David Pham is the co-CEO and the tech expert of Mosec, a mobile app allowing users to create a voice note, auto transcribe it and post it into a contact relationship management system. It has already integrated with 3 CRMs – Salesforce, Highrise and Batchbook.
He founded the company with Austin Ball, chief marketing officer, and Bernard Huang, co-CEO and designer.
PBN: Tell us a little bit about the founders – I understand you guys come from a variety of backgrounds – and how you started Mosec.
PHAM: Austin Ball was a child actor on “Barney,” Bernard was an professional online poker player, and I was a professional fighter. Austin and I were roommates in college, and in January of this year, decided to start working together. We created an on-demand tutoring service called offshoot that would put you in an online video-conferencing session with a tutor. Bernard, who Austin had known since middle school but hadn’t talked to for many years, decided to use offshoot and he and Austin started talking when Bernard decided that he would come down to the café that Austin and I were working at.
Bernard and I met for the first time, and we decided to become a team then and there. We came into Betaspring with an idea to backup your phone contacts, and after changing ideas five or six times and with three weeks left to go in the 12-week program, we started working on Mosec. It’s been quite the journey.
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PBN: What’s your 30-second elevator pitch to snag an investor?
PHAM: Mosec is a free mobile secretary for your Android phone. After every conversation, Mosec lets you leave a voice note, transcribes it into text, and attaches it to the contact in the CRM of your choice. Mosec helps you remember your important conversations.
PBN: Let’s get under the hood – what can you tell us about the technical aspects of Mosec?
PHAM: Mosec is an Android application built in Java. It uses Nuance’s speech recognition technology through Nuance’s Android library. In addition to the Android application, we have a back-end application that securely stores user data built in Ruby on Rails and hosted on Heroku.
PBN: Do you have a business model/funding yet? What’s the five-year plan?
PHAM: With the city’s offer to invest $50,000 in Betaspring graduates, we have all we need to make Mosec a success. For now, we are looking to acquire as many users as possible.
The five-year plan is to spread to as many CRMs and smartphone platforms as possible, with deeper features such as intelligent transcription where we determine what you are saying and do it for you in your CRM.
PBN: Finally, what did you think of the Betaspring program? What were the reasons behind you deciding to base out of Providence? What were the “cons” on the list?
PHAM: The Betaspring program gave us years of maturity in entrepreneurship. While we’re certainly not veterans, we are able to make insightful decisions based on what we learned from our great mentors and the partners, Allan, Owen, and Jack.
And just as important, we have the same group of people all cheering us on and helping us along the way. We decided to base ourselves out of Providence because it’s where we built a lot of our relationships. Not only that, we’re excited to be a part of the up-and-coming Providence startup community and to help make it stronger. We haven’t experienced any “cons,” but we are all weary of the winter that so many Rhode Islanders warn us of.
