John Provine
Co-Founder & CEO, Voicepanel
May 6, 2024
1 min
Today we’re excited to share that we’ve raised $2.4M in seed funding. We’re proud to be supported by a fantastic lineup of investors including Y Combinator, Rebel Fund, Liquid 2 Ventures, Twenty Two Ventures, as well as founders of Dropbox, Instacart, Front, Gusto, Airtable, and Optimizely.
We decided to embark on building Voicepanel last December. Over the past few months during the Y Combinator Winter 2024 batch, we launched our first product that enables businesses to conduct AI-powered interviews with their customers. Today, we’re proud to be working with several well known brands, unlocking a whole new way for them to gather rich feedback to improve their products and services. Our customers have already run 1000s of interviews on our platform getting results in just minutes.
And we’re just getting started.
Businesses live and die based on their ability to understand their customers. But getting quality customer feedback is hard.
We regularly talk to businesses that are used to waiting months for the results of simple customer surveys. NPS surveys are everywhere, but few people bother to respond to them, and they don’t provide the depth that’s needed to hear what customers really have to say.
Qualitative research (e.g. with interviews & focus groups) enables deeper exploration than surveys. But in most situations this type of work is prohibitively expensive & time consuming. Too often, companies spend valuable resources putting together detailed research reports that are ignored or forgotten. Under pressure to innovate faster, businesses are craving simpler approaches that can be opened up to the entire team.
Jeff Bezos said that “obsessing over customer experience is the only long-term defensible competitive advantage.” He famously reserved an empty seat in meetings at Amazon to represent the customer. At Voicepanel, we envision a world in which all businesses can literally give their customers a seat at the table. We believe that all employees—product managers, product marketers, designers, and others—can have a direct line to their customers, allowing them to ask any question and get an answer.
Delivering on this vision requires rethinking customer feedback from the ground up. We need to enable people to have an authentic dialogue with brands in a way that’s worth it to them, giving them confidence their feedback will be heard and acted upon. We need to give companies the ability to sift through hours of nuanced feedback — including rich formats like audio and video — to extract insights that really matter to the business, and do so with a high degree of rigor.
We’re excited to build towards this vision and tackle the challenges ahead of us. With the new funding we’ve received, we will be building our founding engineering team and sustain our rapid pace of growth thus far.
Huge thanks to our customers, investors, friends and families who have supported us in our journey. If you’d like to follow along, stay posted for updates from our blog or follow us on LinkedIn.
John Provine
Co-Founder & CEO, Voicepanel
