The Journey to Talkwell

Hey everyone!

In this inaugural post, I'm excited to share Talkwell's origin story. It's a tale of unexpected product evolution, starting as a platform to help strangers connect constructively online and eventually becoming a tool to help couples and families strengthen their relationships. This journey, woven with peaks and valleys, threads of continuity, and unexpected turns, showcases how listening to your gut and your users can guide a product and company down surprising new paths and opportunities.

Radical

The seeds of Talkwell were planted in the summer of 2018 with an iOS application I built called Radical. In the wake of the 2016 election, I felt there were no constructive forums to constructively debate and discuss ideas online and set out to build a place on the internet to do that. The concept was that strangers could connect over shared topics of interest, have a live-audio conversation, and then review each other like the rider-passenger passenger dynamic on Uber. The reviews focused how pleasant and engaging their conversation partner was as opposed to what was discussed in the spirit of encouraging civil discourse and mutual understanding, even when opinions differed.

I nurtured this project through my graduate program in Journalism and Computer Science at Columbia University, and after graduation, to improve accessibility, I expanded the platform into a web application.

User Experiences and Growth

As Radical's user base grew, I had the opportunity to discuss everything from cryptozoology with a middle schooler from Colorado to the philosophy of good and evil with a prison guard from Kentucky. I even got to brainstorm ideas to bring intimacy back to a truck driver from Alabama's marriage. I remember asking the truck driver why he wanted to talk with a total stranger about this and he laughed and said that there was no way he could talk to his friends about it. For him, Radical was an "anonymous community therapy session" where he could express a more sentimental side.

Evolving Features

As the platform grew I built out features for users to schedule and share their conversations, receive tips, see each other over video, and get insights on how they were communicating.

Some of my favorite conversations shared were between two social psychologists riffing on the promise and peril of using deep learning for their research and two entrepreneurs on how they decided to donate a portion of their company's profits to help solve climate change problems.

While I loved my users and the conversations they were having, I realized Radical had become a sort of Frankenstein product blurring the lines between podcast tooling, conversational insights, and a conversation match-maker. Also, the business model wasn't clear. However, the potential of conversational insights captured my attention.

Columbia Venture Competition

In the spring of 2022, I participated in the Columbia Venture Competition's inaugural "Innovation Challenge in Journalism, Media, and Technology" track and was invited as a finalist to be a part of an entrepreneurial fellowship led by Justin Hendrix at the Brown Institute for Media Innovation that summer.

I saw the fellowship as an opportunity to explore business applications for conversational insights. Initially, I considered focusing on conversations between life partners and family members. However, my exploratory user research throughout the fellowship revealed an unexpected insight: poor workplace conversations were costing companies significant time and money.

That's it for this post. Tune in for the next entry of the "Journey to Talkwell" to hear more about the entrepreneurial fellowship and see how the story unfolds.