Bryan Caplovitz

And what is speakermatch.com?

Speakermatch is a marketplace for Speakers and event organizers and I cater primarily to the emerging speaker market

What is the emerging speaker market?

Great question So emerging speakers I define as people that are not speaking full-time Earning a full-time living as a speaker and or are not learning it earning at least five thousand dollars per speech

What's the high end of what someone earns on your plant like people are making money

Yeah, and the speaker match platform. I have people that are earning everything from nothing in which case They're generally using speaking as a marketing platform for their business or their personal brand All the way up to the top level Keynote speakers that are making 10,000 plus for a speech

Super cool. So is it you know national like the speak matching people to speakers everywhere? What are the big markets?

Yeah, yeah United States. I cater to the emerging hot to the market in the United States

Think conference big I have to think it's conference towns Austin Nashville Vegas, New York You know your standard places or a little bit everything.

So emerging speakers Work primarily those smaller audiences. So big conferences do use a lot of emerging speakers That's typically for things like breakout sessions. So those are very small audiences It also includes things like Rotary Clubs chambers of commerce

Educational institutions church groups youth groups things like that

got into the business kind of by accident. I was looking for places to speak as a I was a Technical consultant business technology consultant and I spoke on things like database development I Had no idea that there was this world of Speaking out there with motivational speakers and other informational speakers I kind of fell into that when I realized that there were not there was not an easy place for me to find opportunities that might work for me and I started calling around to event organizers people that were having meetings coming up places like chambers of commerce and Rotary Clubs and I found that a lot of those people were looking for speakers, but not necessarily on database development They wanted somebody to speak, you know Motivational speaker a sales speaker a customer service speaker and I realized that there were speakers who didn't know where to find the opportunities And on the other side there were event organizers that didn't know where to find speakers like me

Are there any trends that you're seeing in the kind of speakers people looking for topics that they're looking to have speakers on?

It's a good question. So Are people looking for?

Is there a trend to what people are looking for right now?

They're in general event organizers want a speaker who is going to be a good fit for their audience They want somebody that is going to be entertaining Somebody that's not going to hold on to the lectern while they're delivering prepared notes or reading from PowerPoint slides They're looking for an entertainer the topical type of speaker

Varies the the demand for different topics varies so internet security may be really hot AI may be really hot At different times, you know, whatever's in the news tends to be what people are looking for if there is a topical type of thing, but in general motivation is at the very top and there are Aspects to what a speaker has in there and their talk that may make them more interesting to different event organizers

You're in a

pure IRL difficult to disrupt by AI Business real people looking for real people to talk in front of real people Using AI and all in your your particular business

We're using AI a lot in our business AI does not really work So well when it comes to a speaker delivering a message to an audience people want to see a real speaker but AI on the back end so speaker matches like I said a

A platform for the speakers and the event organizers. It's a marketplace and that engine is all What's very automated? So a lot of AI is used in the tools that we use to deliver those services

One thing that is

has really changed lately with AI is the types of Listings that we're able to find and the number the sheer number of listings that we're able to really go through and Get good Media information for speakers, so I don't want speakers to waste their time looking for opportunity looking at Opportunities that aren't a good fit for them and event organizers don't want to waste their time looking for speakers that aren't a good fit on that side AI can really help to clarify for each side if If the other one is worth looking further into

It's like I Feel like AI has actually been damaging in things like The dating side of matching or the finding a job side of matching in a lot of ways, but this is a very Specific use case that it seems like this is a very valuable tool to use here.

I think it's fantastic We're able to go through hundreds of listings in Minutes now that would have taken our staff a month to go through

So what like do you like these tools they're allowing you to be more productive they're helping your business

Yes, very much, so

Is there like what has you excited about you know? I'm asking two sides of this question What has you excited about these tools the AI all of these new tech pieces that are coming out right now?

It makes it easier AI makes it easier for me as a business owner to Perform the services that I need to perform deliver the services that I need to perform with a much a Significantly reduced staff so that's the kind of thing that people are scared about these days is losing their jobs to AI and I Understand that but it does make it make it unnecessary for a lot of the positions that I had before

at my at the biggest I think I had maybe six employees and so it's not a huge impact For my particular business and that type of thing doesn't keep me up at night I was typically dealing with students a lot of students, but

In my particular business no, it's not keeping me up at night. It excites me more than anything the possibilities for Growth are really phenomenal

What is it anything keeping you up at night?

What's keeping me up at night?

The speaking market has changed a lot since COVID so before COVID We had a lot more Personal interaction with event organizers, so it was phone calls it was one-on-one connections at events and the people that were in those roles tended to Be people that had been in those roles sometimes for decades The pandemic kind of shut everything down for the speaking industry for live events and a lot of the old-timers Are gone and so right now I'm dealing with people that are in Many cases I'd say most cases Freshly out of college and they have no idea what they're doing They're learning right now What's involved in hiring speakers and trying to figure it out and they don't like to be on the phone They don't like to meet in person

They don't even really like a zoom call so much they like to text and use the chat service that we have so what keeps me up at night is trying to figure out how to reach those people in meaningful ways and That's all new for us

for somebody that's not using AI tools? AI in addition to the back-end services That I that I use that are unique to my business. I think AI tools for copywriting It are fantastic. I think it's a great use for AI tools even if it's just editing the content that you put together and Making it more personalized Making it more concise making it more

Just what people are looking for so it AI is great in in helping me to craft my messaging

Not worried about AI slot presentations like you know a lot more people can you know write a quick speech that might be terrible

I think that Audiences will see through AI slot presentations very quickly they want a personal communication a personal connection with the speaker and I don't think that slop is going to work well for a speaker and Preparing their content it may be a really good tool for them to use and Reviewing their content and maybe honing things there's a lot that's involved in crafting a speech and one of the things that we've always done speakers have always done is Practice their speech in front of other people get feedback from others see if their laugh lines are Landing rights or if there's enough laugh lines that kind of thing AI is great to kind of helping a speaker Go through at least a few drafts of their speech before they're delivering it in person