We made it to Friday but more importantly it’s day six of 7 startups in 7 (working) days and today we bring you Speech Frog! At our #SYD20 Demo Day, Speech Frog was awarded the Telstra People’s Choice award so needless to say they are truly fantastic!
When this team entered the Remarkable program they had little more than a proof of concept, then in just 16 weeks, they created the first of its kind speech therapy home practice platform! In the first four weeks of launching their product they welcomed 15 paid subscribers and had another 90 on their free trial. They’re also in discussions with several large organisations, including New South Wales Health and Cerebral Palsy Alliance about using Speech Frog with their clients.
In addition to sharing these pitches and to mark the conclusion of our accelerator program, our EIR Alan Jones has taken the time to reflect on the incredible work out #SYD20 startups have done to create such remarkable pitch videos like the one above. Check out what Alan had to say below.
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Speech Frog
Early in the mentoring stage of my career, I used to wonder why I so often met new startup founders who were also new parents. “WHAT ARE THEY THINKING????” I’d silently scream. I’ve been a new parent, I’ve been a startup founder, and each of those life choices are a full-time job, so how does anybody expect to sail through both at once?
I think the reason why it’s common is because both choices are driven by the same motivation — to leave a lasting impression on the world, to create something more full of meaning for yourself and society than an incremental improvement in the shareholder returns for some amorphous corporate, or improving the re-election odds of the minister who rules roughshod over your public service department, or perhaps just keeping the nice-but-not-really-what-you-dreamed-it-would-be job you have.
If it’s crazy for anybody to attempt to be a startup founder and a new parent at the same time, it must be triple-crazy for all three founders in a startup to be new parents!
But no! In fact, you get my vote for Most Productive Team in this year’s cohort (and one of the most productive I’ve seen in a while, full stop). We pushed you to accelerate, and you accelerated. I think we can all agree you didn’t really want to accelerate initially — you had a plan and were confident of success if you stuck to the plan. But we persisted, and you got the hang of this acceleration thing. You’ve achieved so much, turning a prototype demonstration of a single feature into a minimum-viable commercial product, a customer research process, a marketing strategy, a commercial model, a waiting list, and paying customers in less than 16 weeks. It’s a credit to you that you’ve been able to achieve this while also being new parents, and I hope that one day soon, you get a full night’s sleep, which probably means more to you than venture funding at this point. Well deserved!
Words by Alan Jones (the nice one).
To learn more about Speech Frog follow them on their Facebook and head to their website.
