Signl.fm

Kim Hansen, who had worked at BioWare on Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2, left games with a few colleagues to start the company in Vancouver in the summer of 2015. The product was a podcast player built around transcripts — a social interface for audio, with monetization, live streaming, listener engagement and transcription running on IBM Watson. It also went through names, which is what Hansen came to talk about: she introduced herself on the March 2016 TechVancouver stage as a co-founder "at a company formerly known as Vox Eter", and made the case that how hard naming is depends on what kind of business you are. B2B buyers care about the product, not the five syllables in the company name; a consumer product has to be said out loud constantly, which is why YouTube and Twitch work. Her company, she said, sat in the dead centre of all the hard stuff. It also published under the name Gretta before settling on Signl.fm, and by the summer of 2016 Hansen has written that it was nearly out of money, with no one getting paid.