Subly Enables Automatic Transcription and Subtitling for Videos

Hi everyone, I'm Holly Stevens and I'm the founder of Subly and I'm going to tell you exactly why LinkedIn and over 7,000 users have decided to use us within 6 months of us launching and why they need us for their content. So online video consumption has quadrupled during COVID-19. Viewers from watching their content at home from YouTube to Instagram to LinkedIn learning in their home environments for their work. But creators and businesses aren't seeing more views on their content. And I know this as I've worked and struggled myself as a senior position in Google and Xerox and been on Sky News. And I've even had my own YouTube channel. I struggled to get more views. Why aren't they getting more views? Well, it's actually because they're probably not having subtitles on these. 63% of videos on LinkedIn are watched without sound. It's even more than that for Facebook. It's around 83%. And if you don't add subtitles, you're missing out on a huge global audience. When you add subtitles, it increases the watch rate by 80%. Now, creators like I and companies don't add subtitles because it looks like a bit of a process like this. It's convoluted, it's complicated, and if you don't have the skills in order to do it, it can just be a bit of a nightmare. You don't want to spend all that time doing it. Well, Subly cuts those 17 steps all the way down to 4. It's an easy way for anyone anywhere to easily transcribe and add subtitles onto any video in any language for any platform, and it's ready to share. It's so easy to use. You simply take a video, you upload it into Subly, it transcribes it automatically, you can edit it like a Word document, and then you download it to any platform that you want to. Kind of put it out to. That could be LinkedIn, or you could even download the text file to put into Adobe if you need something a little bit towards the video editing suite. We're building for enterprise, so we want this area to really be suited towards that enterprise consumer who wants an easy way to really add subtitles onto video content, translate, and collaborate with their teams all around the world. We're different to the competitors as we offer these enterprise solutions that the customers need, and we've profiled hundreds of customers who need us. They want a product that's easy to use, offers translation, team features, and focused on video and audio. And that's really where we sit. And it's no longer a nice-to-have for organizations. They must have subtitling features. They need it because they have diversity and inclusion quotas. Legislation requires them to do it. And they need it also just for day-to-day use as well. Now, you'll see YouTube crossed out on here. The reason for that is from all our customers that we speak to, they don't use YouTube in a company environment. It's not secure enough for internal comms, it's not secure enough for product videos that don't want to be released yet, and there's multiple teams that need to be involved with it. So YouTube's not even something that they would use. Our secret sauce at Subly is that we're using speech-to-text technology, so we make it really quick to subtitle any piece of content. Combined with the ease of use of the platform. And it's also from the community perspective as well, which you'll see across all our social media of how much people love us. We know that businesses need us, they use us already. From everything from internal communications for their senior leadership team, to job advertisements, and even for just social media posts, that's what they use it for. You'll see some brilliant names on here that I just wanna mention, from everything from Canon, who use it for their events team, to LinkedIn who sell it into their companies and they have purchased licenses for their enterprise customers, to Bloomberg, to Endemol Shine. The list just goes on of enterprise that use us, as well as also creators. Now we're suited to, from everyone to a social media strategist who may start on Subly Pro, all the way to someone who's in the marketing team and have multiple people that they need to communicate with, for Subly for Business. So we have a simple subscription that's billed on a per-month basis, and we've already had, within just 2 days, 250 customers sign up, which is just incredible. We also have Subly for Business that has been purchased by LinkedIn. They purchase licenses for their enterprise customers, and they have it as a value-added service to them. We've seen incredible growth. It's just been crazy within the last 6 months. Now we have over 7,000 users on our platform, We have 250 paying customers. We only launched pricing yesterday, and that's within the last 2 days. And we predict revenue of £1.6 million in just 12 months. And that's just from the figures currently. That's not even projecting from the amount of investment that we hope to receive in the next few months. There's a huge opportunity here for us to kind of globally dominate the translation subtitling piece. And we want to be a category leader in this space. No one's leading it, and that's where we want to be. We've even been crowned the Canva of translation and subtitling. Where we really want to be is that we do want to be achieving that 300% growth year on year in the next 3 years. And we're on track to do that. We've already seen what we've achieved, even with just the investment we've received. We did this to date with just bootstrapping the company, and we want to further increase that growth and more features for enterprise with more investment. We're the team to make it happen. We've built and scaled businesses across the UK and Australia. I've had 2 previous startups and 1 exit. I have a fantastic co-founder on board, and we have some brilliant advisors from everyone who's had C-level positions at Clear Channel all the way to Vodafone too. It's your opportunity now to be part of Subly. You can even invest in this round, and we're closing our seed round. We've already just completed the pre-seed. And you can become a founding member yourself if you want to get in quick on this deal that we've offered for 250 people already, then you can do that too. Happy to take any questions that you have, and thank you for your time.

All right, that was awesome. Thank you, Holly. And yeah, once again, for one of the questions that I liked in the chat right off the bat was, I, I has— I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly— was just All he wrote was, "Too good to be true." We use it at FI, so it's a great product. I'll just throw that out there. But what would you say to the kind of too-good-to-be-true comment, Holly?

I would say that it's an honor to actually receive that comment. It'll be interesting to know what they think is too good to be true from that kind of area. I think that we have achieved exceptional growth. It's really a great time in the market 'cause everyone has gone online, so we have seen that exceptional growth. I think it's also from the team perspective, like we've been very good at bootstrapping it today, testing a lot. Before we even launched anything, we had 1,000 people that wanted Subly. And we were just doing interviews after interviews. And as you know from Founder Institute, you have to interview a hell of a lot of customers before you even launch. And so that's where we really had this product-market fit. So we went to launch, and when we did say we're now billing, we'd already built a number of customers that wanted us. So thank you very much for the comment. I kind of take it as an honor to receive it. Yeah, it's just part of kind of the team and the way things we've done at Subly, and just testing the market before we launched, and spent heaps of money before we even knew what the product-market fit would be.

Sure. And this is something I've seen a couple questions about this, but, you know, going after the enterprise, right? And it sort of gets down to the question like, why— like, how is your team kind of equipped to do those enterprise sales? And how have you gotten them so far? I mean, you were listing some pretty big names in there— Canon, LinkedIn, etc., right? I don't think you guys have much of a marketing budget, so how How have you been getting those and how do you think you're positioned to continue to get those in the future?

Yeah, really good question. So actually we, and back to your point, we actually haven't spent anything on marketing pretty much, just a tiny bit on SEO and that is it. The way that we've really done it is that when we originally presented at Founder Institute and we completed this in February, so it was only a few months ago, our positioning was that we will go after creators first and we'll build the funnel and we'll understand all the different customers that we need. And then we'll go after enterprise in the second half of the year. What happened that enterprises found out about us? One of our main channels, one of my main channels is LinkedIn. And we chose to go for enterprise as well and leave it to that end of the year because we knew that we would need a sales team or a partnerships team to get to them. What did happen is that enterprises just found out about us organically, and they started to recommend within their teams. So we did start to see the marketing team, the internal comms team, the L&D team, the video production team of their agency, they just started to recommend it. And that's why another reason why we've gone after enterprise is because there is such an opportunity for them to become a sticky user, for them to keep using within the product. And so to your question, enterprise was not something that we went towards initially, but it's where the biggest market opportunity is for us. And when it comes to the team and suited to enterprise, Myself and my co-founder and the team have all worked within enterprise teams. I've worked in kind of Google for a number of years, from Xerox, as well as my co-founder working at big media companies. And also our advisors on board as well, kind of, they are geared towards enterprise. That's why we do have the CEO of Clear Channel Media and head of media of Vodafone previous as well. So our team is really suited and we have the right team around us as well to really make sure that we are either going through a channel route to enterprise or a direct sales route. And as I said, we weren't ever gearing towards enterprise straight away. But when we do our— this next seed round, the funding will be used to heavily target those enterprise and go towards a sale route and really gear up the channel route as well.

Got it. So a couple of questions coming in here sort of about the technology and how that works. And so— I guess, first question, what are the languages that you guys are currently covering right now?

Yeah, I could list them all, but it's probably easier to say there's 31 languages we cover now.

31?

31. So if you go to our website—

Maybe don't list them all.

Yeah, it would take me the entire call. So yeah, 31 languages. So you've got English, French, German, everything that you want. There are some that we still want to do. To your technology question as well, we do use solutions out there on the market. So things like Amazon or Google, we do put those together and we do use those, that technology. It just allows us to keep our costs super, super low and use their technology solutions so we can really scale as quickly as possible without any of that cost ourselves. So yeah, that's how we're building it out and we will be just supporting more languages as we grow.

Nice. Okay. And let's see some other questions here. Keep the questions coming. We'll take a few more and then we'll close things out here. But what do you think gives you guys sort of your competitive advantage right now? I mean, there certainly are some other options on the market for this, right? Now, as a user of Subly, I can tell you that Subly just makes it a lot easier. But, you know, what do you guys think are some of your competitive advantages as you start to grow?

Yeah, absolutely. It's a really good question, and we get this quite a lot from investors as well. It's really towards, as you said, Jonathan, it's the ease of use, and like, we do speak to our customers on a daily basis, so we are learning from them more. We've built out a roadmap for enterprise, not just creators. And so where we see ourselves is that we will be— we want to be a category leader. That's our differentiating point, is that we're really user-friendly. You can see that from our presentation. You can see it from the product. Our ease of use is what we pride ourselves on, and that's how we want to kind of win over the market. So I would say that's one of the biggest piece. It is also plugging in the speech-to-text technology so we can do more languages, we can get to a global market quicker. As we've seen, like, some of our top markets, yes, it's UK and US, Australia, France, the Netherlands are big regions for us, Italy. We are seeing that then coming up the ranks of the top regions at the moment. So We're already on a global scale at the moment. In terms of else from our competitors, it is that we are building out solutions that we know enterprise need as well. So there are those team collaboration features. It is a marketplace for longer form videos where they may need to use someone who is local. So if you want to go from something in English and you want to translate into French, but also we've done the translation automatically in Subly, but you want to use some local on the ground that could check it through for you, we will have that in there as well. There's gonna be a lot of marketplace features that we will also build out and around Subly. And that's why in the presentation I've already said kind of the community is the biggest thing about Subly. Everyone loves us, everyone uses us, and they don't leave. And the community that we've built around it.

Sure. Alright, so just to wrap things up here, do you wanna talk quickly about this, the founding member program that you guys are releasing?

Sure. So as I mentioned, we, um, we've just switched on pricing for Subly, and we're offering $6 for 6 months for Subly Pro, which allows you— when we get to September, all the features will be free. From September, you will have all Subly Pro features, whereas everyone else will be billed on $10 a month minimum cost. So you can come in now. We've only got 6 days left. There's only 500 spaces. There's already 250 signups, so you've only got a few days left. You just go to the link, getsubbly.com/foundingmembers. You join there and you can start using Subbly for yourself.