Interview with Subly Founder & CEO Holly Stephens (FI London)

Hi, my name is Dustin Betts. I'm the Community and Content Manager at the Founder Institute, and I'm here today with Holly Stevens. She's the founder and CEO of Subly. They're an FI London startup that lets anybody instantly subtitle videos, which, as we'll discuss, increases viewer engagement as well as accessibility. Holly Stevens, thanks so much for joining us.

Thanks so much. I'm so excited to be here, Dustin. Being on Foundry Institute was one of the best decisions that we made. So I'm really excited to be here.

Awesome. So yeah, before we dive into your startup, Subly, I always like to ask, tell us a little bit about your personal story. What were your experiences, professional or personal, that led you to founding this company or developing this solution for video content creators?

Sure. So yeah, so the idea of Subly started around 18 months ago now. And I had the challenge of adding subtitles onto prerecorded content, whether that was for social media or digital ads and for online courses. I was doing this because I had a YouTube channel, but also I had an online course program for women starting their own startups. And I also had a marketing agency. So I was doing multiple things and I just could see that I needed to add subtitles onto this, but the process The process was horrendous. It was taking me typically 17 steps and I just couldn't stand it anymore. Tried out multiple platforms and I just thought, but there must be a better way to do this. So I put up a landing page and within 24 hours we had 50 signups. And from that point, me and my co-founder, my co-founder and I, Kevin, came together and said, I think we could launch this together. Holly, from your acting experience in marketing, and doing sales work as well, and Kevin, who was the CTO, we just said, let's give it a go. And from then, we've just been growing the business. Now we have 15,000 users in just 7 months. It's just crazy growth. But on top of that, like, the rest of my experience has been in marketing my entire career. I've worked at Google, Xerox, a few different IT companies. And so I've had a lot of experience in marketing teams And so the idea of Subli has just evolved from having all those experiences and the team having the same experiences and challenges too with having a similar subtitling process. So that's pretty much a roundup of me.

Yeah, that's awesome. I mean, I actually didn't know that it was sort of, yeah, such a personal connection, like you created a solution for a need that you like clearly saw for yourself. That's really awesome. Just to kind of zoom out a little bit, I mean, I know because I'm somewhat familiar with your company, Founder Institute is using Subly. I know it's an easy way for anybody to add subtitles, that you have a bunch of different language support, and that you've grown a lot since your launch. But just to kind of give us your short pitch for those not familiar, I guess, what is Subly? What's your elevator pitch?

Sure, I'll do it in the whole FI style, 'cause it's the way that I know it. So I'll give you a quick 45 seconds. And I'll tell you why kind of those 15,000 users did sign up to Subly in 7 months. So every single day when you scroll through your feed and you see videos, 63% of these videos on LinkedIn alone are watched on sound, without sound. When you add subtitles, it increases engagement by 80%. But it's also a legal requirement to add subtitles to content for larger organizations as well. However, adding subtitles to content is a convoluted process. It's really complicated, costly, take 17 steps, Subly's the solution. It's an easy way for anyone anywhere to easily add subtitles onto video into 31 languages with our SaaS platform. And thousands of companies are using it every single day. Exceptional growth in 7 months from 15,000 users to creators, and Fortune 500 companies who are using us. We had 400 customers in just 7 days sign up, and we've signed a deal with LinkedIn. And we're ready to take on the potential $23.7 billion market of creating content, translation, and helping creators everywhere. Our special sources that we— and our IP is that we use customization, data, and AI services. And with a simple subscription plan, you can start Subly from as little as $10 a month. It's actually free to sign up just to use it for 40 minutes for now. And we're expected to make $75K monthly recurring revenue in the next few months. We've already raised our pre-seed round of $210K. We're now on to our next round 2, which is $750,000 that we'll be raising. And so if anyone's interested in even using Subly, go to getsubly.com. If you wanna be an investor, contact me directly at holly@getsubly.com.

Awesome, yeah, free to try. So for anybody who's watching this, definitely go and check it out and yeah, definitely try out the tool. Yeah, we've talked about kind of some of your traction and your growth and it's really impressive. I wanna hear a little bit more about, I guess, your users and customers. Who are they and how are they using Subly?

Yeah, so since we officially launched in February, I'll just give a bit of background is that before we even launched, we were doing a lot of testing, a lot of customer interviews. We were learning more about who needs this product because yes, I needed it, who was a marketing manager and an online course creator and a YouTuber, but there were so many different customers that needed it. So we see everything from an online course creator to a university to a school. It's just so varied. And then yes, we get internal comms teams, external comms teams, but I would say our main customers right now are kind of the marketing managers, the social media strategists who need to translate or transcribe short-form content. So that's what we've seen really from a lot of our user testing and our customers that are coming through. What we're really doing is now with our customers is that we're going from a free service to a paid service. So we'll start to understand that more about our customers and what they really need. And that's the main thing with Subli is that with all our customers, we're understanding, we're trying to find that product market fit. And we know that our customers that need us right now fall in different categories. So we'll start to introduce pricing based on what the customer needs and when they need it. So for example, we have customers right now that may go onto free, they need accessible services, subtitling is standard, they can use it. When they go into Subly Pro, we may see more users who want more customization, someone who has their own business, who's doing work for clients, they may need Subly Pro for transcription, translation, adding headlines. So we'll start to see that more as we grow, who more of our customers are. But yeah, it's really varied right now. And the real reason why everyone seems to be using Subly is that it has been built from the ground up. What the user needed, when they needed it, what they needed it for. And so it's the ease of use that's really built that scale. And what we've seen is that because there are so many users that, so many different use cases for our product, that they have really helped generate that, that viral marketing that has just been so easy to see us grow from zero in February to 15,000 in September of 2020. So, Yeah, it's all through our customers and we'll just keep learning that more and more as we go on.

Yeah, that's awesome. And I think many founders, you know, in our audience who wear a lot of different hats, they are the social media managers for themselves when they're getting started. So yeah, again, like really great tool for them to check out. But I want to kind of talk a little bit more, and you touched on this at the beginning, about why subtitles are so critical. I think maybe for some of us it's really it might be a little obvious, but you mentioned the statistic about, for example, how much video on social is watched with sound off. Can you just kind of talk about, yeah, why are they so critical for videos today?

Yeah, absolutely, and to be honest, I didn't realize how critical it was myself until I started to see more engagement every time that I did a video with subtitles, and that's why I needed a quicker solution. So the main reasons are, and as you know, you scroll through social, you might be doing it when you're kind of sitting on the couch, or you may be watching an online video, or you may be just looking through LinkedIn and you see a piece of video content that you engage with. It's really around 65% of content on LinkedIn alone is watched without sound. You can reach more of an audience, like a global audience as well, where actually I know sometimes that I might not be as clear as I want to be on a video, and you're missing out on a load of people that don't speak the same language as you. So that's one of the main, that's another main reason. And the world is so digital-led now. We've seen that with the growth of Zoom, with the other platforms like TikTok. Everything's going online. Education products are going online too. And so it really means that subtitles need to be applied from everything from social media, all the way to online content, to learning content. We've seen it with films. It needs to be done, and it absolutely must be done from a point of accessing those that are also hard of hearing, supporting those where they are learning to read. So even kids will need this for learning to read as well. It will help them. And on top of that, we really need to start to address the kind of what we've seen lately in some of the news articles that I see is that if companies don't have it and they are a big platform or a big enterprise, they don't have subtitles on their content, they can become sued for it as well. So it really means that it's needed from everyone, from a creator for more engagement, but also a corporate too. It's a huge impact that subtitles can make for a business and a creator.

Yeah, that's really, really interesting. I didn't know, I guess, but it totally makes sense about kind of the legal requirements around it. So yeah, so as well as just the engagement and the accessibility for bigger enterprises, absolutely, like that's something I never thought about before, that you could kind of get in trouble if you're not making your content accessible to everyone. So I think that's a really important point as well for people to think about as they grow and hopefully get to that point for their businesses. So why automatic subtitles? You kind of talked about this in your user experience or why you created the product, but why not just adding them myself manually or using another service?

Yeah, and Dustin, you know, actually adding them manually is so time-consuming. It's just a bit of a nightmare. But also that the point is saving time is automatically done. We can do this now through AI services and speech recognition. It's a really easy tool to be using. But also, I wouldn't just say it's automatic subtitling, it's also that our platform makes it really easy to do it as well. You can use different platforms, there are competitors out there, but we've tried to make this as easy to use as possible. For anyone who's a small business with little digital skills, all the way to your social media team and internal comms team or a CEO who just doesn't have time to do it. So It's the automatic subtitling as well as the combination of our platform that makes it really easy. But the real— the automatic transcription, rather than getting a human to do it, I would suppose, is that it can be really costly if you're doing this manually. The amount of time it's going to take someone to manually type this, it's just— it's not affordable, especially for an enterprise where they're cutting costs in production. So it really can be, it really can start to save money for some of those companies. Just as a typical example, it could take you, even for freelancing this, it will be $50 per 10 minutes for a video. So when you start to, as an enterprise, you're doing so much content, it just is off the scale when it starts to look at those budgets. Ours starts at $10 a month. So it's, it's really simple to use. And, you know, as I said, you don't need any digital skills training. When someone does this in-house, you're gonna need multiple teams to do it. So you would need a transcriber. You may have a marketing manager also reviewing the content. And on top of that, you might need someone who is specialized in digital skills, who would then put the subtitles with the content. And then that's another process and more headcount. So it's just completely streamlined this process to make it super easy for anyone. And the best thing about our product is that, and this is why I love it so much, is yeah, you get the automatic subtitling, but sometimes you might have a slight error. Our product allows you to simply just edit that error within seconds. So it appears just like a Word doc. So it's easy for everyone to use.

That is really awesome. Yeah. And for anybody who's ever done the manual subtitling knows, I think, like the kind of equation that you lay out just as far as cost savings and time savings for your team is huge. But yeah, anybody who's done the manual knows that, yes, that's true. That's such a huge time saver. Before we kind of wrap up, I always like to ask this question. I mean, you guys have grown so much so quickly, but kind of rewinding back maybe to pre-launch, you know, what were some of the biggest challenges that you faced as a founder in the earlier stages and how did you go about overcoming those challenges?

Yeah, I actually, I actually think it's a really interesting question and it's quite hard to think about, but I would say the biggest challenge for me is probably letting go. So as you have to build the business, there's things you have to let go of that you've always been used to doing. So for example, with me, it's marketing and partnerships, and I just needed to let that go to someone who's more experienced than me and really wants to throw their all into it, as I needed to focus on the business. And I'd say that I've been so used to, as a startup, doing a little bit of everything, 'cause you have to. When we got that investment in, when we knew we were starting to grow even further, is really taking a step back and going, I can't do all this now, like I just can't do it. Let's hand it off to the best people. And I found that quite a challenge at the start to start to hand off pieces, but as soon as I started to do it, my life got a hell of a lot easier and so did it get easier for the team. So I would say that the way that I've kind of done that and the way that I tackled that is to start to identify the tasks that was taking me a lot of time, where I needed to focus on, you know, investment, for example, or being on the Founder Institute, funding labs, like I needed to be focusing on that. So understanding that was core, and then really getting the right team around me to take that rocket ship off the ground. And I actually believe we have the best team at Subli now. Everyone's so motivated, they're leaders themselves, and they also know when they need to hand things off as well, when we need to bring someone else in the team, and they need to do that too. So I'd say that's probably the— that's a big challenge for me, is actually just taken a step back and handed it over to the right team.

Awesome. Yeah, I think that's super applicable for any team that's growing quickly. So really, really great advice. I'm going to ask you again for more advice. This is sort of a penultimate question. What advice would you offer for other aspiring entrepreneurs who are just getting started? Any generic sage wisdom?

Yeah, I think kind of back to the other kind of question as well is kind of surrounding yourself with the right network, the right people, investors, great advisors, other founders in your team. There's people that are really gonna push you, and sometimes you lose faith in yourself a little bit. There's a bit of imposter syndrome. Actually, those great advisors can really go, "No, you can do it. We have faith in you and the business. Keep driving it forward." But I'd also say to a lot of those founders out there, put it at the early, early stages. Just start small, get a landing page out there, get it started. Stop thinking that you need to build every single thing. Just get your idea out there, and you will find out if it's worth pursuing it. You don't wanna be wasting all that time burning a load of cash when you don't even know if there's product-market fit or anyone wants it. And then the last tip I'd say is you just need to keep learning. So from everything from kind of taking a step back and deciding that your team need it and learning to manage a team, to learning about legals, valuation, everything like that. Just keep learning. And you know what? It gets tough sometimes, all of those things together, but just keep going and you'll realize actually 7 months on, you were worried about getting 1 user, now you've got 15,000 users. So just keep going and your business will get there.

That is awesome. Really great advice. Thank you so much for that. So final question. We always ask, where's Subly heading next? Any news or updates to share with the FI community or any asks for the audience here?

Absolutely. So we have a really exciting launch coming this month. So September 2020, we're launching a subscription of Subly Pro, as I mentioned, and it is fantastic. The team have been working so much on this and it looks brilliant. So if you want to get early access to that, you need to go to GetSubly. And you'll be able to upgrade straight away from there. We're also raising our seed round now. So if you're interested, go to marketing.getsubly/investor. But yeah, just go and give it a try. Want to see what you think of it. And we'll always be asking for feedback. So just go to getsubly.com.

Awesome. Well, this has been really great. We will definitely include those URLs when we go to publish this video. And it's been awesome just, you know, learning not just about your product, but why subtitling is so important for content creators and digital marketers today. And yeah, we're all really looking forward to keeping up with Subly and where you're headed next. Holly Stevens, thank you so much again for joining us today.

Thanks so much, Dustin. I've loved it. Thank you.