Use Free Trials and Tools to Help Build an MVP (with Jeremy Smith)

Welcome to the Frugalpreneur podcast. I am your host, Sarah St. John.This episode is what I refer to as a showcase episode where I feature a bootstrapped entrepreneur and they briefly share their tips, tricks, tactics, techniques and tools that help them bootstrap their business and the successes and failures along the way.My hope is that each of these showcase episodes will provide at least one valuable takeaway that you can implement with right away in your own bootstrap business journey. Now onto the episode.

Hi, my name is Jeremy Smith and I'm the founder and CEO of Neural Voice. So my background is really in sales and marketing.I ran a couple of different outbound sales teams and inbound sales teams and developed go to market strategies for a number of SaaS businesses. But I've always kind of had a fascination with AI, which came from my love of sci fi. I'm a huge Star wars nerd.I got married on May the fourth this year and what I always loved about sci fi was how realistic it felt communicating with robots and AI in those films. Feeling like C3PO could be a childhood friend if you wanted him to be, or Data in Star Trek, how it felt really lifelike.So that's something I always really wanted to exist and I wasn't really getting it out of the likes of Siri and Alexa. So we started working on neural voice and neural voice is a voice AI agent.You're able to speak to it and have a conversation with it and it's able to perform tasks for you. Now we use this in the B2B space.With my background in B2B sales, one of our main focuses is how neural voice and voice AI agents are able to have conversations with customers at scale to help the sales process.So when an inbound lead comes into a business, for example, neural voice is triggered and we'll give them a phone call right away so they can have that conversation with the customer. They can start to qualify it, they can sell to it, they can book meetings, and they can fill out the CRM of the real human salespeople that way.The customer has got a really great start to their sales process. They've had the conversation when they're actually interested rather than a few days later when a salesperson gets round to calling them.Conversion rates increase for the business because of that and and they get accurate information where they need it and meetings booked. So conversion rates higher for the businesses, customer satisfaction higher because they've got the information when and where they needed it.And that's what Neural Voice is all about. So I started Neural voice back in 2023. At the time I was at a high paying sales role which yeah, I really enjoyed.I was working for a French business, but when I left my business before that, the CEO at the time told me that Jeremy, you don't belong in sales. You're not a salesperson for life. You need to go and build your own business and that's what you're meant to do. And that kind of stuck with me.So I was constantly in the back of my head thinking, okay, what can I do in the space of AI? What can I build that will really interest me and keep me passionate about?So I left that high paying job and I started to work on Neural Voice in the background for a bit and worked on a few different projects at the start and then just kind of made my way on that. Found a few angel investors along the way to help build build the business up. But we started from nothing there.There wasn't cash just waiting for us around the corner.It was all about okay, how do we build a great product from nothing to start attracting some investors, start interacting some customers as soon as possible.So we really went hard on the sales and marketing efforts towards these investors overall early on instead of going direct to customers because we knew that's when we could get our early bits of cash to get us to that next stage.

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So the biggest failure, I would say, is one of the first creations we made, and that's Sales Compass. Now, I don't really consider Sales Compass a huge failure because I learned so much from developing that tool.But our initial AI product we released was a automated email generator that's highly personalized for salespeople. So in the sales roles that I'd been in, personalization was key to getting success. But it was really hard to scale personalization.So we created a tool that would analyze people's LinkedIn profiles and write highly personalized emails. I saw a huge market for it. I wasn't able to tap into that market. We got a number of users, but there are issues with what we were building as well.It was the first time actually building something out like this, so we were learning a lot from it. So we ended up sacking off Sales Compass in favor of building Neural Voice, because that's where we felt a lot more passionate about.The biggest success of Neural Voice, I'd say, though, is something called AI Steve. So back in June of last year, there was a election in the uk, as many of you know, and we ran a candidate called AI Steve.So our chairman at the time, Steve Endicott was running, wanted to run to be MP in Brighton and Hove. So we created an AI clone of Steve. It had his voice, it had his policies, and it was able to speak to thousands of people at one time.And that ended up going super viral. We ended up on CNN and Fox News in the States, BBC, itv, the Guardian over here.We ended up on some Japanese news networks as that was a hectic month, but it was so fun. We ended up with millions upon millions of impressions, tens of thousands of phone calls. It just didn't stop for that month.But we learned so much about our own system as well. We knew in theory the system was really scalable, but until that point, we hadn't had that much traction to be able to prove it was scalable.We also learned so much about PR that we'd not done before. So that was just an, all in all, great success and really great experience.So, for bootstrapping any business, especially in the world of AI, I think there's three things that you really need. So firstly, you need to be creative.You need to be able to think outside of the box, think of things that are going to attract attention to your business, but also creatively solving problems within the business. You need to be really bloody resourceful. You need to go the extra mile to solve problems and turn over every rock.And then you need to really be able to focus on your priorities. You need to be able to knock away the things that are distractions and not getting you where you need to be.So that first focus has always got to be build your mvp. If you don't have an mvp, if you don't have something, you can show you've got nothing and then you start of a clear niche as well.And I think this is something that we struggled with and we still struggle with because neural voice as a product has so many different things it can do. It's so many applicable to so many sectors, so many roles within a business. So finding a niche has always been hard.But if you're able to focus on a clear niche and a problem to solve at the very start, something that you can do 20 times better than any of the competitors on that specific problem, then that's really powerful and you're really able to start to get that focus and work towards a goal. Make sure you're also leveraging existing tools.There's a lot of great tools out there that have really good free trials that found us in this sort of stage are able to utilize to actually really propel their business quite quickly. So like Pipedrive, like HubSpot, there's loads of marketing tools out there, there's loads of ides out there. Like the free trial of Cursor is an ide.Fantastic.If you're not a great programmer and then obviously the big one, building a strong online presence, focusing on that, especially something like LinkedIn, if you're a B2B business is really important. If you don't have a strong presence out online, you don't exist. So the last thing I'll say is quite simple.If you've not used voice AI before, if you've not used it in a business sense, give it a try.It's really interesting and a lot of people have a vision of what it's going to be like when they speak to an AI and they're completely blown away when they do it in reality. So you can go on to neural voice online.So neural voice AI and then we've got use cases on there that you can speak to an AI completely free of charge, no sign up or anything by clicking one button on our use case pages. Or if you want to try and make your own voice AI and deploy it on your website, you can sign up completely for free.Again, you can create your own AI, prompt it like you would chat GPT and with a clicks of three different buttons that AI will be on your website and can speak to your customers. You get all the information about those customers conversations, what they've said to it, their thoughts on it, the sentiment of it.Those can then link into your CRM systems, be accessible by your team. It's really powerful technology, so if you've got five minutes, give it a try, see what you think.We're also still a startup, so any feedback you have, please send me. I would love to hear it.

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