Meet Nikul Patel, Co-Founder & Director at Go Transcribe

How Did You Come Up With The Idea For The Company?

Like many people, the idea of having to type your notes at the end of a long day seemed very tedious and time-consuming. Having dozens of interviews to transcribe by hand for a research project, I found manually transcribing to be time-consuming if I was to do it myself, or too expensive if I outsourced it. That’s when the idea struck: “Why don’t we try to automate transcription?” and so go-transcribe.com was born. A website that offers transcription and subtitling services that are fast and affordable, reducing note-taking by hand to the past. 

What Have You Learned?

Now it’s all good having the idea, but building the website that was the most difficult aspect. As a small start-up company, budget costs had to be kept to an absolute minimum and this meant learning swiftly and building up the website as quickly as possible. We went live in 2016 and got our first paying customer within a few weeks. 

As a company, we learned an awful lot from the feedback received (both good and bad) and it was a steep learning curve but weren’t deterred and kept on improving.

What Challenges Have You Faced?

One of the biggest challenges we faced as a small company, was not being able to just go to experts who could do the job for you. Yes, this would have saved us a lot of time but it would also have cost much more and it was something we just couldn’t afford. Luckily my co-founder, Vishal, did a Computer Science degree at university which meant we could get a prototype out without significant costs.

How Did You Respond During COVID?

Covid was a blessing in disguise for us! With the rise in remote meetings, our demand for services went through the roof and I’ll be honest here, it caught us a little bit by surprise. We had to work harder than ever, offering lots of support to people and keeping up with the demand. The web server had to be updated to handle the increased volume and the website had to be made even more user-friendly so that a first-time user could navigate it easily.

What Are Your Future Plans?

We are aiming high and wide, go-transcribe.com is a small website at the moment used in several countries worldwide. In terms of the future growth, we have plans offer services to various locations and support even more languages and accents. We are currently working on supporting Arabic transcription and we are hoping to release it in the near future.