We are thrilled to have Geoffrey Abraham join us today. As the co-founder and CEO of Spoken, a website that streamlines the consumer shopping experience by finding the lowest prices for furniture items sold across multiple major online retailers, he has a wealth of experience in the industry.
Geoff and his business partner, Dane Hurtubise, came up with the idea for Spoken when Dane was assembling a coffee table from Urban Outfitters and realized it was missing a part. He searched for the piece online and found it at Home Depot for half the price. This led to conversations with Geoff about the reasons for the price discrepancy and the potential for a business solution.
The result was Spoken, which is backed by startup accelerator Y Combinator and has reached over 100,000 monthly users. The company’s goal is to give shoppers information about identical products available from different brands at different price points, and to help navigate the confusing marketplace of online furniture shopping.
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In the past year, what is the greatest business achievement you’d like to celebrate with your team? Please share the details of that success.
Geoffrey Abraham: When we started this, we never thought we’d have millions of people coming to our site. Now that we’ve tasted our user’s excitement for a better way to discover and buy furniture, there is no going back. We are building what we know to be possible as fast as we can.
What advice do you wish you received when you started your business journey and what do you intend on improving in the next quarter?
Geoffrey Abraham: Our first project, which died, made a lot of sense intellectually, but no one cared, emotionally. I wish someone would have told me to be on the lookout for deep emotional responses to a project. It’s easy to convince for me to convince myself why a project should work.
Seeing people respond in a big way to a project is an entirely different experience. The project has continued to be so exciting because we seem to have struck a common nerve. This gives us confidence and energy to continue.
Online business keeps on surging higher than ever, B2B, B2C, online shopping, virtual meetings, remote work, Zoom medical consultations, what are your expectations for the year to come and how are you capitalizing on the tidal wave?
Geoffrey Abraham: Our business is premised on digitally native shopping. Older generations won’t consider buying unless they can touch and feel their furniture. Yet this limits their ability to discover new furniture because they have to go to the store, and can only see the inventory that store has available. Yet the universe of furniture is vast. Not only do we make it simple to understand, but we also meet the next generation of shoppers where they are at — on their computer.
This is a megatrend that we think will not reverse. There may be hybrid models of online/offline that also succeed. Yet when beginning a search — at that first moment of ideation — we think you want to be able to quickly and easily see all of your options. Not just what they are, but also where you can buy them.
Business is all about overcoming obstacles and creating opportunities for growth. What do you see as THE real challenge right now?
Geoffrey Abraham: We spent a long time working out the puzzle of our space. Why, exactly, is online shopping for furniture so terrible? We knew that many furniture companies white-labeled the same exact items, and that consumers only had a sneaking suspicion. We knew they couldn’t shop for like items in one place.
Yet this rabbit hole took us so much deeper — not only into how the furniture industry operates today, but also how people discover and buy items online. We see our current challenge as encoding all of these learnings into one product, and making sure that we’re building a product that our users are excited about.
We’re still learning new things daily, but translating these learnings into a real, working product is another challenge entirely. It is said that ideas are a dime a dozen, and execution is everything. We’re taking this to heart, and building as fast as we can.
In your experience, what tends to be the most underestimated part of running a company? Can you share an example?
Geoffrey Abraham: Dane and I are lucky to have known one another for 18 years. Dane officiated my Burning Man wedding. Before we ever conceived of building a business together, we lived a lot of life together, joining one another in attempting outrageous goals and on many adventures.
I dare say that our relationship is our greatest asset in business. We compliment one another, balance one another out, push one another to dream bigger and work harder, and simply love solving puzzles and building together. Our wins are shared, and so are our losses. I’ve started and ran a company solo before. It was brutal. I’ve also seen partnerships that have seemed unbalanced or had other difficult dynamics.
It’s hard for me to imagine excelling in such conditions. I think the relationships at the core of the company can be overlooked. We work hard at maintaining the health and sanity that we have. We have Founder Dates, just like I have Partner Dates with my wife. We continue to invest in our relationship. The resulting collective strength seems to be the source of everything we have built to date.
On a lighter note, if you had the ability to pick any business superpower, what would it be and how would you put it into practice?
Geoffrey Abraham: I would want telepathy. Specifically, to know in real time what all of my users were thinking and feeling and synthesize this into a clear and precise story about what to do next.
What does “success” in the year to come mean to you? It could be on a personal or business level, please share your vision.
Geoffrey Abraham: Being a founder is wild, because my identity is so closely tied to this endeavor with Dane. All of my closest friends and family are invested financially or emotionally in the outcome of Spoken.
In the meantime, what we are doing is fundamentally uncertain and ambiguous. Success with Spoken — millions more users becoming accustomed to using Spoken in a regular and committed way — would instill in me a pride I can only dream of. It would be everything.
Jed Morley, VIP Contributor to ValiantCEO and the host of this interview would like to thank Geoffrey Abraham for taking the time to do this interview and share his knowledge and experience with our readers.
If you would like to get in touch with Geoffrey Abraham or his company, you can do it through his – Linkedin Page
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