Ultraspeaking's $0 growth engine

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Ali Abdaal recommends them. So do Lenny Rachitsky, Tiago Forte, Steph Smith and Ramit Sethi. The biggest names in the creator economy, the kind who charge five figures for a single sponsored post, all vouch for the same public speaking company. But Ultraspeaking paid them nothing. "My budget is all of zero", their head of growth Anne Kelley told me.

So how does a speaking course get the most expensive creators in the world to promote it for free? I simply had to find out for myself.

Every brand claims their way beats the alternatives. “The number 1 marketing platform in the country.” Sure you are. It costs nothing to say and it convinces absolutely no one. So when Ultraspeaking says “most public speaking advice is wrong”, it should be met with a similar eye-roll response to the rest.

But it isn’t, and the reason gives us some really useful insights. Most companies try to win the argument by stacking up credentials and testimonials until you take their word for it. Ultraspeaking facilitates a moment where you prove the claim to yourself, in real time, whether you intended to or not.

That revelatory moment powers the entire company. It’s even the centrepiece of their origin story.

Tristan de Montebello used to turn bright red when he spoke in groups. With his now co-founder Michael Gendler coaching him, he went from an anxious public speaker to being a finalist at the World Championship of Public Speaking in less than 7 months. The turnaround was so significant that Scott Young told the story in a chapter of his bestselling book, Ultralearning.

After this big learning project, Tristan was attending a networking dinner where the host asked him to give a short impromptu talk on rapid learning. The old speaking anxiety came flooding back.

7 months of work, a world championship finalist, and two unscripted minutes still undid him. He'd trained one skill, the same skill 99% of other speaking tips and tricks focus on. The planned speech. Write it, memorise it, choreograph it, deliver it. But almost nothing in real life works like that. You're in a team meeting, or a client is picking your proposal apart, or you've got thirty seconds to get an exec on your side. Most of those moments are unplanned, and you can't memorise a script to navigate through any of them.

So Tristan and Michael built a method to train the underlying skill, the ability to speak with ease in any situation, planned or not. While everyone else offers quick fixes like counting your filler words, opening with a question, or making eye contact with the audience, Ultraspeaking would argue that makes things worse. You’re trying to remember to do 15 things at once and you end up becoming monotone and blanking. These are symptoms. As the founders put it, "you can't bolt tips and frameworks onto nerves and overthinking. Fix what's underneath, and the surface stuff takes care of itself".

Their method runs on volume, hundreds of quick reps with other people rather than a few rehearsed set pieces. With enough practice and live feedback, speaking under pressure stops feeling like a big deal. They also made it fun, which sounds like a nice-to-have but it’s actually the most important part. Nobody can do hundreds of reps of something they dread. Once you start to enjoy it, the confidence follows.

I went through Ultraspeaking's cohort earlier this year. The first exercise we did put a half-finished analogy on screen, something like "unicorns are like cartwheels because…", and gave me about 3-4 seconds to finish it out loud before the next one landed. 6 in a row. I had the same first reaction as I think most people would. Complete and utter dread. I absolutely did not want to do this, especially on a video call in front of a bunch of people I’d never met but for whatever reason felt like I needed to impress. Then, a few rounds in, I got into a rhythm and realised “Oh, I can actually do this pretty well”.

That confidence was short lived, the next game undid me. It was all about slowing down and pausing, which I found almost impossible. I realised I default to filling silence and actually have a decent ability to come up with something to say off-the-cuff. But when it comes to slowing down and being considered and purposeful, I really struggle. The game showed me that in 60 seconds. No one had to point out my weakness, I experienced it and came to the realisation myself.

That's the difference between this gamified experiential approach and the normal tips and tricks. A framework or script hands you the answer that sounds right, and the simplicity of it helps settle the nerves. But it doesn’t actually work. The Ultraspeaking games don’t give you blanket answers. Instead, through reps and live feedback, they let you find out what you specifically need to work on.

Ultraspeaking’s signature game came out of watching exactly that. Coaching an early student in a backyard, Michael and Tristan asked him "what's the most important invention in the world? Go." He froze, hunting for the perfect answer, confidence draining by the second. So they cut his time to one second and fired another prompt, then another. Once he had no room to edit, the overthinking stopped, the words just flowed, and the ideas were no worse for it. They turned it into a game called Rapid Fire Analogies. You can play it yourself, free, in their app.

When I finished the Ultraspeaking cohort I found myself raving about it, without really deciding to. Something had clicked in my mind, and I wanted to share it. A discovery about yourself is a story you can't help talking about.

Multiply that across everyone who does the course. Around 60% of Ultraspeaking's new customers arrive through word of mouth. Students recommend it to friends and colleagues on their own, with nobody asking them to. Anne's team is only now starting to nudge it on purpose.

The famous names work the same way, just with bigger reach. Ali Abdaal, Lenny Rachitsky, Tiago Forte and the rest vouch for free. They went through the experience, had the transformation moment, and told their audiences because it was their own story to tell. Lenny Rachitsky calls it "the best public speaking workshop I've ever come across". That's why it lands. A paid endorsement gets ignored pretty quickly and easily, but an earned one carries more weight, and no competitor can buy it.

The pattern is so consistent even Anne herself is a case study. She first met Tristan and Michael when participating in one of their workshops. She thought she was already a good presenter, but through the experience realised she'd been over-preparing and avoiding speaking opportunities. Shortly after taking Ultraspeaking, she felt this permission to stop using speaker notes, stop memorising her presentations, and, she got more visible at work and a promotion followed. In her own words, “it changed my life at work”. She was so sold that when she moved back from France to the US she asked to come and help grow the company. Ultraspeaking’s own Head of Growth is a convert from their product experience.

That's the real advantage of building growth around self-discovery. Persuasion has to be constantly pushed out into the world. A discovery spreads on its own.

They found the limits through an experiment in January this year. Anne was trying to scale the experience for more volume of sharing. She recruited fifty creators to be coached like I was, and they all scored the experience 10/10. Anne then handed them a sharing kit after and asked them to post. Almost nobody did, and she spent 12x the effort chasing it. Fifty people had the same incredible experience, but didn’t share it. The sharing kit gave the creators the marketing copy, but didn’t capture the creator’s experience or what would be relevant for their audience. You can't just hand someone the story of their own transformation in a brief.

Also, the discovery is just a starting line. My sessions showed me my weakness with total clarity, but they didn’t fix it. The line I keep coming back to is ‘Don't practice until you get it right, practice until you can't get it wrong’. That gap between identifying the problem and closing it is significant.

Word of mouth growth that compounds has to be built into the product. You can't buy it or program it. It comes exclusively from the moment when a customer proves the value to themselves, and once that moment exists, the sharing takes care of itself.

It helps to reframe your focus. Most of us reach for the downstream levers first, like a referral program or affiliate kit. Anne's creator brief experiment showed that their creator sharing didn’t work at scale. Creators who rated the experience 10/10 still wouldn't post when briefed. The product creates advocacy. Marketing’s job is to translate that story so it resonates most with their audience.

Everything else in Ultraspeaking's playbook follows from that. They sell the transformation over the feature list, because the part people retell is their change in identity on the other side of the fear. They pour effort into hand-built and unscalable relationships, because that's where the proof is strongest. It's also why no competitor can copy their results. The best word of mouth is expensive to earn and impossible to fake.

So the key question really has nothing to do with channels or tactics. Where, inside your own product, does a customer prove your claim to themselves? Facilitate that moment, and your customers do the marketing for you. Miss it, and no campaign will cover the gap.

Ultraspeaking have figured it out, and you can add my name to the list of creators who vouch for them. You can sign up for their training and check out their free app here.

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