John Kenny, co-founder and CTO realized a key selling point of the service could be the ability to remove the background of product images customers found on the internet. They would then be able to incorporate them into the room renders they were designing. Competitors at the time offered only preselected partner brands’ offerings.

“If you're creating a room design, it makes a huge difference to be able to design with any product you want,” says Kenny. “You can just knock the background from any products you find across the web, take the background out of the picture of a lamp, a couch, or whatever else.”

At the start, Spoak was conceived of as an eDesign service pairing customers with interior designers.

Over time, the founders realized there was a real market made up of amateur, hobbyist or interior designers who needed easy-to-use software that could help them design quickly and without advanced technical know-how.

Removing backgrounds then, would be crucial to the Spoak service – which launched in its first iteration in April 2019 – but the tech team was small, just Kenny and another software engineer.

“It wasn’t something I wanted to invest resources in,” he says. “Building it from scratch would have taken a long time, maybe six months. And I felt it was a problem that other people had probably already solved.”

A quick search on ProductHunt revealed remove.bg could indeed fix the issue.

“Once I saw you had an API I knew we could work with it,” he adds.

As part of the pivot to serving designers, Spoak trialed remove.bg as part of being able to provide interior designers with the tools they needed.

“We were introducing remove.bg with a very low user base at the time. It was a ‘let’s just try it and see how it works and if our users like it.’ We played around on the site itself, just to try a few images just to get a sense that this is exactly what we want.

“After that, I basically just integrated with the API straightaway and we released it to our users and started paying remove.bg monthly based on usage.”

Background removal was available to all customers as of April 2020 and remove.bg is absolutely core to the Spoak service.

“It allows people to quickly visualize their new space and start designing,” says Kenny.

remove.bg now processes 70,000 images a month for Spoak and Kenny is delighted with the quality of remove.bg.

“Over the years, remove.bg has been a very solid, reliable service that is easy to use. That’s not something you can say about a lot of the SaaS services we use.”

Going forward, Spoak is consulting with remove.bg about offering full-size images to customers as a higher-priced add-on rather than the previews they currently provide through the API.