Voxify Founder David Duguan Solves a Critical Small Business Pain Point

David Duguan is a Ghanaian-born founder and CEO of Voxify whose customer service approach to innovation is culturally grounded in something timeless: hospitality. As David shares that same belief in the power of relationships inspired him to tackle a critical pain point for small businesses delays in responding to customer calls and unclear communication.

Blending this passion for service with his expertise as a seasoned CTO, David launched Voxify in 2022. The company’s flagship product, Aurora Hub, is a turnkey AI voice assistant that integrates seamlessly with any phone system to ensure no customer is ever left unheard…no business opportunity missed.

Hear how David identified this pain point of small businesses and how Voxify is redefining how small and mid-sized businesses engage with customers. While meeting their many other challenges, Voxify strengthens trust by improving responsiveness that enables owners focus on growth.

Transcript

Jeanne Gray: I am Jeanne Gray, publisher of American Entrepreneurship Today and host of the podcast series Experience Voices, where I talk with highly accomplished people who share the critical elements that led to their success.

In this episode of Experienced Voices, we explore the foundational elements that make a business model both impactful and enduring. Our guest is David Dugan, the Canadian born founder and CEO of fy, whose approach to innovation is grounded in something timeless. Hospitality raised in a culture where hospitality is more than a gesture, it's a way of life.

David saw firsthand how meaningful human connection builds trust and loyalty. That same belief in the power of relationships inspired him to tackle a growing pain point for small businesses, missed customer calls and fractured communication. Blending this passion for service with his expertise as a seasoned CTO, David launched Fify in 2022, the company's flagship product.

Aurora Hub is a turnkey AI voice assistant that integrates seamlessly with any phone system to ensure no customer is ever left unheard. No business opportunity is missed. Voxify is redefining how small and mid-sized business. Engage with customers. Strengthening trust, improving responsiveness, and enabling owners to focus on growth.

David, welcome to Experience Voices.

David Duguan: Amazing. Thank you for having me, Jeanne. It is a pleasure to be here. 

Jeanne Gray: So let's start by talking about Hello Aurora, your AI voice platform. Share a little bit about features , and the services it provides for small businesses. 

David Duguan: Yeah, so Aurora by Voxify is created to focus on redefining customer communication for small businesses in America.

They're the heartbeat of America and our mission is to really decentralize the monolithic structure of the telecom. Giants and help these small businesses to take full advantage of their customer interaction, their data, and any interactions via SMS web phone while again mainly focusing on eliminated those bad customer conversations and communications and.

The features are, it's pretty easy. Like the first feature is what we focus on. We try to make it super, super easy for the people that we work with to use. So all you need is a website, a URL link, and you can create an assistant in less than two minutes. Which kind of goes through our whole ethos of making it easy and meeting our clients where we are.

You're also able to train your assistant just by uploading information or just having a conversation, just like how we are with your assistant. And then you're also able to speak 29 languages 'cause your assistants can understand 29 languages and accents and is able to book meetings set up appointments, gather information for estimates, and so on and so forth.

Jeanne Gray: Well, everyone's using phone systems now, but you are taking this to another level and many small businesses are concerned about. Cost savings customer retention or customer leads. Can you give a sort of a deeper description of some specific features that your product or service brings to the table more than a typical, voice platform?

David Duguan: A hundred percent. So we get the basics right and what makes us. The go-to choice and why service-based businesses loves us because we truly understand 'em. We've had, before we even started building, before we launched, we had , over 200 customer interactions that, , we took to make sure that , we understand what, this is, and we know that referrals is super, super important for our client base and we know that.

And we also know that like for them to get referrals, you need to have good customer support. So we put that into consideration. So the basics, answering the phone is 24 hours, is able to have a conversation, book meeting. All of that is fun. The real. Good part about it and what makes it special is the fact that it's able to text mid call.

So you're able to have a conversation and text your email if, let's say instead of spelling out your email, like phonetically, like my email is David at hell of box by, instead of saying, D for David and a for Anderson or, or whatever, you can just text it or same thing with your address. That applies to, and then let's say for example, like the line cuts off 'cause you're going and need a tunnel, or somewhere where there's no connection or you're hiking for whatever reason.

If you're hiking, , if you hang up or we'll send you a text message like, Hey, just to make sure that, you know, we got your situation all situated, is there anything I can help with? Or is there any other information I can provide to you that would be helpful? So those two informations those two things are, part of many things that we do to really, really harp on customer attention and doing follow ups too.

So let's say if a customer calls and they had a problem or they had a situation where. It had to be handled by a human interaction. Aurora can follow up the, Hey , I know you called a couple of days. Wanna make sure that the situation you, that you brought up has been taken care of and this has been all situated.

So also another thing that we're able to do to really focus on harnessing enough the customer attention and yeah. 

Jeanne Gray: So would you say that, hello Aurora? Brings engagement to the user, to the small business owner that a phone system is just a recipient of information, but Aurora has the capabilities to provide very timely and specific information , to the small business owner.

David Duguan: Yes, definitely a hundred percent. So after every single call, the business owner gets a summary and a full transcript of the interaction that happened. And also recorded of the, voice conversation. And same thing applies to text too. So they get that information ready and sent to them.

So they're able to view, they also get like a weekly report that gives 'em a breakdown of how many calls they got , this week, what is the makeup, is it half new callers, 20% returning callers. And then they get analysis breaking down this, what people are complaining about. These four people love.

Here are your top call times and also in that report is How to solve the problems that your customers are complaining for or suggestions on how to improve those different things. So all of that makes it ready , for our customers to use, which makes it better and has a lot more capabilities and a lot more functionalities to, let's say a regular business line where.

It's either it's just a regular phone where you call, or it has the automated phone menu, or it's the press one for this. Press two for that, and we all know that that can get super, super tedious and super annoying and it's not really a good customer experiences. 

Jeanne Gray: Is there? What is the cost structure? So a person who already has a phone system adds onto what they have, is the additional cost justified in their head as to paying more for your service?

I. 

David Duguan: So we give autonomy to the customer to decide if they wanna still keep their own, their old phone system or not. They don't have to, we have a phone number and they can just use the phone number if they want to disconnect from their previous provider. They can, if they want to, , they can too.

We don't make it a requirement , to do so. And in terms of the justifications for cost. Is pretty prevalent because one phone call , depending on the field of business that you're in. One phone call can probably gets your return on investment. If it's more than 99 bucks, it's whatever service you're selling, it's more than 99 bucks.

You get your return just off of that. And our ROI, we've also noticed that our ROI is pretty high on our old pricing model, where back in the day, something back in the day, like it was like a few months ago, probably like, I don't know, seven, eight months ago. That , we had a 1500 installation fee.

That was to train the assistant, create the assistant, make sure that the functions that needed to be created and all that fun stuff. And we still had a 400 and over 430% ROI because of the cost of it and the revenue that's been generated from the tool. So, yeah, and I'm sure you can imagine what a 99 price price point that ROI , is a no brainer.

And they notice it too, because not only that too, but you get to save a bunch of time. And , shockingly enough the people that we interact with and the people that they the people that are using it and what they love is high, that ranks high is the time that's being safe because they get to focus on more and more important initiative to help grow the businesses even more.

Jeanne Gray: So your target market is primarily small businesses, but you know, give the listener some examples , and you were referring to it just now of how a small business owner is capturing engagement. That feeds into a great ROI like , who would be a really great example of someone who. Gets that information timely that they're now not getting.

David Duguan: Yeah, so the top big three are plumbing companies, window cleaning companies, and then janitorial services. I. So home services are huge for us and also other service-based businesses like the printing companies or a consulting group are also pretty big. Also, law firms too are , pretty enjoy.

And, and those are people that we work with because that's the people that we are able to get the largest amount of output and the largest amount of value out to them currently. 

Jeanne Gray: Now you did a fair amount of pre-market testing. I think you were saying that you had almost 200 interactions as you were developing.

Hello Aurora. So share a little bit about, how you put your business plan together that define that market segment. Because if you're looking at something that's gonna scale I mean, we are in a population of 300 million people.

David Duguan: Yeah.

Jeanne Gray: But you are going after a specific addressable market.

You shared a little bit about the plumbers and the, the home service people but how did you figure out the size of that market? To make the commitment to launch the venture. 

David Duguan: Amazing question. So this is the part that , I get excited about because this is where I get to get a little nerdy and how we got to this point was I.

First we started, we casted the net out wide to all types of businesses and from, I don't know, like initially started with architectural and visualization firm. And then we talked to some more people. We talked to, restaurants, salons, you name it. We probably talked to them and we noticed that for Thursdays for.

Companies, in this, I call it the purgatory stage, they're anywhere doing around from $200,000 in revenue all the way up to about 10 million in revenue. They're, they're, they still have this weird face where they have enough money, but they don't have enough money to fully scale. And we know that one of the big problems for them is customer interaction and customer support.

Also 99% of businesses in the whole United States is small businesses. They make up our economy, they are our economy, and they also make up almost 50% off our GDP. So we know that there's, they need, like this is a big market and this is market where we can disrupt.

Also to that, the, out of the 99%, 50% of businesses in that 99 is service-based businesses. And those are trades and stuff that is constantly in demand and constantly in need. And , we've had interaction with customers where we talked to, and they're doing a large amount of revenue, like 700,000 over a million, and they have never even launched an ad in their life.

So that goes to show that those, markets and those segments are not going anywhere and they're definitely in demand and they're only going to keep getting rising in demand. So combining , the factor of both, pure value being driven to the customer and also like how big the market is, is how we decided to focus on this specific niche .

Jeanne Gray: So that's an awesome pain point that you've identified. 'cause I've built a couple of companies and you're hitting a lot of the different frustrations and challenges especially in the first few years where you're multitasking and you can't get back to customers. So how did. Your idea for this come about, I see in your background that you were a CTO.

Can you give a little bit of an understanding of where the light bulb came on and you said, I've got something here. I. 

David Duguan: Yeah, so this idea came from my the old company that I was with called VSN Visual Solutions Nexus. And while we were working there, we were scaling to a point. And again, we had the same problem where we had no customer support, so everyone was stressed.

And also we had a bunch of leads coming in, but we had no ways , to communicate. I think there's a saying by, , Damon John, the co-founder of fubu, says, majority of companies don't die over starvation. They die over over conception, and that's usually the case. There's so much to do and so much different aspects to go that.

You can't make your decision. So we, I noticed that, that problem, and we're gonna go the typical route of bringing on an assistant or a virtual assistant or bringing on a salesperson like a SDR or a closer to come help solve this problem. But I. Tend to be a little finicky. I like to tinker a lot, so I decided to take it upon myself to start doing some research.

And I knew l LMS were a thing and I knew that if we're able to figure out a way to connect a phone number to it, maybe we might be able to have some kind of. some Something , to base my, hypothesis off of. So initially it started I did it, it didn't work. I was actually on the phone with my significant other, and we were having a conversation.

I kept trying to, did it work, and then randomly I was on FaceTime and then a, a phone call popped up and I was like, who's this, who's this calling line? And it dawned on me that, oh. It's Aurora, it's what you created. So that's, that's where it initially came from and that's where the idea spun up from.

And from there we were, and as we just talked about the customer process of talking to customers, trying to validate the point, is this something that can truly help? Going through that whole process to validate it and then voila, here we are. 

Jeanne Gray: Given that you have a tech background from the point of the idea to building at least a prototype how long did it take and, and how did you sort of lay out the steps?

Was everything embodied in yourself? Did you end up reaching out to some key individuals that said, okay, I, I can frame this out, but. I have to do one, two, and three. So how, how did you get through first? First, 2, 3, 4 steps? 

David Duguan: So, definitely network was a big part of the validation of the process. So there's, there's a few people that I seek advice from in terms for both career wise and also for , personal endeavors.

So I. First reaching out to people that I have in my network. To validate the point and do just basic discovery. Like, Hey, do you know anyone that is in this area, business that we can, that we can chat with, think will be extremely valuable? So, going that route first to, get input, get feedback.

What would they want, what would they like to see? Because essentially how I saw it is I just had the frame to a car. I just, I still had to put in seats, still had to put in the tires, the different things. And , I'm not creating this technology. For me, I'm creating technology for, service-based businesses.

So their input is extremely, extremely important for that. So that's how we did is just purely network. And then, , just validate it and try to get a pilot out as soon as possible. 

Jeanne Gray: But as far as that reach out that you began with, was there any rejection? Did people, were there skeptics and, did you go home and pout?

David Duguan: . There was so many rejections that is not even, it is not even funny. I, remember once we did door to door and it was me, was able to recruit , one of my friends, and then we went in with a clipboards and, I.

try to say that we're college kids doing surveys It was kind of the process, like it was just part of it. and the amount of times that we've got rejected, and , this was in Indianapolis, we went around like, Hey, you know, we're college kids at IUPY trying to get data about that. So whatever institution that we'll go into and amount of times that we've gotten out and it sucks a lot more doing it in person, but it's part of the game.

I found it enjoyable , and once you get the feedback, that's the real, that's when it started to get excited and that's when the light bulbs keep coming on. So a hundred percent , there's been more rejection. It's been no than yes. In the beginning, 

Jeanne Gray: Let's talk a little bit about the tech. Mm-hmm. And, and just sort of, the fundamentals of building the system that you have. 'cause you're also saying it's AI based and you do have a tech background. How far did you get? By yourself or was there one or two other, experts that you plugged into your knowledge base that got the prototype, the actual working model in place?

David Duguan: Yeah. So in terms of how far that I personally went for bringing other people was we are able to spin up an LLM, also a virtual machine use a EC2 and spin up the databases to connect and make all the different API connections between all the different moving parts.

To get a functional MVP going, where I started to bring on the team was creating the different functions that we have. So able to send a text message, able to send an email. Those functionalities was when I was able to bring people in to come help out. And that process.

And the main reason for that was so that I can spend more time on customer discovery and customer discussions and. . , That was kind of like the pivot was, when I was like, all right, we need to dive more deeper. We got more feedback that, all right, this is actually something viable. So like, okay, this is worth it.

This makes sense. Let's go ahead and, and, and, and double down. 

Jeanne Gray: So how far along are you in your launch? It's in the market. You have users Share a little bit about , your execution. 

David Duguan: Right now we are at the stage where , we rebranded from Binary 10 of Vox. And we're at the stage where , we're about to do a proper launch to launch this company and bring on more and more partners.

'cause that's where we know that we're able to, work with because that's how our clients buy. And again, based off of the research that we did, we noticed that. , The market and , the ideal customer profile that we're targeting don't really buy from traditional marketing means like advertisements or social media.

We know that they buy from people that they trust, like their consultants or their chamber of commerce president or even like a franchise broker and so and so forth. And me personally that is like right in my sweet spot. 'cause I love talking to people in person and I'm also from Ghana. So community is huge for me.

So going down that route and partnering with individuals who work directly , with our customer profiles, like it's, our main strategy and our main channel that we're focused on. 

Jeanne Gray: So you're not really doing any direct advertising or promotion to the small businesses.

Most of your focus is on establishing a an affiliation or partnering structure , for the company? 

David Duguan: Yes, ma'am. Yep, a hundred percent. 

Jeanne Gray: And how did you anticipate? So investors want to know about scalability is how quickly can you move , the startup forward? So in terms of.

Approaching an investor and getting a sense of you can pull the, team and the tech and the effort behind it. Did , you laid it out a business plan that projected how much you could achieve over a five year period. 

David Duguan: Yeah, so definitely and scalability was in the back of my head from when I first created this and also from experience from other startups that I've worked with, other initiatives or things that I've done.

From when I was very, very young. All of that applied , to now, and I know distribution is one of the most important parts about a business is getting the, the product out for people to use it and especially for technical founders, including myself, is definitely, a point that. We, intentionally ignore because it's not our, strong suit, but , it's probably one of the most important, if not the , most important part of that.

So scalability was an amount. So to answer your question how we plan for scalability is that , we knew we. , The fastest and most efficient way to grow is to, again, engage with those consultants and also franchises. So franchise brokers are sweet because a franchise can have hundreds , of franchisees and.

They're most, 90% of the time, or 80% of the time, their processes are the same. So, which means that we can easily duplicate instances , for different franchisees in a franchisor organization which means that we're able to scale a lot more faster without , the soft cogs, like employee account, all of this different information.

Jeanne Gray: as far as the team yourself or you have partners or you have people that you are lining up in the next, you know, month or two to, to go to the next level. 

David Duguan: Yeah. So in terms of employees , right now we've sent about four engineers and we have a couple of contractors to help with marketing and help with the release of this.

We also have advisors on our team too, and some of them worked at ndl. Some of them worked at Zoro. Other others owned businesses, successful businesses, sold businesses. Actually, funny enough, one of them is the, is the, the person that invented the app store and sold it to Apple. And we also have a few different devices that also have been in the telecom space too.

those are like kind of the team makeup in terms of partners and the people that we're working, hoping to go to market with, It's like the Chamber of Commerce in Washington Oregon. And then also there's a group called the Playbook Invest Network. It's also one of our partners that, that we're working with, that's also in Vena Systems which are all of these like consultant groups that we're, we're working with currently to get this deployed.

Jeanne Gray: So you, you mentioned I. How you were originally testing out the, the idea. Mm-hmm. Share a little bit about your background, 'cause I know you're from Ghana originally, right? And 

David Duguan: Yes, ma'am. 

Jeanne Gray: You're immersed into American culture now, so Yes. Share a little share about when did you come to the States and, where did you sort of go to school and, and come up with the sort of an ethos for your company.

David Duguan: Yeah, so I born and raised in Ghana. I moved to the States about 12 years ago, and the entrepreneur bug I didn't really think was bugging. And I say this all the time I didn't really think it was bug. I think it was just the way that, life is, is how, you know, humans operate as a species. But come to find out that there were a few different differences.

So for example. The story that I tell all the time when I was about seven was around the age that was about to get confirmed. So I was originally I was raised Catholic and in the process of Catholicism, there's the whole confirmation process where you get like a holy communion baptism and then what's the last confirmation.

, The process of doing that, I had a mentor, but we took a trip to a. Which is village in central region of Ghana. I say central region, but . It's a coastal city. And my grandma lived there and funny enough, I was talking to her yesterday and I. There was a, there was a kid that came in that wanted to buy a, like a can of milk.

It was a can of evaporated milk, but didn't have enough money. So my grandma just gave it to him. But he came on on a a tire. It's like a tire where like the kids back home, they put like, sticks in and treat it like it's a car or like a toy car. And I always loved cars. I'm a big gearhead. And I was like, oh, that's cool.

I went and chased them around. We played together, came back. I was extremely daddy. My mom was mad, but that mean I had time to reflect. I had like a three hour drive to reflect, and when your mom is mad at you, she really doesn't really want to talk to you. So that was reflection time for me.

So reflected I, and I noticed there was a discrepancy and. Our lives. But the main cause of the discrepancy , was money. And I was able to figure that out, that it all boils down to money. 'cause if they had the money that they probably would not be in the situation that , they're in.

So I asked my mentor that was helping me throughout the confirmation process. How do you make the most money? And we went to a cafe and back home a cafe is basically a internet shop with a whole bunch of computers. And we went in and we googled how to make the most money we narrowed it onto two answers.

First was either be a cardiovascular surgeon or a second BA soccer player. . It didn't last long I decided to hang up my cleats and from there I decided to pursue cardiovascular surgery. I did, did all the prerequisites, and then I had this moment dawn on me. I was like, oh, I don't think I wanna go to school for about 14 years just to make, I know like half a million. I'm saying half a million. It's a lot of money. In terms of what I wanted to do, , what I wanted to achieve that was not feasible at all and didn't make no sense.

So I have African parents and there's a saying that they say an African home where you have like three careers as an African kid. To be a doctor, lawyer or engineer and nursing was the closest to do so. So I decided to go to nursing school. I got into nursing school and as soon as that I did first day of clinicals I saw I a catheter being put into, another man and I was like, ah, this is not really , my speed.

So. I went my advisor at like 9:00 AM in the morning and decided to change , my major. Changed my major, went to a different school, and I got pushed from my intern and then pushed again. Startup worked at , a startup in Charlotte. Moved from Charlotte to Austin to start my own startup.

But basically all that to say that the whole idea and the whole gulf for, creating this company is to find the intersection between the humanities and the science where we're able to deliver immense value to go back home and to deliver value. And that ethos is also incorporated , in our company, even down to the logo.

Like our values one of our values, is relationships over everything. And then second one is customer partner obsession and then ecosystem optimization. But it's super, super important to us. Like that, the logos, it's a Sankofa, which is part of , the dean cross symbols from the contract in Ghana.

And it means you always go back to where you start to help out. And this is the channel that I chose to go back home and help out. Not just to that kid back in Ghana even though that plays a huge, huge role, but to the people that we work with, because. , Again, based off of the interviews and then the discussion that we had, we noticed that their deep value.

Is to really go back home and help out. 'cause they have a family at home. They either have a family in outside the city or state or even country that they want to help out that they're working hard for. And a lot of my family too, do the same exact things. They come , migrate here to the United States, work super, super hard just to take the money and go back home and help out.

So it's definitely big part of our ethos and what we definitely wanna do. I know I was super long-winded, but. Thank you for, thank you for listening for that long-winded answer. 

Jeanne Gray: Well, there, there's a definitely a thread that I hear in what you explained is that you're launching a customer service focused company , and that's part of your ethos as far as relationship building is there.

It's always the core of a startup is where is the heart of the entrepreneur. What is the motivation and the passion that's going to take them a long way, and if it's based upon such strong values that you described, you know, you've got a real serious check mark that you've put in place here for building customer focused business.

I. 

David Duguan: It's nothing outside the box, nothing extraordinary that we're trying to build, especially where, where I'm from we are known like Ghanaians are known to be h hospitable to a fault. . It's not, it's not anything that is extraordinary. It's something that's in my wheelhouse. 

Jeanne Gray: So David, , I've enjoyed speaking with you. This is quite a journey that you're starting. You've already been on, you know, coming from Ghana, come to the states to get through, figuring out what you wanna do, and now.

And it's such a early part of your career launching such a value-based service for small businesses. So I, I think the next few months are gonna be very exciting for you and I look forward to, I. Keeping in touch and seeing your next steps. 

David Duguan: Definitely. Definitely. I so much appreciate it. 

Jeanne Gray: You have been listening to the podcast series, experienced Voices. To hear more and subscribe, visit american entrepreneurship.com/podcast. Where you will also find a form for listener feedback.