Co-Founders Introduce Textok — A Bold and Ambitious App for Style and Tone Automation

I had the pleasure of interviewing Olga Procevska and Katya Firyan, the co-founders of Textok, an app that automates style and tone compliance for brand texts. Olga has a PhD in communication studies, while Katya has over 20 years of experience in business. They teamed up 10 years ago when they founded a copywriting agency, and their practical realization of the uselessness of unautomated brand books led them to the idea of Textok.

What motivated you to launch your startup? In short, we were tired of making brand books and tone of voice guides that didn’t work. When we started, there was one enterprise-level solution available on the market, but it lacked the accessibility and comprehensive approach that Textok brings to corporate communication managers.

Over time, AI-based solutions for style and tone started to emerge, but being unconfigurable black boxes, they also couldn’t meet the exact requirements for style and tone compliance automation that companies had.

Additionally, there was a special case with one communications executive who collaborated with us on the creation of tone and style guidelines. We saw firsthand how overworked and stressed text writers and their managers were.

For example, large companies could receive five to ten different texts from their copywriters every week: emails, social media posts, website texts, blog posts. These texts might all be in different styles and tones of voice because one text might be intended for retail customers, while another might be for business partners or corporate clients.

Writers had to keep all these little details about how their company should write in their heads, and the numerous text polishing and feedback rounds made the content creation process so painful that automating the writing guidelines was just a natural decision.

So what exactly does Textok do? Textok is a place where brand managers can define the desired style and tone of their texts. They do it via more than 100 parameters that we have created, so it’s super fine-tuned. What words do you want to avoid? What rhythm do you need your texts to have? What kind of emotions do you want to convey? Do you want your brand to be assertive or empathetic? How do you want to create a dialogue with your audience?

Almost all communication managers who started using Textok say that the process of defining their tone of voice was helpful for its own sake — it made them really think through the unique character of their brand and how they want to project it. After a custom tone of voice guide has been created, it can be shared with all copywriters and content producers, whether they are in-house or freelance writers. They use the guide to check their drafts for style and tone compliance and get gentle guidance from Textok. This way, when texts are handed back to the brand manager, marketing manager, or head of communications, they are already in line with the company’s tone of voice guidelines. So they don’t have to spend time trying to make them fit, which was our goal from the beginning.

What is it that excites you about what you’re building?

We love everything about building Textok — from talking to our users to actually making the features (and re-making them, as often happens). We have two great co-founders, Victor and Alex Kirhenshteins, who are the IT brains behind the product.

But, of course, the most exciting thing is to see how the product is used by its first adopters — to receive that feedback, tweak the rules, and come up with new ones. It is, basically, seeing something that you invented grow and become really useful to someone.

What has been your biggest challenge when growing your startup?

Somehow, we feel that our biggest challenge is still in front of us. But so far, being patient has probably been the hardest part. We are bootstrapping, so we cannot just throw money at a problem. It is usually hard work, continuous learning, and patience that do the trick. It requires a great deal of teamwork and mutual support — and we are lucky to have that.

What are your future plans for your startup?

We want to make the lives of all brand managers, corporate writers, and freelancers easier. Our ambition is to remove all the inefficient aspects from the text creation process. Textok is growing into a comprehensive collaboration platform, covering all stages of text production: from briefs to the first draft, editing, approval, localization, storage, and performance analysis.

If you had to share “words of wisdom” with a founder who’s about to start their own startup, what would they be?

Be as you are. The startup world is geared towards “moving fast and breaking things,” but there is room for different kinds of personalities, as well as different kinds of businesses.

How can our readers follow you on social media?

You can find us on Facebook, LinkedIn and on X. We post product updates, insights about tone and style management, and an occasional cat picture.

This was very insightful. Thank you so much for joining us!