jobs a day. And then making the same as someone who probably charges, you know, the sort of moral industry, right, and does one or two jobs a day sort of thing. So, and those clients, I don't know if this is your experience, but the clients that paid the least are generally the most of a pain in the ass, in the experience difficult to work with. So are you kind of willing to take on because like, Okay, let's go back to the $5. How was that reached? Was it to compete with Fiverr? Was it because that's the kind of lowest thing you ever charge on the internet? Like, how was that reached?
David Ciccarelli
Um, so we we looked at 0, 1, 5, 25 and 50. And zero would make no sense because we didn't want to have free requests, right, then then it's just like, so now you're kind of using everyone's resources and time to get a free request. And the counter arguments wallet, if it's a charity or a nonprofit or some good cause, that even still, there's probably some nominal, you know, token amount that could be provided in in terms of compensation. You know, one is, you know, the first kind of positive integer that it would make sense that it would kind of have a transaction would go through because we also want to make sure that there's a valid credit card on the Other end of that transaction, the person is who they say they are. So, but that also felt candidly, you know, lower than any other site that's out there. So that would be weird. Five would be on par, because it's already well established. 25 or 50 is like, Well, are there situations where it's going to be? It may be lower than that. So where are we, whereas for there's some, as you know, we've had these other creative categories around audio editing, and translation, where we had already established $5 as a minimum in those other creative categories, instead of having two sets of rules, because audio editing is often, you know, built out on an hourly basis, as opposed to a usage and license basis. But because this because the system was already designed to have a $5, you know, entry point, if you will, across all of the other categories, we're like, well, let's just harmonize that. So it's the same entry point, irrespective of which category the client posts the job in, or which category the talent lists their project listings in.
Toby Ricketts
I mean, yeah, it just seems like, you know, if you're, you're still the same 20%, I assume you take on that on that $5, even if there's not a different sort of split at those lower levels, is that so we can effectively only making $1 on each of those jobs, if they come through at $5, which just doesn't? You know, it doesn't seem like...
David Ciccarelli
it actually, it actually costs us $1, something to send out each payment. So that was another part of it like, well, this, you know, imagine there was a huge frequency of these Well, paying $1 to send out $1 Doesn't make any sense for anyone. And so, you know, I think what we've we've learned over the years is two things. One, let's try to get out of the way, rather than impose more controls and restrictions. Because when we get out of the way, it allows the market to, in a lot of ways government govern itself and market market, I'm referring to talent and client, you know, coordinating transacting and communicating on your own. So let's try to get out of the way. Let's also try to, you know, and by that, I mean, you know, these kinds of types of controls. The other thing is, a lot of these kind of worst case scenarios rarely transpire the way that, you know, we all might think I mean, years ago, you know, well, I mean, I could, I could go through the, the list of items of kind of the worst case scenario, you know, kind of game theory type being played out on a lot of improvements that we've made over the years, and rarely has one kind of been, you know, long term sustainable, or sorry, long term damaging, and, in fact, quite the opposite. We found, you know, that, in the end, if we truly believe this guiding principle of let's make decisions that are based upon shared success, for the talent, the client, and voices as an organization, then let's make sure we have that kind of first and foremost, and things do do play out. It's the, it's the gap in between the announcement and having actual data and evidence, where a lot of emotions, you know, kind of gets get stirred. And it's kind of almost like daresay, like the fear of the unknown. Like, we're afraid the whole industry is going to go a certain way. Well, that's actually not in our best interest, it's not in your best interest. So why would we push it that way? Now, I know, that's a hard thing to kind of ask yourselves and maybe realize that, you know, we want what's best. And that's what we're trying to do is help new clients enter help new talent, kind of get their feet under them. And and then have them both of them grow into be, you know, you know, professional talent who are working with, you know, amazing clients on the platform.
Toby Ricketts
How do you measure success? Is it the number of voices you have? the number of clients, you have? the number of jobs push through? the average sale on the platform? Like, what are the kinds of KPIs that you and and how do you think this is going to affect that, because it has been suggested that, you know, you will receive less investment money, you know, way back, and they're sort of putting pressure on, because, like, it's all about, you know, site visits, and like, you know, then you can be acquired for something, and that's kind of like, you know, maybe that's if we take a big step back and talk about pure business. Is that something that's that you consider, like, how do you measure success? And well, yeah, so we
David Ciccarelli
it's called the Northstar metric. So what is our what is our guiding Northstar? And we call it hired jobs. So jobs that are fulfilled not just a posted job, not just a project order that starts but those kinds of both converge into a job that's fulfilled, whether it be search someone's profile, the project listing or The job posting, there's kind of like four paths that all converge. The job then gets offered to the talent, saying, Hey, we're awarding you the job, or we've placed this project order for you. And in both situations, the talent is reviewing this spec, and clicking accepts right on the on the agreement. And then and then the work is done and delivered through platform, that is a higher job. So that's how we measure success. We don't to be candid, I don't care about the average selling price on that kind of thing. Because, you know, having a you know, you could have very few hired jobs right? At an insane average selling price. But that's not enough to kind of go around for everyone, or you go to the other end, you don't want to have a bunch of them where it's like, really, really low. So you're kind of like you're, you're you're balancing out what that is. But ultimately, it's more much more throughput and volume. Nothing to do. I mean, if our website is, you know, art, let's say a website was advertising based, where you have banner ads, and so forth, then you really care about pageviews. And how many visitors and so forth. I mean, that's not something that we that we look at, because that's not the business model, the business model is a transactional business model, just like as you described, Uber or Lyft, or Airbnb. So therefore, in a similar way, it's what's known as that core interaction on Uber, it's the ride that actually is taken on Airbnb, it's the the book stay, that actually is completed, right. And on voices, it's the job that gets fulfilled by a talent.
Toby Ricketts
But yeah, if you're going for, like, you know that as many of those as you can surely want to be making money off them, I just won't worry that like at the five, if you take it to the extreme and say and make a straw man about you know, so every job suddenly gets posted as $5, you're not making any money, which is not ideal, but maybe it's a loss leader for you, you know, maybe that's your rationale behind it.
David Ciccarelli
Well, we definitely don't want to be we're trying to capture a portion of the market that is not being served@voices.com Right now. Right? These are, these are not about clients who, that, that that are going to go kind of downstream, this is about they have these jobs already, they're getting them fulfilled by some talent out there on some, presumably some other platform. So this is about kind of like net new jobs, kind of aligns with that Northstar metric I described net new jobs coming to voices that weren't previously there. You know, that that's the that's the intention. But you know, those if, if those listening can kind of hear the, the conviction in these two concepts of shared success, and the most higher jobs, then you can see how these things start to align, because we're basically turning away jobs right now by saying, you have to meet certain parameters and so forth. We want to invite those clients onto the platform.
Toby Ricketts
I still feel like the two arenas model, I'd love to see someone try it. And I've suggested it to some people that do have, you know, a premium model is to have that sort of budget thing, like you have, you know, the budget and Avis model or something, you know, you have you you can capture two areas by having the same company with different branding over the two, which which might not be have that brand crossover. But I mean, I I also understand the fact that you've got to like it's easier to brand one thing and do your marketing, etc. But I feel like that might have been a missed opportunity. But then it's not my company. And you're you're welcome to do what with your company, what you like, just a couple of small things from what you said as well, like in terms of local currency. And I that was a really interesting point. Because I've I've said to people in terms of my rate card, it's like if I if someone asked me to quote TBC in India, and I quote, you know, 4000 US dollars, that's like someone's entire annual income, like there's just not reasonably, like they, they're not going to be earning that much off that ad. So you know, it's ridiculous. But maybe a way to do that is to have like, local currencies that you charge rather than you because US Dollars are always very strong in that and the market shifts all the time is to like have local local currency versions. So it feels like you're charging in a different currency because you kind of are you know, have Did you consider that at all? Because it's always been the US dollar
David Ciccarelli
right now, it's a single currency platform, you know, we work with customers in 160 countries around the world, yet, the entire platform is all in US dollars. And so to get to let's play this through to localize the currency, that's one thing but then to still have a minimum threshold of $100 equivalent to $100. US it's still like we can say it's in rupees but
Toby Ricketts
this maybe, maybe, maybe it shifts if you're paying in local currency, but then I guess you get people buying rupees and doing American jobs. That would be confusing
David Ciccarelli
You know, or the other way I want to pay in, I want to hire a, you know, Indian based talent? Do I, you know, like, what's the driver? Is that? Is it the buyer who's deciding which currency it is? Or is it the seller? So that's where the underlying, candidly infrastructure issue we had. Was this this rule, if you will, that didn't allow for transaction to happen in other in other countries, because everything was anchored to $100. Us, which just made no sense. So thank you for, you know, really kind of acknowledging that there are different price points for different clients around the world and that currency and the need to kind of go below what Americans, North Americans would go, I would never do anything for less than $100. Well, the job will doesn't it's not worth that in those other countries around the world because they can't afford it.
Toby Ricketts
Yeah, yeah, it is. I mean, I acknowledge, it's a really tricky problem in that in that you do want to capture more of the market. And there's this kind of this tech leader, kind of libertarian view of like, we'll just like, let everyone at and the market will decide. And, and it's an it's an interesting tension between that and having some kind of like, not the Union, but something like a union where voice actors say, Look, you know, this is the minimum, we we want to charge because the trouble is, if you if you devalue work financially, you do value it conceptually, in terms of like the, you know, if you pay less for something, then you inherently value it less. And I feel like the the reaction to this has been, we've we're proud of our craft, we're professional voice actors, we do our best. And this is, and this does sort of like acknowledge the fact that professionally, people will put jobs up to $5, and people will go for them and getting fulfilled and everything. And just having that all in the same pot, it becomes very difficult to separate what where those values are. So I mean, just in sort of, in terms of wrapping up, because I think we've gone through, you know, quite a few of different facets of this like, to the people like who have emailed me saying, you know, that they might leave voices.com, after this professional voice talent that have been there on for years, like what what would you say, to try and like to keep them on the platform, you said this in scouting, exciting stuff coming up, which is a bit of a bit of a kind of like, what's in the box? But, you know, what would you say to say, what's your long term vision? And how does this strategy sort of, you know, add to that?
David Ciccarelli
Well, voices is always aimed to be the definitive destination where, you know, stories get told, right, and really, we are the mechanism to kind of bring the two people together, but you are the ones actually telling the story, it's your words that are brought being brought to life and someone else's script. So that, that remains the same, you know, some of the things that we've we have on Deck are, you know, there's a lot of kind of just hygiene improvements, which is what we refer to them as just improving the overall usability of our voices. There's a big package around, showcasing and highlighting the top talent on voices. So those who have done very well in the past, we want to continue to kind of reward and recognize those talents on platform where they become, you know, almost something to aspire to those who are kind of just getting started. That's certainly one piece and that can, you know, look anything like, you know, badges, recognition, you know, different programs for top talent on voices. And because clients, as you know, sometimes just want to go just show me and give me access to the best. And then there's other clients who are saying, I can't afford the best, so I need, but I still want someone who has the equipment at home that's kind of better than me doing it might be kind of their thought. And they want to just get get get started with, you know, a semi professional or an aspiring talent. So you're right, it's there are they are two different communities of talent at different ends of the of the journey, those starting and those that are thriving in their career. But yeah, that next year, I think, because maybe maybe might be worth doing, you know, an upcoming podcast or video on what 2023 looks like. But hopefully that gives you at least an early glimpse of building into into the talent, those new ways to be found and discovered and be featured on the platform all kind of about bundled within the same premium membership.
Toby Ricketts
Cool, fantastic. Well, thank you very much for your time today and going over all these points. I hope that the sort of the the gamblers it works it feels like a bit of a gamble kind of kind of pays off, and that would there is shared success and we can all find a way to still, you know make to Have like shared success on the platform as you say so it'll be interesting to see how this how this all pans out thank you for your time today thanks so much Toby
