💬 Q&A: The Future of Sound Bites
Aaron Hsu (Cofounder/CEO of Blerp)
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Hi curious minds 🧠,
As a mentor for Alexa Next Stage powered by Techstars, I have the fortune of engaging with missionary founders innovating with voice.
Here’s a prediction: messaging with sound clips will be as prevalent as GIFs and emojis within the next two years (click here to believe it).
Now that you are a believer, meet the startup that is becoming the search engine and audio platform for sound clips.
Let’s roll.
Meet Aaron.
Guest: Aaron Hsu is Cofounder & CEO of Blerp, the creator-driven audio platform for sharing and finding short sound clips. Blerp is integrated into your voice chats, messaging, and live streams. Audio expression for any moment.
Fun Fact: Aaron is from SLC, UT. His mom immigrated to Utah from Hong Kong. Aaron’s most lucrative high school job was buying and selling harddrives on KSL.
Q&A Time.
Question #1: What are you inventing with Blerp and why now?
To be honest we started inventing Blerp because we made a soundboard app of Shia Labeouf and saw how much fun we could have by just playing his voice clips in different situations. As we kept working on Blerp we were able to see the power of the moments Blerp created when a sound clip was shared at the right time. As we kept working on Blerp we saw that we were helping solve a fundamental need of making people feel connected and understood by enhancing a moment with common context and expression.
The idea is for Blerp to become the audio sharing platform that enhances any experience. Audio has always been a powerful tool for self-expression in music, video, and podcasts. We see movies strategically use sound design to create the perfect scene for a film. Similarly, through Blerp, we can use sound to help create the best moments. We see Blerp continue to add value to our experiences especially in a world where consuming and sharing audio continues to carve out a natural place in our lives through Voice Assistants and remote communication.
Question #2: Tell us about the moment you started to gain users, how did you feel, what did you do?
Our first soundboard got 50K downloads and I remember laying in the tennis court after releasing just reading the reviews and being amazed how something so simple could be distributed to so many people through the click of a button. Our users for Blerp felt real when we went to TwitchCon in 2018. It was exciting to be able to talk to creators who recognized and used Blerp. The feeling of having a user love your product is very motivating. We had already been working on the platform for a few years and it was wild to find people who absolutely loved our product.
Question #3: Tell us about a memorable creator collaboration.
We created a soundboard of one of our favorite creators and sent it to him —https://clips.twitch.tv/FrigidSavageOryxPeteZarollTie-z1IRXTzEh3QRzrZw — It is memorable because it is a hint into the creator-driven economy we are trying to build to help creators extract extra value from their sound content.
Question #4: How do you envision digital communities and connections evolving in the next few years?
I see digital communities becoming more interactive. We see it with the gaming community in livestreams and voice chats. I see a future where we are immersed in interactive content especially as more platforms continue to adopt live interaction. I see Blerp as a key tool to enable that interaction especially as more people want to be a part of the live interactive experience. I see the social communities evolving from the culture of sharing everything public to transforming to close chat communities where we are all communicating directly with people. My thought is that we all have a human need to build closer relationships and more closed communities leave a better environment to do that.
Question #5: What is a soundbite you find yourself sharing a lot nowadays?
In real life I love using the sound of the Discord ringtone — https://blerp.com/soundbites/5d01443d531c0d000622632a — I’ve been using it to get out of meetings.
Through messaging I enjoy sharing —https://blerp.com/soundbites/5b237fbafca7167a35619c5e — to make my jokes funnier.
Question #6: How can creators or users get in touch with you to learn more or start using Blerp?
Creators and users can join our discord — https://blerp.com/contact — and ask direct questions within the channels setup on the server!
If you are an online creator in the gaming space we would love for you to check out our app for live streamers — https://blerp.com/soundEmotes
If you are interested in bringing sound effects into your life please check out our site — https://blerp.com
Thanks for the chat Aaron! Audio expressions enhance every interaction and Blerp makes it seamless to discover, create, and share sound bites. It is energizing to see your focus on helping creators find new ways to innovate with audio and interact with fans. Keep raising the bar.
Btw, I like this clip of Elon Musk and this iconic theme song, of course.
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This is awesome. Just signed up for Blerp.