CTO interview: Andrew Barraclough, harnessing the video era
Andrew is a down-to-earth founder and CTO, kind and approachable. With his co-founder, Dave Carruthers, they built a platform to collect video surveys. Original and visionary (they started it 8 years ago!), Voxpopme is a company you may have never heard of, but counts prestigious clients. Andrew and his team built the platform with a mix of modern cutting-edge technologies and good old PHP.
How did you get the idea to start Voxpopme?
Before starting VPM with Dave, he was running a company that was helping to incubate a lot of startups. I was the tech director there, helping startups to raise seed funding and help them build out the tech.
We saw a lot of things, they were struggling to get things off the ground. We thought about how we can connect consumers to brands, and video was the obvious answer as video was getting more widely used in 2013. It was a challenging medium at the start. At the time people were getting started with video on FaceTime calls and live videos on FB. Everyone got used to not only consuming videos, but also contributing, even in their own personal lives.
We just had this big belief that video is a medium that would give so much more to brands to understand their customers better rather than what they were getting through, like a couple of words on a survey or a score of nine. There’s no meaning behind this, and so we really wanted to make that connection worth a lot more.
Consumers are happy to film themselves for surveys? How does that work?
Yes. We basically built a mobile app, iOS and Android, and we built a platform that our customers could use and allow them to send out video surveys to the app users. So they’ve downloaded this app. They get a push notification. They get 50 to 75 cents per survey they respond to. It only takes a couple of minutes of their time.
It can be particularly useful for concept testing on a brand the consumer already knows well.
For instance, before Christmas, feedback on your new products is especially valuable. You need to think about what are the behaviors and attitudes towards certain products. It’s a medium for people to answer a survey and share their feelings in a video; easy for the customer and easy to interpret. And the respondent can get the cash through Paypal once they reach $15.
What is the incentive for your clients?
We’re not a replacement for quantitative surveys, but we’re here for the qualitative surveys. We’re replacing focus groups.
We’re here for when you need to be able to do that product research and get those answers affordably and conveniently. Traditionally, what people would have to do was to get focus groups, in-depth interviews, and it would take weeks and weeks to set-up facilities. With our platform you can set-up a study in minutes. Typically, most of our studies will complete within around 24 to 48 hours.
You’re in the UK but I see the company is based in Utah, USA. Does it mean you have a distributed team across the UK and US? How do you manage it?
We have a distributed team, which we started about 5 years or so ago. Dave moved out to the US. We were aware that we had such a big opportunity in the US. With videos as a medium, our platform has a lot to do such as transcription. Expanding in the US with a massive English-speaking market was an obvious move, although we now support 59 languages.
The executive team is based in Utah with a sales and marketing/services team. In the UK, mostly in Birmingham, we are primarily product and engineering. Also some Go-To-Market.
It’s not always easy, especially with a distributed exec/leadership team. It does pose its challenges, but we’ve worked with that for a long time, it’s helped us since COVID-19 as all communications and processes were already in place.
What is the tech needed to run a video survey platform like Voxpopme?
Everything is cloud-based. Programming languages-wise we have a mix of stuff; PHP and Node based services. We have a centralised API layer for our platform. Angular frontend. We leverage a lot of AWS services when we can (SQS, SNS, Lambda).
We also work with several partners and power video analytics into other provider platforms, making our API available to them.
There are lots of challenges in terms of processing the data. First big one is transcription, to be able to apply a lot more data for our customers. One of the things we did early on, ensuring everything happened asynchronously, running with microservices. If we’re running speech-to-text, it’s asynchronously. Same for sentiment analysis, facial emotions. We do our own NLP analysis on top of that.
Some of the things we built ourselves, and some of them, we partner with some great companies; for example IBM Watson for sentiment analysis.
It allows us to concentrate on the product and solving customer pain-points.
Do you think deepfakes are going to take more importance in your business area? And what do you think about that technology?
From our business, it’s not something we need to be too cautious at the minute. It’s something people need to be aware of. It’s about how well we could detect them. It’s not something that’s going to impact us too much. Maybe at some points we’ll have bots answering our surveys and we will need to detect them.
If you want to connect with Andrew, click here.
To learn more about Voxpopme, visit their website: voxpopme.com
If you’re a techie working on something exciting or you simply want to have a chat, get in touch with me. I’m currently CTO at Kolleno.com
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