Peter Trebek, GoTranscript : “Now, it’s time to get back to work!”

First of all, how are you and your family doing in these COVID19 times? 

Peter Trebek : Glad we are safe, and we’re doing great! Thank you for asking! Our team has been working remotely for the last three months, and our team members are safe as well. No one got sick or lost their jobs – all of us are enjoying quality time at home with our loved ones.

Tell us about you, your career, how you founded or joined this company?

Peter Trebek : I’ve started my journey at the age of 17. I was living in a small apartment in London with my roommates. Ever since, I have been living in different countries and cities, such as Manchester, New York, Toronto, and Warsaw. Throughout my time, I founded GoTranscript because I wanted to change the way the content is being accessed and utilized. I also wanted to create a great working environment for freelancers so they can work on their terms.

How does your company innovate? 

Peter Trebek : At GoTranscript, we’re always experimenting with new ideas, bringing in new young and enthusiastic people to our team, and making big changes inside the company. We’re always trying to be creative and imaginative to deliver the best service and help our company’s growth. We are always looking for new and top talents to join our teams, taking risks to create a novel business and expand our range of services, and we invest a significant percentage of profit in R&D, so we always are competitive and keep up with the market changes.

How the coronavirus pandemic affects your business and how are you coping?

Peter Trebek : Due to pandemic lockdown, our team members started working from home, and that affected management difficulties since we had all the systems and operations in the office. We also used to have two team meetings in a week to discuss the achievements and strategies. Nevertheless, due to the pandemic situation, our company has seen a 22.5% increase in sales, and almost 2,400 new freelancers applied for the job at GoTranscript. We had a lot of inquiries from content creators (especially from YouTube influencers) to caption their videos because they wanted to improve their search rankings. Also, due to an increase of interest in video conferencing tools (such as Zoom, Microsoft Teams), we received a lot of orders from businesses and corporations to transcribe their audio recordings of conferences and online meetings. Also, we hired more staff members for the customer support department due to an increase in the number of sales during the pandemic lockdown.

Did you have to make difficult choices and what are the lessons learned?

Peter Trebek : Management and HR have been the most difficult tasks to deal with. During the pandemic lockdown, we had some difficulties in keeping our team motivated and keep the productivity levels up, but we managed to battle those difficulties, and we’re even stronger than ever.

How do you deal with stress and anxiety, how do you project yourself and your company in the future?

Peter Trebek : The Coronavirus pandemic has presented us with unique and challenging situations. It created anxiety and stress in our business environment. Anxiety and stress to a limited degree can be very helpful. However, taking into a significant degree, stress can create problems physically and emotionally. When I’m trying to manage my stress, I’m having discussions with our team and family members. Also, I’m trying to not overload on information. It is important to understand the facts and keep up to date on what is going on, but I don’t want to overload by watching television 24/7 or staying with a newspaper all day long. Also, I try to avoid thinking about negative things and push myself. I make sure I’m sleeping at least 8 hours to get more energy for the rest of the day, and sometimes I’m taking a walk in the park to release my stress levels. By learning from our mistakes, I believe we will be growing even better in the future. 

Who are your competitors? And how do you plan to stay in the game?

Peter Trebek : There are a lot of competitors who are offering transcription, captioning, and translation services. However, our competitors are mainly focusing on AI transcriptions, not human-generated. Other competitive points that set us apart from the competition are: six hours turnaround time, accuracy of over 99%, human-generated services only, free trial, translation to over 53 languages and more than 5000 active freelancers.

We plan to stay in business by focusing on competitive pricing and innovation, and always look for new ideas to help the world more connected through better communication between people, power productivity and solve challenges around the searchability and accessibility of multimedia content.  

Your final thoughts?

Peter Trebek : Thank you for interviewing me! Now, it’s time to get back to work! 🙂 

Your website : 

https://gotranscript.com/