Sean Holladay, 27, recalls the moment he and his brother Tim, 35, conceived the idea for their app, Crowd Mics. They were in a large meeting and having difficulty hearing the questions being asked by other members of the audience. “I leaned over to Tim and said, ‘Hey, is there some way we could turn our phone into a microphone?’” he says.
About one year later, in February 2014, the duo unveiled Crowd Mics at Launch Festival, a start-up event in San Francisco. In its first year, the app was used at events hosted by PayPal, Univision, Salesforce, and Novartis. Along the way Tim, who previously worked in tech sales and commercial real estate, and Sean, who ran a janitorial business and was finishing a degree in nursing when Crowd Mics launched, have experienced a big learning curve.
“When we thought of the idea, we thought, ‘This is brilliant.’ So we went to look for it and we couldn’t find it,” Tim says. “That should have been a red flag—if nobody is doing something there’s probably a good reason.” What they came to realize is that it’s difficult to transmit audio fast over Wi-Fi. The brothers admit some of their early clients were frustrated because the delay between the person speaking and the sound hitting the speakers was too long, at about 300 to 400 milliseconds. In October 2014, an update to the app dropped that time to around 70 milliseconds, which Tim calls a “huge deal.”
In recent months, Crowd Mics has been used at Vodafone’s European sales meeting for 1,500 people and at the Think conference in Colorado.
Meanwhile, the brothers are continuing to refine the app based on client feedback. Up next: a moderator function and additional audio enhancements. And don’t tell the brothers that business and family don’t mix. The two live just two houses apart from each other in Mesa, Arizona; their nine children play together regularly; and they work 12-hour days together out of Tim’s garage (which has been retrofitted with air-conditioning and flooring). “Our passion and energy is only amplified by the fact we are siblings,” Tim says. “We have zero fear or concern about burning a family relationship because family is always first.”
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