We recently connected with Will Bodewes and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Will, thanks for joining us today. Let’s start with education – we’d love to hear your thoughts about how we can better prepare students for a more fulfilling life and career

As a Mechanical Engineer, I have spent a lot of time in school or out of school studying. While in my eyes, there is a lot of benefit to attending school, by founding my own company I have realized that there is a lot that my 17 years of education didn’t teach me. In my experience, the education system takes a black-and-white approach to life, you either go to college or you can’t make money, then you graduate and you get a job in your field or you continue your education. Unfortunately, history has shown that your educational background is not the number one measure of your success. A recent study of millionaires in the US shows the following three traits 1) the average millionaire has tried 17 business/ enterprises/ ideas before they hit one 2) the average millionaire has been bankrupt 3.5 times 3) the average millionaire owns or manages their own business. When I first read these statistics I was blown away. My whole life I was taught that success would only be measured by how challenging your major is and how hard good of grades you got. it seems that what is more important is not giving up, and not being afraid to take risks.

If I were to reform the education system I would focus much more on showing students that there are so many more options than following the traditional career path. I would encourage students to practice more real-world problems, such as managing finances and saving more than they spend. Finally, I would encourage the educational system to focus more on preparing students for their life, rather than their careers.

Will, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

Spoke Sound is pioneering the personalized audio space with our new “speaker picture.” Our speakers look identical to a 1.5″ thick canvas-wrapped photograph and are customizable with any image. With a simple and easy connection to Bluetooth, our speakers are a great way to experience audio without cluttering up your space with an ugly speaker. We also partner with artists and photographers to allow them to create an audio-visual experience that was previously impossible.

Spoke Sound has developed, patented, and created our first speaker picture, Swell, after nearly three years of research. Many people see our product online and say, so you just put a small speaker behind a picture? That couldn’t be farther from the truth. Our speakers actually take a fundamentally different approach to creating sound that turns the surface of the photo into a speaker. This way, the canvas wrap doesn’t muffle or distort the sound as a traditional cone-based speaker would. I could go on for hours about the technology, but I think it’s just one of those things that needs to be heard to believed. This simple fact is one of the biggest challenges we have faced during COVID. Because everything went remote, it was hard for people to hear the sound quality and understand what we were doing. Fortunately, we had a few faithful customers willing to try it out, and we started growing word of mouth from them.

We ran into software and connection issues with some of our early speakers. For this, we had to have several speakers returned for repair. I learned from this that kindness, understanding, and good customer service go a long way to maintaining your brand reputation.

I suppose I want the world to know that our speaker’s solution is out there. We’re a Colorado-based company, and our mission is to make the world a more beautiful place, one speaker at a time.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

One of the biggest pivots in life was when I started Spoke Sound. After graduating college, I was all lined up to start an accelerated Ph.D. program at the University of Melbourne in Australia. My reason for choosing this was simple; I wanted to continue chasing the academic ladder to the top. Unfortunately, I started this program mid-COVID, and after a few months of remote work at a 14-hour time difference, the program shut down, and I had to figure out what next. Rather than getting a job like everyone else, I was curious about pursuing the idea of starting my own business, which I always thought I would do ‘someday.’ At the time, I had about 4000 dollars that I could spend and decided to start to try to build a prototype of this speaker picture idea I had. I spent most of my budget on the R&D of this but was finally able to get a working prototype. Shortly after good fortune would have it that I was accepted into the SCAPE accelerator program, where I learned about starting my business. I imagine that when I look back on this I will think of it as one of the biggest piviots in my life.

How did you put together the initial capital you needed to start your business?

Being fresh out of college, I didn’t have a lot of savings. I had managed to save up about $4,000 to start my company which I basically just put into R&D and government/ legal fee’s. For the first few months the money was really nip and tuck. I was taking no salary and was really taking advantage of everything from free trials to using barrowed equipment. After almost a year in business I was starting to see some cashflow and was fortunate to raise money from outside investors to help fund the company. It took me months of working on my pitch and talking to investors before I found the right ones but it was really what Spoke Sound needed.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.spoke-sound.com
• Instagram: @spokesound
• Other: Personal Website: www.willbodewes.com