2019 was a great year for Voiceflow. We launched the Voiceflow platform publicly and grew the team from 5 to 18 people. We couldn’t be more grateful for our supportive and engaged community of users, now measuring over 21,000 people globally.
With 2019 almost at a close, I thought we’d take a second to recap the major milestones for Voiceflow this year, and what is coming in 2020.
2019 by the numbers
- Powered 50M+ interactions through Voiceflow apps
- Our community grew to be over 5,000+ people
- Voiceflow’s user base grew to over 21,000 people, from 50+ countries
- Launched Google integration, Real-time collaboration, workspaces, API integrations, visuals, backups, and thousands of small UI/UX changes that all add-up to one amazing user experience.
2019 Recap
January
Adding Ryan Hoover and the Weekend Fund as Investors
In January we were fortunate to add Ryan Hoover from the Weekend Fund as an investor. This was the first Silicon Valley venture fund to take an interest in Voiceflow, and we can’t thank Ryan and the WF team enough for taking a chance on us. They opened doors we didn’t even know existed.
February
Supporting both Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant
We’ve always wanted to make Voiceflow the best, most limitless product in the voice space. Our users wanted to build for both Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa, however no visual platform in the space allowed for this cross-platform building. We decided to build the first full Google Assistant integration of this kind in the space — allowing our users to build voice apps for both Alexa and Google Assistant simultaneously.
April
Raising $3.5M from True Ventures
In April, we announced we had raised $3.5M from True Ventures in San Francisco. This was incredibly exciting for our small team as it allowed us to continue building the team and community.
Merging with Invocable
In March 2019, Voiceflow merged with Invocable, absorbing much of the company’s assets. It was a big move and massive bet for our small company that has ultimately propelled the entire space forward. By merging Voiceflow’s powerful platform with Invocable’s world-class design, we’ve been able to build a far better product for our users.
May
Speaking opening night at Collision
We were fortunate enough to be chosen to speak main stage, opening night at Collision — one of the largest tech conferences in North America. It was an incredible experience we’e so thankful to have.
June
Moving into our new office
After the True Ventures round, we decided to move out of our shared co-working space and into our own office. We picked a spot on Richmond street which was too big for our small team of 8 then, but would allow us to grow for the following years.
July
Launching the Voiceflow SSML Editor
Writing SSML is incredibly tedious, and causes more errors than any other feature in Voiceflow. To combat this, we decided to create an easy-to-use visual SSML editor which had great UX and made it easy for anyone to create better conversations, without messing up their SSML. This tool is set to be integrated into Voiceflow in 2020.
Voiceflow attends Voice Summit 2019
Our team attended Voice Summit in New Jersey and had a blast meeting so many of our users in person. We had an amazing team meeting partners and users in person and can’t wait to do so again in 2020. Thanks to Pete and the Modev team for putting on such an incredible event.
September
Voiceflow V2 codebase launch
In October, many of our users remember the launch of a brand new Voiceflow canvas. This launch wasn’t just big, it was the finale to 6 months of work rejigging the entire Voiceflow codebase to get ready for other foundational features we’d later add. It was a tremendous effort and we couldn’t have done it without our amazing engineering team.
October
Receiving investment from the Amazon Alexa Fund
After building strong ties with the Amazon Alexa team, we were fortunate to raise an investment round led by the Amazon Alexa Fund. Our prior investment partners, Ripple and True Ventures, both participated in the round and continued to support the company. We look forward to continuing our involvement with the teams at Alexa to build a better voice ecosystem for everyone.
Our small team grew from 5 to 18
Starting 2018, would couldn’t have imagined we’d triple in size only a year later. We’ve been able to attract incredible people to our small and growing team, including new members in growth, product, operations, and engineering. Emily Lonetto, Voiceflow’s Head of Growth, wrote a great piece on why she chose to join Voiceflow.
November
Real-time collaboration launch
In November we launched our largest ever single-feature: real-time collaboration. This groundbreaking feature is a first for both the voice, and the no-code space. Further, RTC marks Voiceflow’s increasing focus on helping teams build better, more engaging conversational products.
Looking forward to 2020
We came a long way in 2019, but we’re just getting started. Here’s what you can look forward to in 2020 from Voiceflow:
1. Team focused features
We’re increasingly focused on supporting our Professional team customers. To support this focus, we’ve added real-time collaboration and workspaces. Moving forward, you can expect an increasing number of features and improvements to support team collaboration and workflows, including commenting and better prototyping.
2. Continued focus on global community growth
Our Community of engaged, supportive Voiceflow users is incredibly important to our company. We’re planning to continue to double-down on our community and its growth, both on Facebook, other platforms, and in-person meetups. Look out for more community programs launching in 2020.
3. Better, more industry-moving content
After powering more than 50M conversations this year with customers from the Fortune 500 and individual creative class, we think we know a thing or two about the voice and conversational space. Until recently, however, we haven’t shared our thoughts outside of the odd podcast cameo or Twitter thread. In 2020, you can expect this to change as we create more meaningful content for our customers.
4. Increased native platform support
Native platform features like ISP on Amazon Alexa or Carousels on Google Assistant are what differentiates voice apps across platforms, and make experiences feel special per platform. Because Voiceflow supports two platforms, we often only support features that are mutual across Alexa and Google. Through 2020 you can expect us to support an increasing number of native-platform features.
5. Ecosystem partnerships
There are a ton of amazing tool and infrastructure companies that our customers already use, or want to. In 2019, we were focused on building Voiceflow’s individual value proposition before extending our capabilities through integrations. In 2020, we plan to partner and integrate with as many industry-leading tools as
we can, including:
- PulseLabs — user testing for voice apps
- Jargon — voice app CMS
- Dashbot — conversational analytics
- Jovo — open-source framework for voice apps
- BeSpoken — continuous testing framework for voice apps
+ Many more we hope to work with. If you work for a company who would like to integrate with Voiceflow, please email us at braden@voiceflow.com
6. Increased international support
Voiceflow’s user base is an increasingly international demographic, and our content and platform needs to support this. Currently, Voiceflow only supports English and is optimized for Mac OS and Google Chrome — a very particular demographic. Moving forward in 2020, you can expect Voiceflow to support an increasing number of languages, browsers, and operating systems.
One last thank you in 2019
Everything we do is to help our users build incredible conversational experiences. We wouldn’t be here without the support of our users, customers, investors, and friends/family.
From our family to yours, happy holidays from the Voiceflow team. We’ll see you in 2020!
Have any predictions for Voice in 2020? Tweet us at: @VoiceflowHQ
