Podcast Episode 286: How A 22-Year Old CEO Went From Selling Children's Stories To Getting Funded By Amazon: Exclusive With Voiceflow CEO Braden Ream

How The CEO of Voiceflow Turned An Interactive Children’s Storybook Into One Of The First No-Code Tools to Build Alexa Skills and Google Actions  I can remember first starting to build Alexa Skills back in 2017-2018, and researching “no-code” tools to do so. At the time, coding Alexa Skills from scratch seemed like such a long journey, that I was even talking with our CTO Joe Wallace about building our own no-code tool (aka Content Management System; aka “WordPress of Voice”) so that we could effectively roll out Voice Apps for clients easier.  What got me excited were a few things. First of all, at the time, as far as I knew, nobody had done it yet. I had found one blog article on Medium.com about “how to build Alexa Skills without coding” and it featured a company called Storyflow. But when I went to Storyflow.com, the no-code tool clearly wasn’t ready for real consumer use yet, which - being in software development - I totally understand.  Well, about a year after I found Storyflow.com, I really wanted to start building Alexa Skills for clients, and for Data Driven Design, and I decided to Google again - “building Alexa Skills without coding.”   Again, the same Medium.com article came up. I opened it, and instantly remembered Storyflow.  That next time, when I clicked on the link, I was redirected to Voiceflow.com, and it was a MUCH improved experience, and not just from a front-facing marketing website perspective, but from a SaaS product perspective.  I jumped right into the tool, created an account, and started building Voice Apps.  Another year-plus later, after building dozens of Alexa Skills and Google Actions using Voiceflow, I sat down with CEO Braden Ream and talked with him about his journey building an interactive children’s book company into one of the top SaaS products in the world, and especially in the Voice space.