Knocking down walls
What a journey! In December 2019 we sat together over a long, fun and debate-filled weekend in snowy Zurich to discuss these crazy ideas about a company we desperately wanted to build. Had we known how many wrong assumptions we would make along the way…
What surprised me about the startup journey: how hard it is to obtain meaningful insights into the workings of something involving the interplay of humans and machines. Neither do experiments lead straight to results. Nor does an interview with an expert clearly answer questions. It’s half a cup of conversations, a few good pieces of experiment, a dab of data and a pinch of gut-feel, to make a stew of “hell, I don’t know, but I think it’s this”.
Even so, I still come to work every day with a spring in my step, a big smile on my face and tons of motivation to try out a new trick and see whether the wall may give in, once we hit it just so. After every wall we knock down, we rub our eyes, scratch our heads and mumble to ourselves: “How did we not see before that this was the way to do it?”
We set out on this journey with the hypothesis that talking to the right people at the right time changes everything and that modern technology has but scratched at its potential to unlock that value. Our mission is to change that. In our offline lives, we tend to run into such conversations in the least expected places. So the question arises: if social audio is the closest thing to a real-life conversation experience, including discovery and human connection, should social audio then happen in one specific place or everywhere? It‘s everywhere! There is no monopoly on great conversations. Much the contrary — where there are people, there’s room for great conversations.
It’s another one of these learnings that in hindsight we mumble: “How did we not see this before?” Today, the Angle Audio consumer app goes into retirement so that we can focus all of our attention on making it easier than ever before to have great audio conversations everywhere on the internet!
Another wall is knocked down and it is with great joy and conviction that we are now doing whatever it takes to turn our first customers’ users into raving fans. Onwards, with hardened helmets, for the next wall to present itself! We’re ready.
