There’s light at the end of the funnel.

In their first month of using Toplyne, Murf set up two playbooks on Toplyne. The first one triggered nudges to users Toplyne determined were primed for self-serve conversions. What took a few hours to implement outperformed their internal scoring logic by 7x at a 10% conversion rate.

The second playbook triggered a sequence to hot users at enterprise accounts that prompted a conversation with sales. Within a month of running the playbook, Murf saw the open rates on their sales sequences skyrocket 3x and the free-to-enterprise conversions go up by 10%.

Surfing the Gen-AI wave

Synthetic speech company Murf lets users generate “human-like” voiceovers without needing to buy recording equipment or hire a voice artist.

Entertainment animation agencies creating entire TV series episodes using AI-generated voices… authors creating a series of fantasy fiction audiobooks with little to no production costs… YouTube influencers creating rap videos using AI-powered speech - these stories are all very real in 2023 and they’re all powered by Murf.ai.

Founded in October 2020, Murf saw its ARR rise 26x over the next two years while synthesizing more than one million voiceover projects along the way, in a variety of speaking styles and tones. With a library of more than 120 human-parity AI voices across 20 languages, Murf raised a $10 million Series A round in September 2022, on the back of their blazing growth. What they didn’t know at the time, was that their growth so far was about to pale in comparison to the volcanic surge that was coming their way.

“Post the announcement of DALL-E and ChatGPT, we started seeing 3x more website visits than we were, three months ago.” - Chaitanya, Head of Growth at Murf

‍“Doing this internally is a very time-consuming human process. We have somebody figuring this out on a daily basis - a way to automate this, link it to an email tool, and then send an email. So all this is going to take one full person's bandwidth every single day. With Toplyne, that happens in a few minutes.” - Chaitanya, Murf

Murf tracks the behavioral data of users on Mixpanel. On the GTM end, they use Customer.io and Sendinblue to trigger emails to their customers prompting conversions - both self-serve and sales-driven.

Prior to Toplyne, Murf built cohorts on Mixpanel to qualify users to trigger conversion prompts to. They tested a few hypotheses:

Hypothesis 1: Anyone who’s created 10 minutes of audio

Being a content creation tool fundamentally, Murf’s north star metric is “minutes to content created.” Qualifying anyone who created 10 minutes of speech on Murf broke at volume. Way too many users crossed the threshold, and once past the 10-minute mark, they all looked the same.

Hypothesis 2: Anyone who’s used 5 or more different voices

While this logic was good at disqualifying users who weren’t ready to convert yet, it failed to surface the conversion crème de la crème.

Hypothesis 3: Anyone who shares while on the free trial

In Chaitanya’s words: “If a user shares while on the free trial… that's a very high interaction, but a very small percentage was doing that. The percentage was similar to our conversion rate. Then again, it's tricky to qualify.”

Murf experimented internally with cohorts defined on Mixpanel against these and various other actions they hypothesized to be correlated to conversion. Although individually each of these experiments positively impacted conversion rates, they were discovering a bottleneck with each, beyond which there was no meaningful difference.

“Given that it’s a software tool, there are a bunch of things that users could do. As we got into more metrics, it got trickier and trickier. How many metrics, which metrics - where do we stop? So yeah, then it was very clear that this is a data science problem.” - Chaitanya, Murf

And so in September 2022, Murf turned to Toplyne.

Murf's problem was two-fold. On one hand, they needed to optimize their sales bandwidth much more effectively on the leads most likely to convert, rather than waste time, energy, and emails chasing leads who weren't qualified to convert yet.

On the other hand, Murf didn't want to spray and pray by email blasting the many thousands of new users who sign up every day. For many reasons:

1. Optimization of sales bandwidth. While their sales teams looked to book meetings, they didn't want to book too many meetings either and swamp them with leads who in reality had shown no intent. Not too many, not too few.
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2. E-mail marketing fatigue is real. E-mails triggered to users who, through their behavior, show no intent to convert can lead to decaying open rates over time, and tune them out of the channel completely.

"Our (growth's) job is to drive Calendly invites. That's our success metric. You can run an email campaign, or in the future, run an in-app campaign, the idea is to drive Calendly invites. We can't drive too many and we can't drive too less," adds Chaitanya.

In their first month of signing up for Toplyne, Murf built two playbooks on Toplyne.

Chaitanya leads the growth team at Murf. Growth at Murf owns metrics of self-serve conversions and meetings booked for sales. While Growth and Sales are two teams that have seen the most value from Toplyne so far, Chaitanya is also excited about doing more with Toplyne.

“Doing this internally is a very time-consuming human process. We gave somebody figuring this out on a daily basis - a way to automate this, link it to an email tool, and then send an email. So all this is going to take one full person's bandwidth every single day. With Toplyne, that happens in a few minutes.”

While acquisition is not a burning problem for Murf (it's an understood problem statement), a problem with a lot of unknowns is churn reduction.

In Chaitanya’s words, "We have a lot of customers. Now how do we get them to upgrade or get them to invite their team on board and expand in size?"