d’Sa: Most Voice AI Platforms Like Vapi Run on LiveKit
“So VAPI and like land and retail and some of these, most of them actually are built on top of LiveKit. And so they use our infrastructure for all of the transport.”
Isenberg: Sensitive voice AI agents require slow pacing and human transfer options
“I think it's important to note that you know, you'd want to have the Vappy or whatever voice AI agent you use that's super soft tone low pace, empathetic prompts, you know, no rush. I'm here to help. Things like that, putting it in there. And of course if peop…”
Dearsley: Relocating to SF Escaped Multi-Year Local Maxima
“I think it's more to do with moving, I think, is the, it was the biggest thing for us, like, I think we got stuck in a rut of, like, chasing a local Maxima, working on what we worked on before, which is like a Calendar app for three, four years. That moving wa…”
Founders Refunded $500K in Revenue to Users to Force a Startup Pivot
“We grew to about half a million in revenue over like three years, and we just gave all the money back to all of the users and then just kind of moved to SF”
Dearsley: Abandoning $500K ARR startup came down to lacking will to continue
“At the end of the day, it just came down to something simple. I just did not have the will to continue. It's really that I did not have it in me to put time into this and feel like my time was worthwhile anymore. I convinced myself for long enough. That it was…”
Dearsley: Vapi charges five cents a minute plus passthrough model costs
“I'll charge you, let's say, like, five cents a minute. Sure. And I'll pass on the model cost at cost, because, at cost, because I have no idea what you're going to spend. And so that actually pricing model actually ended up being, you know, the same pricing mo…”
Vapi Targets Lower-Level Developer Control Compared to ElevenLabs' Abstracted Platform
“Now they have, like, a separate voice agent, like, platform that they've started to release, but it's a bit more abstracted. Whereas we're much more like low level, we expose all the raw pieces. So developers can like build like entire products on top of it.”
Vapi Encountered 70% Hallucination Rates Using GPT-3.5 for Early Voice Agents
“We would see, like, 70% hallucination rates, like, 3.5 at the time”
Vapi Initially Planned to Raise $500M to Train a Master Speech Model
“We actually thought for the longest time that what we were building was, like, the proxy to eventually becoming, like, the voice model company. Like, we thought we were going to raise five hundred million dollars. We're naive. We're gonna raise five hundred mi…”
Dearsley: Vapi processed approximately 32,000 calls in January 2024
“In like January, 20, 24, we had like 32,000 calls on the platform. If I even zoom back further than that, and that's all just sales roleplay training, basically.”
Dearsley: Vapi call volume tripled to 164,000 after March 2024 Product Hunt launch
“Then we started to get some other folks like trickling in and we kind of hit like 52 K calls. We're looking at February. March was like 164,000 calls. We launched on product. So that was the first time, like, we ever launched publicly, and so immediately we ju…”
Closing Customer Slack Channels Unexpectedly Boosted Vapi's Brand Reputation
“We actually had to shut down all of our Slack channels. We had to close them with all of our customers, just because, like, we could not focus on what was important. And actually, it had this, like, weird, like, rebound effect. Where, like, you think it would …”
Dearsley: Strong PMF Makes Startup Work Harder, Not Easier
“It's not easier. Like, it's harder. It's, there's a difference between, like, the feeling of uncertainty, and that being easy or hard, and, like, actually the work being easy or hard, if that makes sense. Like, it went from, things are hard because I don't kno…”
Dearsley: GPT-4o expanded voice AI awareness rather than displacing Vapi
“GPT-Foro just, like,
Grew everyone's awareness that voice was important.
It didn't really like displace us by any means.
It just made it more popular.”
Dearsley: Google and Amazon will build enterprise voice agent platforms
“And I'm sure Apple and Google, or sorry, Google and Amazon are gonna work on some very large enterprise facing versions of what we have.”
Dearsley: Developer-tuned voice APIs are physically impossible to shortcut
“And hard to actually physically impossible to shortcut. Like every single parameter in our API is from like us, like hearing from a developer, figuring out like the core pain that they have and shipping it and like seeing how they did and then tuning it again …”
Vapi Scaled to $4M ARR in Six Months via Organic Self-Serve Growth
“Within six months, we were at about, like, four million in, in revenue annually recurring. Something, like, very small, small section of it was enterprise, now that's larger, but most of it was just, like, self-serve organic. We did zero ads. We did zero, like…”
Dearsley: Vapi started by solving an existential pain for an AI sales startup
“What we did is we found a 10 out of 10 pain for this one specific AI sales role play training company where it was existential that they figured it out or their company would die. We just so happened to be in a place where lots of other people were going to st…”
Dearsley: Startup Spent $1 Million Over Three Years and Was Default Alive
“We were already default alive. We spent a million over like three years. Like we were super slim. And so we could just keep going.”
Vapi Confirmed Product-Market Fit When an Outage Sparked Severe Customer Outrage
“Probably, maybe even, like, after we were at, like, a couple million in revenue, and, like, we had an outage, and everyone was just, like, so fucking mad that, that was probably it. But still, I wouldn't, I don't know if I would call that product market fake, …”
Epstein: In voice AI applications, latency itself is the interface
“That's a great point because the latency is the interface in some ways in that how fast it responds to you, the longer it takes, the less it feels like a natural conversation and the more it feels like you're talking to a robot. The whole point is to make it s…”