Not Showing Your Product Make Great Startup Videos

Its fine we all make mistakes, one of ours I am going to share was to produce a little product video a year ago and then expect people to understand all the technical terms are and jump right into our beta and convert to life-long customers. Wrong! Nobody cares about our product if they do not know what pain it solves. Watching an interview with Miguel Hernandez on Mixergy (he’s from GrumoMedia), a month ago made me realize how bad our first video actually was.

Tell a Tale

What I got as main message from the interview was that we should tell a two minute story on our homepage to explain the problem and relate it to real figure explaining the problem and solving it using your product. So no more screen-casts of yellow mouse movements and me sitting behind my laptop at home, making these. You’re not going to buy an application, you’re buying a solution to a problem your having. Check out the video of a new service called “Flow”, it’s a task management solution and do you see a product in there NOPE!

Write a script

Pick a concrete example of your problem and keep it simple. Get e scenario that shows this problem and a way to solve it (your product). Then it has to have a call to action in the end, I guess sign-up for free trial, so they do not get stuck with a nice video but no follow up step. Write a script (that you can use for voiceovers) and it should be again SIMPLE AND CONCRETE!

Storyboard

Every sentence in your script should be combined with a visual image you need to make the connection. How to make a storyboard… its all in the two-minute video below.

Voice-over

Now you have a script an a storyboard. You need a voice-over. Also this is something important. We used Voices.com for our first video and I will do it again. For less than 300 USD you have an enthusiastic person telling you the script sentence by sentence and recorded in a good quality. No need to look further (unless you need Irish voice-overs, use Peihole for that)

Ready for Production

The “Flow” video above will set you back 10k at least but it can be done the 99Design way. Yep, crowdsourcing video production is now possible with Wooshii. (see video below). This is a friendly format of crowdsourcing and when you follow the above steps you will get great pitches from producers and prices are good. For a 1 minute video, they recommend a budget of 1200 USD and for a two-minute video a 1600 USD budget. But as always with crowdsourcing, if you only have a 1000 dollar, put that as your pricing and I am sure there less professional producers that want to do it.