Brian is founder and CEO of Inversoft, a Denver-based provider of platform technologies built for applications and online communities. CleanSpeak, Inversoft’s flagship product, is an intelligent profanity filtering and moderation tool developed to help companies manage, moderate and engage their customers.
Before Brian bootstrapped Inversoft, he studied computer engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder. After graduating, he worked at a variety of companies including Orbitz, BEA, US Freightways, XOR and Texturemedia.
Hi everyone! Thanks for joining the discussion today. Ask me anything you want!
How did you make the jump from your day job to running your own company? When did you know it was safe to make the leap?
It’s probably never safe to make the jump. 🙂 Jokes aside, the decision comes down to revenue that you can generate either from a product or from your skills. Usually it is a combination of how much you can make from selling the product and how much you need to supplement your revenue through consulting. Once that equals roughly your current salary or something lower that won’t impact your ability to enjoy life, make the jump!
Here’s a great Podcast I did about making the jump and quitting your day job:
http://execpodcast.com/podcast/0-16-bootstrapping-as-an-engineer-with-brian-pontarelli/
Thanks for taking the time, Brian! Does CleanSpeak only work with a set list of profanity, or can it be edited? Can it be trained to deal with offensive comments that disguise profanity?
Great question. CleanSpeak has editable filtering lists. You can add words and phrase that should be block and you can also add indicators that might be offensive, but should be analyzed by a moderator. We call this the greylist or alert-list. CleanSpeak can also be customized with an NLP/ML system for enterprise customers that can be trained to find any type of behaviors in content. This usually is a larger project though and requires lots of data and analysis.
Hi Brian,
Thanks for doing an AMA here! Quick question: you mentioned that CleanSpeak handles moderation. Can you elaborate on that? Are there chat bots? How does that work?
Thanks!
Hey Brian! you said you bootstrapped this company. What made you decide to go in that direction instead of trying to go the VC funding route?
and thanks for taking the time!! 🙂
This is awesome. Bootstrapping forces you to do the hard things and I love how it “became part of your culture’. Thanks!!
Hi Brian,
Thanks for sharing your insights. I wanted to get your perspective on the arguments that “free use of speech” help foster closer communities online, as they allow for harmless expressions of feelings. How do you think profanity filters play into this?
Hey Brian, thank you for taking time to chat. here’s my question, your platform works for multiple languages. Was that always the original plan or did something drive the need for localization?
Customers drive almost all of the features in CleanSpeak. We had a number of customers ask for additional languages (like Disney and Pokemon). When we received those requests we built out the blacklist for each language they needed. Though from the start, we realized that EFIGS (English, French, Italian, German and Spanish) would likely be a requirement for almost everyone, so we built that out without a customer asking for it.
Hi Brian, does your platform keep overall metrics on word usage? If so, can this be leveraged to help with SEO and hashtagging?
Great question. CleanSpeak does provide analysis of word usage. We also have some really cool reports like “Trending Terms”, “Common Terms” and “Related Terms”.
Related Terms is pretty cool. You type in a word or phrase and CleanSpeak will tell you words that are related to that word or could be used in conjunction with it.
We also have the ability to build out new reports as required by customers.
Hi Brian,
Thanks for joining this growth chat! What happens if the profanity is coming from the internal team, perhaps a rogue moderator? How does your platform handle that?
That really depends on the integration. We work with some companies that are using CleanSpeak solely for filtering/moderating their employees (like customer service representatives). If the company thinks this could be an issue, they can hook up CleanSpeak to their moderation systems and filter/moderate them the same why they filter/moderate end-users.
The only thing that CleanSpeak doesn’t currently handle is if a moderator is inside CleanSpeak and edits a post. In this case, CleanSpeak will not filter their changes. But, if that was a need, it would are really simple to add that.
Hey Brian, do you think profanity could help us eliminate echo chambers, or the other way around?