Some lessons about text-to-speech hold across every company.
Takeaways for text-to-speech builders: stop overthinking and execute, the team matters more than the tech, data beats gut feel and simple beats complex. This article looks at text-to-speech: what tends to work, what usually fails, and how to start.
What I've Learned From 23 Companies
A few patterns in text-to-speech come up again and again.
The founders who handle text-to-speech well understand that you should focus on one thing and do it exceptionally well.
The Reality Nobody Talks About
A lot of the advice on text-to-speech rests on assumptions that made sense five years ago. The world has moved on.
The first thing to understand is that your team matters more than your technology. I've seen this play out across dozens of companies. The pattern is unmistakable.
Many teams spend months on the wrong path before realizing that the data tells a different story than your gut. Once they make the switch, everything changes.
The Counterintuitive Truth
In text-to-speech, the best practitioners often do less, not more.
Trying to do everything at once is one of the most common ways to fail: even a team with strong technology and talent can spread itself too thin.
The lesson: simplicity beats complexity every time. It sounds simple. It's incredibly hard to execute.
The Numbers Don't Lie
The gap between companies that take text-to-speech seriously and those that don't is usually clear.
Investing early in text-to-speech can be the difference between raising your next round and running out of runway.
One of my portfolio companies went from struggling to profitable in under a year after they finally got serious about this. The founder told me later that they wished they'd started sooner.
This connects to broader themes around text-to-speech, conversational AI, voice AI assistants that I've been thinking about a lot lately.
The Bottom Line
None of this is rocket science. But it does require intentionality, consistency, and a willingness to learn from mistakes.
If you take one thing from this article, let it be this: start now, start small, and iterate. The founders who win at text-to-speech aren't the ones with the best strategy on paper. They're the ones who execute, learn, and adapt faster than everyone else.
Companies that take text-to-speech seriously tend to pull ahead of the ones that don't.
If you're working on something interesting in this space, I'd love to hear about it. Drop me a line.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q:What experience informs this perspective?
This perspective comes from over a decade of building companies in Silicon Valley, two successful exits (RemoteTeam to Gusto, MovieLaLa to Gfycat), and investing in 234 startups including Anthropic, OpenAI, and Scale AI. I write about what I've lived.
Q:How can I apply this thinking to my own situation?
Start by identifying the core principle behind the opinion, not the specific example. Then ask yourself: does this principle apply to my context? If yes, test it in a small, low-risk way before going all in.
Q:What's the most common pushback you get on this?
People often push back by citing exceptions or edge cases. And they're usually right that exceptions exist. But building a strategy around exceptions rather than patterns is a losing game for most founders.