Episode 414: From China to SparkVox

Corey KupferSean Weisbrot is the founder of SparkVox, which turns content your executive team already makes, call recordings and the like, into LinkedIn posts in their voice. He is also the host of We Live to Build, a podcast that has 235K subscribers and 320 plus interviews with seven to nine figure brand owners.

He's created over a hundred million in value to his network, generated over fifteen million in revenue for his businesses, and raised over eight million dollars for his businesses and clients. Angel invested in nine companies, two exits, lived in China for ten years. He's fluent in Mandarin, Vietnam for five years, Portugal now for four years, and today he's focused on growing his newest business, SparkVox, which turns podcast recordings and business calls into LinkedIn content without losing your voice or sounding like AI.

Welcome to the DealQuest Podcast, a dealmaking podcast where we get into m&a deals, strategic deals, and capital raising of every kind. Sean, welcome to the podcast.

Sean WeisbrotThank you for having me.

Corey KupferSo listen, I'm excited. Interesting background, living around various places in the world, raising capital for your own and other folks. Really interested in this newer venture and project and product you have. Capital raising is a big theme on this show, so this is as much a capital raising podcast as an m&a podcast, and your background covers both.

But before we get into any of that, I wanna take you back to when you were a little kid growing up, maybe eight, ten, twelve years old. What did you wanna be? Because I'm assuming maybe a serial tech founder and an international business person might not have been it when you were a kid, but you tell me.

Sean WeisbrotI had no desire to be an entrepreneur until I was living in China. And it was a few years into living in China that I realized. But when I was a kid, my dad is a dentist. He had his own practice when I was a kid. I grew up watching him and realizing that being an entrepreneur maybe wasn't such a great thing, because I could see his struggles. I also saw my brother, who was a few years older than me. Constantly trying to sell things on eBay. He was trying to find ways to make money. He never made anything really big, but he was always trying. And I appreciated that, even though I didn't really understand it. So I didn't really have anyone around me that was a good role model for entrepreneurship, unfortunately. So I didn't know what I wanted to do.

Corey KupferSo you were just, it was just maybe not that. That's funny. So what had you go to China originally?

Sean WeisbrotI kind of saw in my last year of university, this was 2007, 2008, I could see that something was happening. I didn't really quite understand it, but I felt like it was a bad idea to stick around. But I knew as early as being in high school that I really wanted to explore the world.

And I also saw my brother getting into corporate America and realizing that that didn't look like a really good idea. So I just knew that leaving the US was probably gonna be the best option for me. But I knew that I needed to get a degree from an American university to have a chance at finding work overseas. So once I got my degree in psychology, I went to China. I actually wanted to go to Japan. And I found out about the government-run English teaching program too late to be able to apply.

So instead of waiting another year to apply, I said, screw it, I'll just go to China because it's next to Japan. Maybe after a year in China, I'll be able to get my way over to Japan. And I ended up staying in China for 10 years. So it was also a lot of curiosity because China is very different from the US. Looking back, maybe there was also a sense of, well, if I can figure out how the Chinese people live, maybe I can find a way to make money from the differences between Americans and Chinese. It was all very vague. I was 21. So I didn't know who I was. I just knew what I didn't want.

Corey KupferWow. That's phenomenal. What was your first deal of any type? It could have been early in your career or maybe there was something when you were younger, anything you would consider a deal. I ask every guest this because after 35 years of m&a transactions and deal structuring, I've found the first deal usually tells you the most about somebody.

Sean WeisbrotWell, the most professional thing I would call a deal was fundraising 150,000 for a pre-seed equity round in 2016 for an American founder living in China. The investor I found was Chinese, and he couldn't speak any English. The founder couldn't speak any Chinese, and because I'm fluent in Mandarin, I was able to connect the two and I was a part of the process from start to finish. It was two months of karaoke and alcohol and tea and lunch and dinner and just spending a lot of time translating and all that.

And then it turned into this fundraise and that was seventy five hundred dollars to me. And that was amazing because previously I was only making like a thousand, two thousand a month, right? Because I was young in China, salaries are very low and in general people don't make that much money. So $7,500 was a lot of money to me in that moment. I was like 25, something like that, 26. So that's my first real professional deal, I'd say.

Corey KupferLove it. Now, had you studied Mandarin before you went to China or did you learn the language there?

Sean WeisbrotI learned speaking to people on the street. I arrived in 2008. And at the time smartphones didn't really exist yet. And so you literally had to buy a notebook and a pen and just walk around the street. And I would just talk to the food vendors. I talked to anybody that would let me talk to them. And if I didn't understand anything they said, which is like everything, I would hand them my notebook and my pen and I would have them write down what they said.

And then I would go home and I would somehow try to translate the characters they wrote to something that means something to me. And then I figured out what they said. And then I would figure out, is this an adjective, a verb, a noun, what's the use case? And then I would go outside and I would use it. And so within the first six months, I was able to recognize about six hundred characters. And I started becoming slightly conversational by that time. Because living in Wuhan, nobody spoke English. So you either learn or you don't.

Most of my friends couldn't speak any Chinese. My expat friends couldn't speak Chinese. My Chinese friends couldn't really speak English. So if I wanted to know the locals, I had no choice but to learn. If I wanted to feed myself, I had no choice but to learn. Because you go to a street food vendor or you go to a restaurant, you go to the fanciest hotel in the city, it doesn't matter, no one spoke English. So you have no choice. You have to learn, or you have to find someone that'll translate for you.

And I learned really early on trying to negotiate my working contract and housing contract and all those things with my first company that I worked for, that I relied on my coworkers who were able to speak English. And they're one of millions that could speak English in this city. And I learned that I couldn't trust them to speak for me because they didn't have my best interest at heart. They were just doing something I asked them to do. And I realized that they weren't translating what I wanted them to translate.

Sean WeisbrotBy the time I was good enough to understand. And so then I said, I have to do this for myself.

Corey KupferWow. That's amazing. One of the things, I don't look back and regret much in life. I'm a very positive person and I've had great experiences. But when I went to school, even Spanish in school was taught as Castilian Spanish, from Spain, formal, and all the Puerto Ricans and Dominicans that I grew up with in New York didn't speak anything that was like that. And I sort of got turned off on to it.

I've traveled so many places in the world and the ability to immerse in culture, even as a visitor, and understand a culture is so much better for the people who speak the language. So I'm a little jealous of the fact that you did that. Language shows up in m&a negotiation more than people expect, especially on cross-border company acquisitions where both sides think they've agreed to the same thing.

Talk to me a little bit, because it's very interesting, one of the things that's very interesting in deals, and in any kind of business but certainly in deals, is the cultural differences. And you mentioned on this first small capital raise that you did, you mentioned karaoke and drinking. Talk to me a little bit about the differences in deal making and business in China versus let's say the US.

Sean WeisbrotSo to be fair, the majority of my experience is in China. So my ability to compare is based on my understanding of American culture before I had it. My first job was working for my dad in the US when I was younger. So my first proper job was outside of the US. My first job outside of university was outside of the US. And I've only ever worked outside the US as an adult. I've been outside the US for almost 20 years now. So I may be a little bit limited in that knowledge, but I'll do my best. So from what I understand, with Americans, it's kind of like, hey, I don't really know you very well. Let's shake hands and do business. Let's get down to business. In China, they want to know you as a person before they're willing to do business with you. You might introduce me to a bunch of people that might be interested in my software after we've done this call because you feel like you know me a little bit now. But if there's a Chinese person that could potentially gatekeep for a big deal from me, they won't let me near that deal until they know me well enough to know that I'm not gonna screw them or make them look bad. So we call it losing face. If they think there's any chance that I could do anything or say anything that will make them lose face, they will not wanna help me. They want to put the effort in to know you as a person. And sometimes that's months and months and months of spending time together before they're willing to do any business with you. And at first it was frustrating because I was going there with an American mindset of, why can't we do something faster? Time is money. Let's be efficient about this. And after a few years being there, I came around to the idea that actually we should know people before we put our neck on the lines to help them. Not to say that they're not worth helping.

But things could go wrong and you only have so much capital if you burn a bridge because you introduced the wrong person. And this actually happened to me when I was fundraising for other people, which we could talk about later. So spending a lot of time with you is really important. There's some things that are a little bit more nuanced, like business cards. I left China nine years ago, so I don't know exactly, I don't think this thing has really changed, but business cards were massive in China.

Everybody had a business card for any reason and they carried them with them all the time and they were happy to give everybody their business card. And there's a certain way that they will give the card and a certain way that they'll receive the card. And so they will use both hands. And something that I learned was, again from my US perspective, what I understood was if someone gives you a card, you can take it with one hand, it's no big deal. But if you take a card from a Chinese person with one hand, it is so disrespectful because they think you don't care.

If you receive it with grace with both hands, you pinch it and you look at it and you hold it in your hands while you continue to talk to them, they're so happy because they think you're engaged, they think you care, they think you're interested. But in the US you take the card and you put it in your pocket. If you do that in China, there's no deal. You may not even have a chance to become their friend. It's done.

Sean WeisbrotBecause they are just so disrespected. You've made them lose face and you don't even realise you've done it.

Corey KupferYou know, it's so interesting. I told this story before, but it's been a while. So we had a similar experience. Back in, let's see, it was actually the late eighties, we were doing a deal, we represented a US company that was selling to a Japanese company. In the Japanese culture, there's some similarities with that. And we actually had a cultural consultant back then. Keep in mind, we're talking about the eighties, pre internet. You couldn't just Google such, or certainly ask chat or somebody about customs. We literally had a consultant that was hired.

And one of the things they told us is listen, you receive the card with both hands, you don't stick it in your pocket, you read it, you acknowledge it, you put it down on the table in front of you, that whole thing. And it was interesting because the cultural consultant was great. All throughout the entire deal, there was no faux pas, everything was good. And then we finally get to the signing table. These are the times where people would be in person in a conference room and all the documents would be printed and lined up and manually signed.

And we're at the signing, everything's gone well. We haven't screwed anything up. And next thing we know, there's a commotion in Japanese and we're like, what's going on? And by the way, at this point I'm a first and second year associate, so I'm not in charge of anything. I'm just sitting there running copies and proofreading stuff. And it turns out that the consultant had forgotten to tell us that we needed to get a ceremonial pen, nice pens, and that the custom was that they would sign the agreement with this pen and never use it again. It would be a memento of the deal. We had regular pens.

Corey KupferAnd it was a huge deal. And we literally, this is ancient history, we literally had to send somebody out at that time to, fortunately not too far from the office, there was a store that sold nice Cross pens. This is before Montblanc got big and all this other stuff. And we had to go buy pens and the whole deal was held up until we brought the pens back, until we presented them, until we apologized for the failure to recognize that, and then the deal got closed. So the business card thing and the pen thing remind me of exactly what you're talking about. Even in recent m&a transactions I've worked on, the cultural prep matters as much as the documents, and no amount of m&a strategy saves you at the signing table if the m&a deal structure is right but the custom is wrong.

Sean WeisbrotYeah, I imagine you probably brought some sake or you brought some sort of Western wine when you met them the first time, right?

Corey KupferWell, all of that. You know, all of that. And listen, there've been books and now of course there's all kinds of things you can search on the internet about dealing with the cultural differences. But it's interesting you say that. I think it's funny because you're right. In the US there's much quicker to get down to the business, much quicker to make a referral.

But I still think ultimately the best business deals and things are built on relationship. It's just that a lot of times the relationship is built after. It's not required to be done first. Hopefully the ones that work, you build it afterwards. In my own m&a experience, the best m&a work still comes out of relationships rather than process.

So you mentioned that you've raised some money for other companies. You also had a prior venture, and you raised some of your own money. Talk to me a little bit about that journey. Every entrepreneur that I know, I think in the pre-call I was quickly talking to you about a friend of mine who's been on this capital raise journey and has been on the verge of running out of money several times and had to do a restructuring. And it's almost sort of part of that capital raising entrepreneurial journey when you're playing a big game. Talk to me about your journey a little bit.

Sean WeisbrotSo I'm gonna preface this with, I've interviewed 320 founders, and I started my podcast when I was running that software company that I had raised money for. And I ended up interviewing a lot of them that had bootstrapped to profit. And what I found overwhelmingly was that the people who had bootstrapped to profit were very happy with their lives, and the ones who fundraised were miserable with their lives. And I was miserable from my experience as I was interviewing these people, going, I think this is the wrong path for me. Maybe I should have a bootstrap business. So the preface is if you're gonna raise for your business or if you're raising for your business, just don't forget your customer as you're doing it. Because oftentimes you're so busy raising that you forget to grow your revenue. And this has impacted some of my clients with their fundraising journeys. So we can go into that a little bit. But to go back to after that first raise, it was in the blockchain space and that was an equity deal. And the guy had hired me to do industry analysis and then eventually wanted me to create a system to help other blockchain companies launch a token and a blockchain. And I found out that he screwed me out of extra commission I should have been getting from follow-on investments from this investor, which really pissed me off. And I just walked away. And instead of giving him the thing he was paying me to build, I took that as what he should have paid me in commission.

And I turned that into a $15 million consulting business, which was my second business that I did. So some of that money was generated from the fundraising for other clients. And because I had started to understand the blockchain space, because I was living in China, because I could talk about blockchain in Chinese and in English, I was this massive force that very few people could compete with.

To get the attention of the Chinese and the West. So I ended up helping a number of Chinese companies and Western companies raise from the other side. So I helped Chinese blockchain companies raise pre-ICO sales for their venture from Western investors, and I helped Western companies to raise money from Chinese investors. And you're gonna love how I did it. So a Chinese friend of mine who could speak a very little amount of English.

He had a little business and all of the profit from his business he was buying Bitcoin with. And when he found out that I had done a little bit of work in this space already, he wanted to introduce me to a group of his friends who also were unable to speak English. They were also businessmen. They were also interested in blockchain. They also were in their 20s and 30s. Some of them had already made tens of millions of dollars in their 20s and 30s. And they would get together for these dinners.

And the dinners were a thousand dollars US per person. This is inside China, a thousand a person. And one person would pay for everyone else's meals for that night. You'd have like 10, 15 people at a dinner. And they'd get together, they'd talk about the newest projects coming up, and they would show off their cars and we'd go to KTV, karaoke, and have massages and you name it. We had fun. And one person would pay for the whole night. Luckily for me, they're like, yeah, he's the foreigner, he doesn't have to pay for this stuff.

Sean WeisbrotBecause I was broke. I couldn't afford to pay that forever. I would be in debt after one dinner. I'd be bankrupt after one dinner. Because I was still so early, because that business hadn't really blown up. So knowing this guy and meeting these people was something that helped the consulting business to launch. And so the very first time I went to one of their dinners, I had already picked up my first client who wanted to raise for their ICO. And so I went to the dinner. I was there with them for a few hours. By the end of the dinner, I collected $100,000 for that client from them. Because here's this really interesting guy. He's a foreigner. He understands blockchain. He understands us. He's fun. He's easy to chat with. He understands our culture, our language. And I leveraged that to raise money from them. And so I went to a few more of these dinners. And one of the guys ran a blockchain media outlet in China.

He had hundreds of thousands of people reading his articles and following what he talked about. And a lot of what they did was review upcoming blockchain projects. And so I said to him at one of the dinners, I go, look, I want to make you an offer. I get five percent commission for all the money I raise.

If you're willing to review these projects that I'm working with and you're willing to promote them and your audience is willing to invest in them, I will share with you 50-50 what we collect.

That one offer, and I spent some time with him, I got to know him before he agreed to do it. In the six month period that we worked together on this, we raised five and a half million dollars from his audience.

Sean WeisbrotIt's a huge, huge opportunity. And I saw that opportunity because I understood, when I was younger, I was a leader of a community. And then my first business, I was running an event company in China that had 700 people attending the events. And all of the opportunities I got around the government and the media, and I know we didn't really talk about this, but all of those things that I did with the Chinese government told me that people want to know you when you're in charge of something, when you're the founder of something. And so I knew the most important person in that entire group was this guy because he was the founder of something. And so hundreds of thousands of people knew him and trusted him. Even if they didn't know him and couldn't shake his hand, they knew of him and trusted his word. And so I knew that leveraging a relationship with him would be the most important thing I did. And I was right. So when you're trying to raise money for your company, if you are visible on LinkedIn, if you are visible on social media, if you have created something that people want to know about, and having a podcast is an amazing way to open doors.

I've literally talked to billionaires. I should have no right talking to these people. I've talked to people that are doing a hundred million dollars a year from their business, or they've sold their business for hundreds of millions of dollars. I don't deserve to be talking to those people based on what I've done.

Sean WeisbrotBut because I have a podcast, they love to talk to me. And they're super friendly, super valuable advice.

Corey KupferJust to pause and make a point on that, and then we'll get back to the journey. People say to me all the time, Corey, your podcast has become pretty popular. Okay, great. They assume that business from listeners is the biggest value of the podcast. And what they don't understand, yeah, do we get some of that? Sure. But what they don't understand is there are two things that are even bigger.

First of all, the ability to stay top of mind at scale. Because that was always, when I moved from being small where I'd be able to stay in contact with all my referral sources and connections and clients, once you get to any scale, you don't even need a lot of scale for that to become impossible to do. And then I had this gap of frankly a decade where I was frustrated. I'm like, how do I stay top of mind at scale? It's pre internet. You couldn't really do it. And then I did the book, the podcast, I understood authority marketing.

So you have that. But then the other thing, which is I think the biggest value of a podcast, is what you mentioned. I get to meet people and have guests on who, if I was trying to get in to see them, or to pitch myself, or even just to build a relationship or to try to help them in some way, there's so many gatekeepers and things like that. But if they want to get exposure for their business, their product, their new book, or they just love talking about what they're doing, to get on a podcast, then it's an opportunity to meet great people and build relationships with them.

People ask me all the time how to be a guest on a podcast, or how to get on a podcast as a guest, and the honest answer is that it starts with being findable. Every m&a podcast guest I've had on this show came to me through something they'd already made visible.

I just wanted to put a highlight on that point because most people that don't understand the podcast don't understand that the guest access and relationship building, if you do it right, especially for somebody who's not selling thirty nine dollar online products, who's building relationships for high ticket kinds of things, is the biggest thing, and people don't understand that about podcasts. So I'm glad you mentioned that.

Sean WeisbrotYeah, so I first started my podcast when I had my tech company. And the goal was to build a waiting list for the software. So my guests were my ICP for the software. And I built a waiting list of 250 companies that had 5,000 seats waiting to test out my product. And it was amazing. And then when that company unfortunately had to shut down, I lost my purpose for the podcast, but I kept going anyways. And I'm glad that I did because it's been really valuable. Because in the building of this new software, I get people that, some of them are running five, 10, 15, 20, 50 million dollar a year software companies. So I can get their advice for free. During the podcast, I can get their advice. And after the podcast, I can keep getting their advice. And some of them want to use my product. So some of my guests, they're gonna use my product. They're gonna be my first clients. And it's because I've started to build a relationship with them.

Some of the clients that I've worked with to help fundraise, they're guests from the podcast. Some of the investors I introduced them to, I interviewed on the podcast.

Corey KupferYes. So before, we're gonna get to what you're doing now and I want you to definitely talk about this venture and the product. But before we go there, on the last company, I know you raised some of your own capital and you had a journey around that, and we sort of alluded to it. Give us a little bit more about that journey. And you sort of mentioned the bootstrapping versus capital raising conversation.

On a business acquisition podcast you'd expect every story to be about buying companies, but capital raising journeys teach just as much. This is where the capital raising side meets the equity m&a side, and the deal value you think you're protecting early on is not always the deal value you end up with. So give us a little more color around that because I think it'll be valuable to the audience, and then we'll get to talk about what you're doing now.

Sean WeisbrotDo you want me to focus on the capital raising part or is there a larger context you want me to provide?

Corey KupferYeah, I mean, when we spoke previously you talked about that you did raise some money, and then you ran into some challenges that you were willing to share.

Sean WeisbrotOkay. Yeah, sure. So I originally thought I would bootstrap the business because I had made a lot of money from the consulting and the fundraising. So I thought I definitely have enough money here that I can start my own tech company and surely that's gonna 100x my stack. That was the thesis. Very, very wrong, which is one of the reasons why I suggest people be very careful about fundraising for a business, because you're more likely to succeed now that AI has dropped the cost of launching to basically zero.

With that said, my last business, I had fundraised. So the idea was I've made enough money that surely I can skip the pre-seed, I can skip the family and friends, I can maybe skip the seed round, and I can keep a massive amount of the equity for myself until the Series A when we've got users and revenue and we've proven ourselves. And that was the thesis. Well, because I had never done it before, I didn't know what I didn't know.

It cost me six hundred fifty thousand dollars of my own money. I originally only planned to do 125. So it cost me 650,000 before I raised my first money from an outside investor. So that was like three and a half years of suffering and struggling, and a pivot because of COVID. But it was a good pivot. Because before the pivot, investors didn't care. After the pivot, investors were very interested.

Sean WeisbrotAnd so I had raised a million dollars. So I put 650 of my own and then I raised a million for a seed round. And one of the investors was a previous client of mine in the blockchain space. He's from India. And he actually flew me to India along with a few of my friends who provided other services to him that I connected them to, which was pretty cool. We went to India for a week together. And then two of his friends also came in to invest.

So they each came in for about a hundred thousand. No, he came in for a hundred and then his friends each did fifty thousand. And then another investor of mine was this blockchain VC, British guy from a micro VC, British guy living in Switzerland. I had gone to a blockchain conference in Malta in 2018 with a few people from my team.

And I had been chatting with him online. I flew from Malta to Switzerland. I spent the night there. Next morning I met him in person. And then I went on to Paris and saw friends and went back to Asia. A year and a half after I met him in person, he invested. He invested 50,000, but then he went and did an extra 100,000 later on. And then the last investor was a friend of mine who I met from the group in China who lived in Vietnam. And he's one of the reasons why I moved to Vietnam and lived there for a number of years, although I also lived there because my wife is Vietnamese. That's a much more complicated story.

So he's the one that screwed me. He said, I'll come in for half a million, and then he only gave me a hundred thousand. And he promised, he swore up and down for a year and a half that the rest of the money was coming. The other investors sent me the USDT immediately. They all sent me USDT.

Sean WeisbrotHe did a wire transfer. He was also heavy into crypto, but he sent me 100K. We started budgeting, ramping up. We already had our plan to hire more people. We were trying to move forward. That money, that million, was meant to get us over the hump to get us live, to get first users, to get feedback, and to get to revenue so that we would raise before we ran out of money. But that $400,000 gap between what he promised and what he gave was a massive part of why we failed.

Because I tried to get other investors. The guy who did the extra hundred thousand, I hit him up twice. I said, look, we're in dire straits. I'm trying to pay salaries. I'm trying to keep going. And he got his LPs to approve an extra 50K and then another extra 50K. Because to my knowledge, the other investor who I had known for six years had promised to find the money and give it to us. And yet he didn't.

Sean WeisbrotAnd so I was trying to keep the boat going, to keep the train going. And I tried to find other investors. And what I didn't realize at the time was they heard we're dying, we need money. And so no. Nobody wants to fund a dying ship. Even though we were building something incredible that was going to compete with Slack. In 2020, we were looking to build something that, we knew that the future of work was remote, automated, and intelligent.

And we wanted to build something that competed with Slack that made all of your tools integrated into your chat so you didn't have to leave your chat with your team, because with all of the tools now you have to go between the different applications. It's really bad for your brain to constantly switch context. So we wanted to build everything into your chat. And then we wanted to build AI on top of it so that it could understand all of the data coming in between all of the applications and the conversations with your team.

So that then it could act as a manager and an assistant if you couldn't complete the task on your own or with the help of other people. 2020, this is my vision.

Sean WeisbrotIt would cost a billion dollars to get there. So a million dollars was nothing, but we had no choice. We had to prove ourselves. Because I had never started a tech company. I didn't know anything about it. So I had to prove myself. It was gonna take years. I didn't know OpenAI was gonna come out three years later. So that was our vision, and we weren't able to complete it, unfortunately. So the podcast was a really great way for me to get therapy for the stress.

I had panic attacks. I had anxiety. It was awful for years. And I suffered horrifically over the loss, over having to fire the team, over the money that I had invested. All of it was very painful. And COVID, and I lost my wife, and I gained a bunch of weight. I didn't lose her. We got a divorce. My first wife. Just an awful time, honestly. And that's one of the reasons why I moved to Portugal, to get a new start.

Sean WeisbrotTo mentally get away from the space I was in. COVID put me in a bad place. The business loss put me in a bad place. The divorce put me in a bad place. I think it's fair to say the business died fifty percent because I didn't know what I was doing and the other fifty percent because my investor didn't give me the money that I needed to actually support me.

Corey KupferSo now listen, anybody who's in the entrepreneurial world understands. I remember we had, they've done this in various places, but I remember one particular event. I've been a member of Entrepreneurs Organization since 2008. And it's great to be with a bunch of other entrepreneurs who are true entrepreneurs. You need a million dollars in revenue and above, so you're running a somewhat real company and many of them are a lot larger.

And to hear, when you really get in there with everybody, nobody's got a straight line up. It's never up and to the right consistently. I've watched this across the m&a industry and the broader m&a space for decades, through every kind of deal volume cycle, and I hear versions of it from guests whether we're recording what amounts to a private equity podcast episode or a founder story like yours.

I remember there was an event called The Night of the Living Dead, and it was really, because a lot of times as entrepreneurs we'll share our challenges, but it's always just a preface to the hero story, a preface to the comeback story. So usually it's, yeah, I had a tough time, I was whatever. But this was like, no, we're just gonna, everybody's gonna talk about the toughest times in their lives. And it was actually strangely a combination of disturbing and very comforting because it was one of those key, I'm not alone moments.

Every entrepreneur has been through major stuff. And it's why when people that don't know any better see you have a successful venture, or you eventually fight through and build whatever you've been working on, they say, yeah, you're lucky, you're an overnight success. And then even when you say you don't understand the ten or twenty years or the ups and downs I had, they're like, yeah, whatever. So unless you've been through it.

Corey KupferSo I guess, leading into talking about this current venture and the products and services you provide, let's access it through the point of, okay, so now you've been through this journey, you've had your challenges, whether it's around raising capital, around learning how to build a business, whether it's around personal stuff.

Coming into this business, what did you learn? What did you say, hey, I'm gonna do this differently? And then we can talk about what it does and the service and product you're offering. The best m&a advice I can give anyone coming off a loss like that is to be specific about what you'd do differently, and it's the same m&a approach I take after a deal goes sideways.

Sean WeisbrotSo by spending five and a half years of my life with that team, I learned how to do back-end technology. I learned how to do front-end technology, quality assurance, marketing, sales, product, segregation of duties. I learned how to operate a business, but unfortunately didn't have the opportunity to actually execute on that. And so with AI, because I have that knowledge, I can do all of those roles myself with the AI's help. I don't need a team to do those things.

And the consulting business had a few freelance service providers that, I didn't want to do that thing, so I would just have them do it and I would pay them. But essentially they were their own boss. I like a lean business. And so my goal with this business is to do 10 million a year and not need another.

It's extremely ideal. I don't think it's possible, but the profit margins are high enough that I think it could be doable. If not, I could hire a few key people. That would be really important. Because I don't know how to build an agentic team yet. I've interviewed a bunch of people that are doing it, that are building it for their clients or building it for themselves, and I don't quite understand it just yet. But I think that's an important step in being able to do that. I've learned how to automate, but agents are a step up from that for sure.

I think the knowledge I have around AI and the use of AI for coding, for developing, for design, for marketing, sales, product, for all of that is probably a lot more developed than most of the people I talk to, except for the people that are building agents. So it's extremely helpful. So what I learned was you can move really fast.

Sean WeisbrotBefore AI, I was like, this is something that takes years to do. And now it's like, if it takes you longer than a month to do, you shouldn't do it because it's too long. The industry will be different in that month. You have no choice. You have to push forward. I came across a competitor, they've been building this for 18 months and they haven't launched. I'm like, I built the first version in like two days. I've been tweaking for the last six weeks, eight weeks as I've been talking to people and doing demos and all that, getting customer feedback. So I'm super early with the journey, but I could have never imagined years ago that I would be able to do any of this stuff. And so what AI has done for me is make it so that all of my dreams can come true within minutes of me having them.

Corey KupferAnd tying it into the conversation we had earlier, it's easy to bootstrap for longer. It's less capital intensive. To build technology, and also the number of people you don't need, it affects that conversation as well. When capital is cheap to avoid, the calculus changes for everything, including whether you chase growth through acquisitions or build it yourself, and whether work that used to take an m&a team now takes one person with the right tools.

Sean WeisbrotYeah. When we were building years ago, okay, you need to have a server, and the server, you need to have preparations with the cloud or a non-cloud with multiple servers and load balancing, and you have to know how much you're gonna be able to use. There was so much work around that. And I created the first version of the website on Lovable for free using their free credits.

I moved it to Cursor, which I pay a twenty dollar subscription for. I host on Netlify, which has a serverless architecture, and Supabase, which is a free database, a scalable database system using Postgres. My monthly cost for running the business is like fifty dollars right now.

Sean WeisbrotAnd that's excluding the token costs for running the prompts and the models and all of that stuff. But when someone uses it, I'm getting paid. So it doesn't matter. So the core non-customer input costs are extremely lean. And I know that Netlify is gonna scale with me, Supabase is gonna scale with me. Maybe I'll have to start paying for some things, but it's ten dollars a month, fifteen, it's so inconsequential. Where in the past, we were dealing with HubSpot and it was like a thousand dollars a month for a HubSpot CRM that we never even got to really use. We were just throwing money away. Paid $15,000 to a designer in the last business. And we did two redesigns because when we pivoted, we went from mobile to web. And I wanted to build an admin dashboard for the last business. And it was three months of collaboration among four people to do.

I built the entire dashboard in five minutes.

Sean WeisbrotAnd I already had all of the data sources. AI has made it so that you can do anything you want faster than you can think of the idea. That's what I've learned so far. Ideas are cheap, execution is cheap. Why the hell aren't you doing it? Why aren't you making money?

Corey KupferLove it. All right. So listen, obviously we talked about it a little bit in the bio and you mentioned a little bit, but let's delve into what does the current business do? Who does it serve? Give us a lot more detail about what you're doing now.

Sean WeisbrotSo I got the idea for SparkVox when I was trying to be more visible on LinkedIn going back a few months. And I'd spent a few months before that realizing that people on LinkedIn were generally copying and pasting ideas from ChatGPT into LinkedIn. And so everyone lost their voice. And that to me was unacceptable because I've been a writer my whole life. I've been a linguist my whole life. I read, write and speak multiple languages. So the idea that I would give up my voice to an AI disgusts me.

I said there has to be a better solution. But there's still a problem of nobody wants to write, but they need to be visible on LinkedIn. They have to be able to be visible in order to win those deals, whether it's a customer or an investor or a potential talent that they want to hire. You have to be on LinkedIn. You have to be visible. This is for founders, this is for execs. This is for boards of directors. This is for GTM. This is for HR. It's for everybody in your team. Everybody needs to have a presence on LinkedIn.

And so what I realized through doing demos and talking to people was you should be able to use the content that you're creating from your sales calls, your internal trainings, your podcast appearances, or if you're a business that runs a podcast for building your sales pipeline like I do, you're constantly creating content in the form of a recording, in the form of a transcript. And so instead of sitting down and writing new things, which you don't have the time to do and you don't want to do anyways.

By taking this transcript and using my tool, essentially you're able to do the whole thing. So it takes your transcript, it looks for the most important moments, and then it gets rid of the ones that aren't absolutely really valuable. And through that curation process, it cuts down to only a few really important posts and it turns them into three different themes. So each time you use a transcript, it's three different themes. It's a dynamic system that I developed. And so you have a content strategy for that piece of content, that transcript that you've created.

And so you can then post, and LinkedIn doesn't say, but my research has proven on my own account that one post a day is the best. So if you do an hour transcript, you'll maybe get like eight or nine really great posts from us. So that's like a week-ish of content. So you do a few of those in a month, you have a month's worth of content.

Sean WeisbrotAnd every time you're posting, you're getting an opportunity for the people you want to know about you to find out about you. And every day you're not posting is a day that you're losing out to your competitors for being able to get discovered. And so I built this tool to help businesses become more visible more consistently and do it in your own voice while removing all of the nonsense that makes it sound like an AI created it.

And so I've also created a voice profile so that the more times you use it, the better it gets at knowing who you are and writing in your voice. And it even goes so far as to tell you what it knows about your tone and your turns of phrase and all of the things that make you who you are. And so that's what I've built.

Corey KupferLove it. It sounds amazing. It's interesting because we do a lot of posting online. I'm just thinking about myself. We do a lot of posting on LinkedIn, and I've got a team that helps me with that. And they are taking stuff from our podcast transcripts. Years ago when I published my book, there's a lot of content they pulled out of my negotiating book. And again, it's my content, my language. So I'm not posting some generic thing even before AI made it easier.

Visibility matters whether you're running an m&a firm, doing strategic advisory, or building a product like yours.

Corey KupferSo having a tool that pulls from your material, that keeps your voice, but does automate it, because also, listen, I gotta tell you, my marketing team wants me to, all the time, wants me to do more. I mean, yes, we'll do a post promoting this, more than one post promoting this episode. But when I do something, when I'm at a conference or at an airport, and I do a direct post, that gets the most views, the most engagement, the most of all that stuff. But I'm not the kind of guy who, I like to be present with people, so I'm not the kind of guy who always has my phone out.

So to have something that helps that but that's not some AI generated slop, I definitely see the value to it, no question about it. So kudos.

Sean WeisbrotThank you. It's been a fun journey so far. I used to be much more focused on marketing and sales in the last business. And what I found is, because I'm now able to be technical and I can read the code, I've learned to read the code by working with Claude, I've come to really like the product side more. So if I were to hire anyone, it would be on marketing and sales. And I would just focus on product.

Corey KupferLove that. So you're in Portugal now. That's where you live. So China, Vietnam, Portugal. We'll finish up soon, but what do you love about Portugal?

Sean WeisbrotI love that there's like three hundred days of sun. And I love that it doesn't snow in Lisbon. And I love that it's a single flight away to where my parents are. When I was living in Asia, it was three flights in thirty-six hours, and now it's one flight in eight hours.

Corey KupferYeah. Well, it's interesting what you say about the weather and lack of snow. I have that here in Southern California, but it costs me.

Sean WeisbrotExactly. I love how people here appreciate relaxation. They're willing to give up wealth. To be fair, a lot of Portuguese people are not wealthy. A lot of Europe in general, salaries are very, very low. But they also don't have the same problems that Americans face in terms of being afraid of going bankrupt if you have to go to the hospital to take care of yourself. I could talk about this all day long.

And it's one of the reasons why I choose not to live in the US. But people in Europe, it seems like they appreciate life more. I feel like Americans are focused on work and I think Europeans are focused on life. And I really appreciate that. It's hard for me to change myself towards that, because China was super hustle mode. They're way more aggressively in hustle mode than Americans are, which is kind of funny to see. And Vietnamese are as well. So Portugal is the first place I've lived where people are like, yeah, let's just relax. And I'm trying to appreciate that, especially as I start my family.

Corey KupferInteresting. All right, before I ask you my final two questions, is there anything else you want to tell us about, whether the business or a trend you're seeing or anything else that we haven't covered so far?

Sean WeisbrotThe trend I'm seeing is, especially if you're a business that's raising money from investors, I've started to see people talk on LinkedIn about how as an investor they're expecting their founders to be visible on LinkedIn. And if you're not visible, they may not even take your calls.

Corey KupferIt's interesting for me. The whole authority marketing concept. And for me, LinkedIn is, we used to actually do some stuff on Facebook and Instagram. We stopped. We just stopped. It's all LinkedIn in terms of social media. And then we post some of the podcasts up on YouTube. But for me it's all LinkedIn and it's made such a difference, raising my profile, staying top of mind. People are always gonna look you up on LinkedIn or Google you, and then your stuff's gonna come up. So I totally get it. And it's made a huge difference in my business. It's how people find me for m&a business and for help managing acquisitions, long before they ever pick up the phone.

Going back, let's say ten years ago when I first started doing this stuff and then did the book and the podcast, it's made a huge difference. Listen, obviously underneath it you have to do great work and you have to deliver and you have to be responsive and all those things that basic business does. But there are plenty of people who do all that and they have no exposure. And it does create perceived credibility. Now again, you gotta back it up. But the fact that, even if I do a talk at a conference, those people see it, but then if I promote that on LinkedIn, not just that I spoke, but hey, here's some of the lessons, it expands the reach of that. So listen, I'm on board. I get it.

Sean WeisbrotI'll tell you something that's really interesting to me. I've been working on this for two and a half months now. And I use the tool to post my own things. Sometimes I'll write myself, but sometimes I'll post from my own interviews, my own conversations, I'll turn into content. And at the bottom I'll say, hey, my tool wrote this for me. And I've already gotten two people who reached out to me saying, hey, I want to know more about SparkVox.

I booked calls with both of them already and talked to both of them. They both run agencies and they're interested in using it for their clients. I've had two people approach me to be on their podcast, which I've already booked for both of them. They want me to guest. And someone reached out to me with a Substack following and she wanted me to give her a quote about AI and she's gonna publish her article on Substack in a week, and she's gonna give me a backlink to my website.

This is all because I'm more visible on LinkedIn, and it's all because my tool is enabling me to post more stuff. And this is just the beginning. Sorry, one more thing, the most important thing. I do a lot of testing with it. And I always hit the approve button. Gotta test everything all the time. Got to make sure nothing's broken by accident, because I'm not a tech guy. And sometimes I'll delete the posts that I approve because some of them aren't relevant. One of them was about AI destroying accounting in 20 years.

Sean WeisbrotI didn't realize that this thing was not deleted. And a woman with 700,000 followers on LinkedIn requested to connect with me. And I didn't know why. And I was like, okay, fine. And then LinkedIn sent me a notification a few days later saying that 21,000 impressions had gone to this post. It's my best performing post ever. I didn't even write it. I got 12 comments saying, you don't know anything about AI, you don't know anything about accounting, you don't know anything about anything.

And yet here, this woman has an AI that helps CPAs to upload their transcripts so they can get better at coaching. And I said, hey, I noticed you have this tool. My tool can let them take the same content and turn it into content for LinkedIn that gets the next client. And she's like, I'm very interested. Let's have a call. So I'm probably gonna end up having a referral relationship with her and could potentially have hundreds or thousands of clients out of this because I posted something that I shouldn't have.

Corey KupferI love that. Well, great stuff. So listen, if people want to find out more about you and about SparkVox and the tool, where do they go? And for folks newer to the show, this runs as a negotiation podcast and a mergers and acquisitions podcast depending on the guest, and today it's a capital raising story.

Sean WeisbrotSo they can go to the website sparkvox.io. And then they could also check me out on LinkedIn. I'm sure you'll have the links for that stuff. And if they like it, they're interested, they have a company, possibly a team that's interested, I'm happy to do demos with people. I love to build relationships, want to know the customer and what they want, what they're looking for. So yeah. Website, LinkedIn. I also have a podcast on YouTube at We Live to Build.

Corey KupferSparkVox. Sorry, I mispronounced it earlier. SparkVox.

Sean WeisbrotI'm sure you'll have the links in the show notes, they could check that stuff out. I don't talk about deals, but I talk about everything else related to business, and I interview business owners that are actively doing those things, especially heavy on AI and agentic work right now for the interviews.

Corey KupferLove it. So, Sean, the final question on my podcast is about my highest value in life, which is freedom. And that means to me everything from freedom around the world for people from oppression, to why I've been an entrepreneur for decades and haven't had a boss. What does freedom mean to you and how does it impact your life and business?

Sean WeisbrotI've lived for freedom. My first action as an adult was I went to study abroad in Europe for two months. I wanted to just see what the world was because I grew up in a place where everyone thought America was the best country. And I'm like, but why? Have you been? Do you have a passport? Have you been outside? Do you not have the freedom of choice to go somewhere else and see if that's true or not?

And I've lived my life by that idea of I should have the freedom to choose what I do, when I do it, where I do it, and who I do it with.

Corey KupferLove that. Sean Weisbrot, thanks for being such a great guest on the DealQuest Podcast. I appreciate having you on and I appreciate you sharing SparkVox and your deal making and entrepreneurial journey with us.

And to everyone listening, if a conversation like this one makes you think you've got a story our audience should hear, you can apply to be a guest on a dealmaking podcast over at beaguestondealquest.com. The podcast guest application takes just a few minutes, and we're always a business podcast looking for guests who've actually done the work. I'm Corey Kupfer, and this is DealQuest, which people are kind enough to put on their lists of the best m&a podcasts.

Sean WeisbrotThank you for having me.