Featured Startup Pitch: VoiceBunny is applying the crowdsourcing model to professional voiceovers

Company: VoiceBunny

Website: www.voicebunny.com

Founders: Alexander Torrenegra and Tania Zapata

Headquarters: New York City, with a new office in San Francisco coming soon

Year Founded: 2012

Twitter: @voicebunny

Facebook: www.facebook.com/voicebunny

Blog: blog.voicebunny.com

Brief Company Description: VoiceBunny is ‘crowdvoicing’: fast, professional voices for any project delivered via web or API.

By Alexander Torrenegra, co-founder and CEO

Product Overview

VoiceBunny makes it easy to get crowdsourced voiceovers in minutes from a pool of 100,000 professionals. It’s ‘crowdvoicing’! Over 50+ languages are supported. Connecting to the VoiceBunny API turns blogs and news articles into podcasts automatically and in just minutes after it’s posted. Some other use cases: videogame developers can get affordable, professional voices easily, video editing apps can offer great voices to their clients, ads for online radio can be created while the client is buying the campaign, apps can deliver custom content at low cost, etc. VoiceBunny’s potential is limitless.

Voiceover is a multi-billion dollar a year industry that is rapidly growing. Think about all the professional voices you listen to on a single day. In traditional media you have TV, radio, corporate videos, phone systems, and toys. In new media you have online TV, YouTube, online radio, podcasting, advertising, videogames, ebooks, audiobooks, audio guides, mobile apps, elearning, translations, research, etc. Our core service is our CrowdVoicing API (that’s the ‘Amazon Mechanical Turk’ of voiceovers) where you give us a script and we get a professional voice very quickly (in most cases, under 40 minutes). Our dream is to build the best and largest set of global services and communities for the creation and consumption of spoken content.

How We’re Different

We’ve created the world’s first and only API for professional voiceovers. You can get the voice of Duke Nukem or Hulu, or even amazing celebrity/character impersonators via an API call. There used to be many inefficiencies in the way voiceovers were found and fulfilled—that is, until we arrived. We are building the best and largest set of global services and communities for the creation and consumption of spoken content, while expanding the voiceover industry to verticals where it wasn’t accessible before.

Founder’s Story

I founded VoiceBunny with my wife, Tania Zapata. Tania was an aspiring voice artist. She had been taken advantage of by a few talent agents. Back in 2003, I hacked together Voice123.com, the first online voice casting service. Without venture capital, we grew it to over 100,000 talents and over three million auditions. Clients and talents didn’t have to deal with agents and casting directors any longer. Now with VoiceBunny, we are trying to speed up the process of getting a great voice recording to just minutes by getting rid of the auditioning part and providing an API.

Marketing/Promotion Strategy

PR has been very good for us. The world of voiceover actors, and the voiceover industry in general, sparks a sense of fascination in a lot of people. I think people are curious to know what really happens behind the scenes when they hear amazing voices on TV, in cartoons, in movie trailers, etc.

Business Model

We currently have two services: Speedy and Search n’ Book. Clients can post ‘Speedy’ project and pay the price-per-word rate (based on script length) plus our 20 percent service fee to get a fantastic voiceover quickly. Or clients that wish to choose their own voiceover talent can ‘Search n’ Book’. Clients search our database, listen to voice samples, and book their favorite voice. Prices vary from talent to talent as they get to set their own per-word rate for these projects. Soon we will launch our ‘autopodcasting’ service that allows publishers/bloggers to get podcast created automatically via our API. An example of this is Fred Wilson’s blog at AVC.com.

Current Needs

We are always looking for passionate and brilliant team members! Visit our jobs page for more info: http://voicebunny.com/pages/jobs

VoiceBunny – www.voicebunny.com