Planning To Cross $1M/Year With Our Voice-Over Agency In 2023 [Update]
This is a follow up story for Voice Crafters. If you're interested in reading how they got started, published over 3 years ago, check it out here.
Hello again! Remind us who you are and what business you started.
Hi! My name is Mony Raanan.
I’m the founder and CEO of Voice Crafters, a multilingual voice-over agency and marketplace.
In my original Starter Story article, I wrote about how I started my business and how it evolved over the years.
Voice Crafters mainly provides voice over services. We’ve been providing high-quality voiceovers in over 80 languages since we started in 2009.
Our main customers are ad agencies, production houses, and translation/localization companies, although we cater to many different industries our services apply (e.g. e-Learning, video games, audiobooks, IVR, and more).
We also do a lot of video translations, where clients ask us to localize videos to target languages.
Tell us about what you’ve been up to. Has the business been growing?
Since our original article on Starter Story, we’ve grown significantly! From a revenue of around $600,000 in 2021, we’ve grown to over $765,000 in 2022 - double the revenue we earned in 2022, which is when we introduced our online marketplace. We’re planning to cross the $1M mark by the end of 2023.
Some of the tactics we’ve used to grow traffic are:
1) Translate our site to Spanish, French, Portuguese, and German. We developed our very own plugin that uses Google Translate’s API to instantly translate the entire site in any language we choose. We later have human translators proofread the text.
2) We’ve audited our emailing automation sequences and have made some major upgrades in customizing the emails clients get based on their customer journeys. 3) Google Ads. After many years of relying solely on organic traffic, we see that organic search results are pushed down significantly by ads in SERPs. Furthermore, the release of AI results in SEPRs will push organic traffic even further, so ads are inevitable.
We’re still focusing much effort on organic traffic, especially long-tail keywords, and low-hanging fruit (that is, keywords we rank fairly high on that can be optimized to rank better), as well as link-building.
Some other things we’ve been doing:
1) Establish a closed FB group for our talent, where we talk about how to work with clients and make them happy, new features on the platform, audio tips, and more…
2) We’ve added new features clients have asked for such as:
a - Sharing talent proposals with end clients. b - The ability for clients to add team members to projects. c - Streamlining the transfer of large files (up to 5GB internally on our platform!) d - A “related talent” function to show similar voice actors to the one/s clients invited, to increase engagement.
Go back to why you started your business and what your mission was. What can you do better without compromising your vision?
What have been your biggest challenges in the last year?
- While we have been able to increase traffic, mainly through ads, it’s been difficult to maintain consistency, and as ads are costly, we’ve limited them to brand search (e.g. users searching for “Voice Crafters”) and competitor search (e.g. users searching for our competitors).
- We’ve had a fairly large amount of users opening spammy projects, which is a motivation drainer for our talent. We’ve managed to take some steps against this phenomenon and to be fair, it has been present on other platforms as well, but we’re working to minimize these occurrences by integrating ChatGPT to recognize spammy content before sending requests to talent.
- We hired another developer in 2022 to assist our main developer with the many tasks on our roadmap. Unfortunately, he decided to quit following a full-time job he secured. This was a bit frustrating because onboarding new developers is a lengthy process for a site like ours.
- There are always moments of burnout or frustration when things slow down unexpectedly, and fewer projects get posted on the site, but this is normal. You take a deep breath, use the downtime to come up with new ideas and push forward.
What have been your biggest lessons learned in the last year?
Ignoring background noises.
There have been times during my career when I suddenly lost clients to lower-tier voice-over providers. It devastated me at first, until I realized many of them are clients I don’t, or shouldn’t cater to because they are not our target audience to begin with.
This year, with the stellar advance of AI and text-to-speech, I felt threatened at first, but came to realize that buyers of such services are not in the same pool as our clients, or clients we want to have.
Human voiceovers resonate well with our target audience.
While there’s a generation of teens and kids growing up with AI voices on TikTok, they are not the ones with the money (at least not yet!).
There’s still a lot of room for human voiceovers across multiple industries. It’s much more versatile and sounds much better than AI.
Will this remain to be the case? That’s yet to be seen, and we’ll need to find a way to adapt if and when the time comes.
What’s in the plans for the upcoming year, and the next 5 years?
We have quite a few features we’re planning for our clients and talent.
Two major tasks on our roadmap include:
1) Expanding the marketplace to include supplemental services, like video editing, sound design, and music composition. We already have a pool of composers we work with on our Royalty-Free Music website, so including some of them in the talent pool for custom music composition is a no-brainer.
2) Adding an option for select talent to synthesize their voice and offering that option on the marketplace. We found a high-quality solution for synthesizing talent voices, so this could be a good solution for clients wanting premium voices at a discounted rate for their projects.
What’s the best thing you read in the last year?
Kalicube Tuesdays - podcasts by Jason Barnard
Demand Curve newsletter
Advice for other entrepreneurs who might be struggling to grow their business?
I think it’s important to look at your competitors and see what they are doing to scale their business. At the same time, you should not copy their tactics and try to come up with your original offerings.
Go back to why you started your business and what your mission was. What can you do better without compromising your vision?
It’s very easy, especially during times when business is slow, to divert your focus or try to find shortcuts.
I think downtimes are great because they give you a chance to take a step back and see things from a wider perspective.
Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?
We’re not actively looking, but at some point, we will need another full-stack WordPress developer.
We are looking for an excellent, native English writer with experience in linguistics and the voice-over industry.
Qualified candidates can send their resumes to [email protected] (we only reply to candidates we feel may be qualified).
Where can we go to learn more?
If you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below!
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