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From Voice Changing to Voice Moderation: How Modulate Found Product-Market Fit By Actually Listening

Sometimes the path to product-market fit requires founders to stop explaining and start listening. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Modulate CEO Mike Pappas shared how his company’s journey from voice-changing technology to voice moderation was shaped by an unexpected pattern in customer conversations.

The origin story isn’t what you might expect. Unlike many founders who build solutions to problems they’ve personally experienced, Mike and his co-founder Carter were driven by a broader vision of improving online interactions. “One of the big themes that we hit on a lot was this idea of, what is the Internet, and is it really living up to its promise?” Mike recalls.

Their initial focus was on voice-changing technology, but early customer conversations revealed an interesting pattern. Gaming studios kept asking about voice moderation capabilities. As a technologist-turned-CEO, Mike’s initial response was telling: “I, being a technologist, would say, ‘hey, that’s a totally different product. You’ve clearly misunderstood what I’m presenting. Let me explain it more clearly so you stop asking silly questions.'”

This resistance to pivoting, while natural for technical founders deeply invested in their original vision, could have derailed the company’s future. However, the market signals became impossible to ignore. As Mike puts it, “Our first customers found us and banged down the door and made us understand that this was a thing that they deeply needed.”

The pivot to voice moderation through their ToxMod product proved transformative. Mike shares that “over last year, we more than forexed in our annual recurring revenue,” including partnerships with major gaming studios like Call of Duty.

This experience shaped Modulate’s entire go-to-market philosophy. “First and foremost, we want to tell the truth,” Mike emphasizes. “We see ourselves not just as a vendor to a platform. We really want to be a partner.” This consultative approach extends beyond just selling software to helping platforms navigate complex regulatory landscapes.

“There’s a huge amount of activity these days in safety and privacy regulation,” Mike explains. “Facebook or Roblox have the resources to read thousands and thousands of pages of regulations and figure out what exactly they’re being asked to do. But most games are not that size.”

This market reality has guided Modulate’s thought leadership strategy. Rather than just selling software, they’ve positioned themselves as guides helping gaming platforms navigate an increasingly complex regulatory environment. This approach has helped them build deeper relationships with studios and expand their market presence.

Looking ahead, Mike articulates a vision that extends far beyond gaming: “We want to be the prosocial voice intelligence company. We want to be the organization that enables everyone across the globe to have more meaningful, richer, deeper conversations with each other and to understand each other and make the most out of those conversations.”

For founders navigating their own go-to-market journeys, Mike offers this crucial insight: “Listen to the customers when they tell you what they want… When you’re getting that consistent message, even if it’s just as it seemed to me, a message of them being confused about what you’re building – pause. Stop trying to hammer in your vision and really go back to saying where is the customer coming from.”

The lesson is clear: sometimes what appears to be customer confusion is actually the market trying to tell you something important. The key is being humble enough to recognize these signals and courageous enough to act on them.

This shift in perspective – from seeing customer “confusion” as a problem to be solved to seeing it as valuable market intelligence – ultimately enabled Modulate to build a category-defining product in voice safety. It’s a reminder that sometimes the best go-to-market strategy isn’t about better explaining your vision – it’s about better understanding what the market is trying to tell you.