Prediction Not checkable as stated
Mayo: Ad Revenue Will Eventually Become SpokenLayer's Largest Business Component
“In the long term, we know the growth of ad revenue will be the largest component of the business”
Insight
Mayo: Acquiring consumer audio users is brutal; B2B infrastructure scales better
“Acquiring customers is really hard in audio, and instead of competing with distributors and publishers who are our partners, we'd rather empower them and work with them to create a better user experience and a better distribution for them, so being behind the …”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Mayo: SpokenLayer's enterprise customer acquisition is driven entirely by inbound sales
“Everything's inbound.”
Disclosure
Mayo: SpokenLayer focuses on enterprise clients with 10M+ audiences
“We've entertained it, but most of those types of partners don't have a budget to spend thousands of dollars a month to add a spoken edition, so we've really focused on clients that have, you know, 10 plus million person audiences that can Work with those audie…”
Insight
Mayo: First-person narrative content translates phenomenally well into spoken audio
“Anything written in the first person that's a personal story that's typically editorial or opinion, that is the writer saying, I believe this, I think this, I think that we should do this, or this was done wrong, is always written in a short quip sentences, ve…”
Insight
Mayo: Inverted-pyramid newspaper articles fail completely in audio format
“If it's a blanket, reverse pyramid style newspaper article, it's gonna not work at all.”
Insight
Mayo: Audio adoption is slower than video, but retention is far stronger
“Audio is a product that people, once they adopt it, they don't leave it, but the initial adoption isn't as quick as You know, a YouTube video or something like that, but once you get someone, audio builds a really strong habit, as you probably know with your a…”
Insight
Mayo: A funding round should be double to triple the lead's check
“What we look at in terms of determining how much we want to raise is whoever is interested in leading the round, the check size they're willing to write should be somewhere between a third and half of the round.”
Opinion
Mayo: Spoken editions differ fundamentally from traditional long-form podcasts
“I think they're really different products. I think what podcasts are an incredibly great medium for people to create bespoke content, tell native stories, and especially in a long form sense, typically you think of a podcast as a 20, 30, 60, 90 minute experien…”
Assertion Supported
Mayo: SpokenLayer powers audio editions for about 30 media properties
“So we power spoken editions for about 30 properties or so ranging Wired, Reuters, Huffington Post, Bustle, Playboy, Skiff, Smashable, TechCrunch those are just the ones that pop off the top of my head.”
Disclosure
Mayo: SpokenLayer Currently Generates Most Revenue From SaaS Subscriptions
“Right now we probably make, as a company, more revenue from the SaaS side, since we also work with non-media clients as well, enabling them to have spoken editions, whether it's a hedge fund that has reports for their traders or other types of enterprise conte…”
Disclosure
Mayo: SpokenLayer's enterprise SaaS contracts range in the thousands per month
“This isn't something that's a couple hundred dollars a month. It's also not something that's hundreds of thousands, but, you know, it depends on the volume of content for a partner that's only doing, you know, It could be relatively low, but for some of our pa…”
Assertion Not publicly verifiable
SpokenLayer has raised over $2M across six years
“We've raised a bit over two million dollars over the past, ah, six years.”
Disclosure
Mayo: SpokenLayer monetizes via SaaS platform fees and an ad network
“So not only some of the publishers we work with pay us as a platform in SAS fee to have a spoken edition, other publishers because of their scale work with us and we have an ad network and ad marketplace built on top of our platform that as things start to sca…”
Disclosure
Mayo: SpokenLayer's priced rounds are backed almost exclusively by media executives
“We've done price rounds, but everything has stayed as individuals actually almost exclusively all C-level founders or board members of top media companies.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Mayo: SpokenLayer has about 10 people on its core team
“About 10 or so on the core team.”
