(1) Describe your startup.
Names are central to our unique identities, and NameCoach software helps people to say names correctly and instantly make others feel more recognized and familiar. Praveen built NameCoach’s first product to enable school faculty and staff to access audio recordings of student names (e.g., on class rosters, at graduation), making them much easier to learn, thus helping create a more inclusive culture. The product has exponentially gained traction among Higher Ed institutions, with 180+ customers including Stanford, Northwestern, and the California Community Colleges.
NameCoach is now launching an ML-based name pronunciation recommendation system that will serve any use case, from salespeople with prospects’ names to nurses with patients’ names to developers using Alexa and other voice platforms. Starting with a Salesforce integration and a general API for other systems, NameCoach is onboarding corporate pilots in 2019 – to help CRM users make a great first impression and avoid hangups when making outbound calls, and to help organizational leadership create more inclusive corporate cultures. With the backing of top investors including Founders Fund, Stanford-StartX, and Authentic Ventures, NameCoach will realize its vision of creating 10x better first interactions everywhere a name is said.
(2) What inspired the creation of the startup?
It was a much-anticipated moment when my sister graduated college, for her and for family and friends who had traveled from near and far to attend. And yet when it came time for her to cross the stage, her name was butchered, marring her moment of recognition. I realized something then that we’ve now heard many times from NameCoach users: there’s a subtle but real sense of alienation that happens when your name is mispronounced, in any context – and it’s not for lack of trying that it happens, but for lack of an easy solution.
(3) What differentiates your startup from the competition?
NameCoach is the only system that integrates directly into the systems users use every day, putting audio pronunciation buttons next to names in CRM systems like Salesforce or Learning Management Systems like Canvas. More fundamentally, our proprietary system leverages data science and machine learning to recommend the right pronunciations from the world’s largest database of accurate human-recorded audio pronunciations.
(4) Who is the target market?
We started in, and continue to serve the Higher Ed and K-12 market, helping institutions create more welcoming and inclusive campuses. We are now starting to do the same for corporate cultures, while also starting to serve outbound sales and customer service teams to ensure those critical first interactions are successful. Ultimately, NameCoach will be used in numerous other verticals, from recruiters to health care staff to developers using voice assistant platforms.
(5) How did you grow your presence in your target market?
By attending conferences, leveraging networks, and outbound marketing and sales efforts, we continue to grow our customer base.
(6) What stage are you at?
Post-seed, revenue-generating.
(7) What are some of the biggest challenges that your startup have had to overcome?
Initially, many investors didn’t see the practical (and therefore monetizable) value of our mission to enable more inclusive and respectful interactions. However, customers see it, and have continued to demonstrate the value they place on something as seemingly simple yet important as getting a name right.
(8) What is next for the startup?
In 2019, we will continue to run corporate pilots for both sales and customer service teams, and for internal organizational interactions. We will also identify the further markets and points of integration (CRM’s, HR systems, sales enablement systems, etc.) for our pronunciation database and recommendation system.
(9) Where would you like to be in the next 5 years?
People will simply expect to see a NameCoach button everywhere a name appears online.
(10) If you had to give one piece of advice to an up and coming startup what would it be?
Seek out advice and expertise, but trust your intuition at the end of the day. You know (or will know) your space better than anyone.
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