Solon native’s Speeko app designed to improve how you speak

Solon-raised entrepreneur Nico Aguilar has migrated to a much larger town, now working to develop his fledgling business from an office in downtown Chicago.

His full-time energies are focused on Speeko, a technology company that is building an innovative product to help people improve their public speaking skills, using only their smartphone.

The Speeko app, which is accessible through a monthly or annual subscription, analyzes your recorded words, voice patterns, inflections and more. It offers a unique, high-tech way to progress to better speech, whether in the elevator, board room or at a conference podium. 

Aguilar thinks it can change lives.
 
“We launched our app last October on the Apple App Store,” he told me last week. “And it's now helping thousands of people across the world develop this essential life skill.”

That’s a broad scope, but it doesn’t mean Aguilar has forgotten his local roots.
 
“Some of the best teachers I have ever had in my life were at Solon High School,” he says. It’s where an interest in science and technology became his passion.
 
He remembers being “CEO of a soap-making company” in a class project by chemistry instructor Ken Beck which first gave him a taste of business basics. As a high school senior in 2007, his wind turbine project placed fourth in the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair. 
 
Later, as a student at the University of Iowa, he became friends with Anthony Pham of Davenport. The two collaborated on other startups while working on research that measured communication patterns in medical settings. 

Pham, who is now finishing his medical residency at the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics, is a co-founder of Speeko. Aguilar has two masters degrees from the University’s College of Public Health.
 
After more than three years working on the startup in their spare time, Aguilar was able to leave his job as a manager at Northwest Memorial Hospital in Chicago and pursue Speeko full-time.
 
“It was a big leap for me to go all-in on this startup,” says Aguilar. “But our core team has been building toward this for awhile.”
 
The young company works out of Iowa City as well as their new office space in downtown Chicago as part of the Techstars global startup accelerator program. 

Aguilar is CEO of the Speeko venture, which currently employs six full and part-time developers and data scientists.  The team also includes another Solon native, Skylar Hansen, who works as the team's lead operating systems developer and is Nico's longtime friend from Solon High School.
 
What inspired him and Pham to create a better-speech app?
 
Aguilar recalls a stressful experience in which he had an anxiety attack speaking in front of his rhetoric class at the Iowa. He experienced sweaty palms and shortness of breath, and “totally botched my presentation.” He ended up working with a speech coach to improve, which was the catalyst for the idea of Speeko.
 
The two friends saw a way to combine voice analytics and artificial intelligence to help people avoid similar embarrassing public speaking experiences.
 
The company has developed machine-learning algorithms to identify vocal patterns of good and bad speakers, based on thousands of speech recordings and years of academic communication research. That data was built into the Speeko app, where users record themselves and get instant feedback on how to improve.
 
One section of the app provides interactive lessons and exercises. For example, a user may be asked to read 30 seconds of teleprompter-style copy on the screen. The feedback from the app may address the pacing of their reading, their pauses, their intonation and the use of filler words such as “um” and “like.”
 
“It will tell you if you are a monotone speaker and how to improve that,” he said. “It measures how dynamic you sound as a speaker. You learn techniques on how to retain an audience’s attention. There is science behind all this.”
 
Aguilar says people are encouraged to use Speeko to record their voice during any meetings or presentations where they may be addressing a group.
 
“It’s all about self-awareness and confidence,” he says. “All they have to do is open the app and hit record. Later, they can review a critique of their speech.”
 
The entrepreneur says the basic monthly subscription fee is about $12, but the young company is still evaluating how the product should be priced.

“This is a fraction of what it takes to hire a speech coach,” he pointed out.

Customer testimonials and company surveys have been extremely positive so far. 
 
“We did a user survey, and 85 percent reported feeling more confident and effective with their public speaking skills after using Speeko,” he said.
 
Both Aguilar and Pham had high praise for the University’s John Pappajohn Entrepreneurial Center (JPEC), which connected them to a strong network of entrepreneurs and mentors. Last year, they won several pitch competitions at the university and national level.
 
More Information:  Watch Nico Aguilar’s Demo Day presentation about his company Speeko at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wevOk_3jAvM.  The company website is www.speeko.co