How I Saved $15K On My Explainer Video
If you are part of a lean mean bootstrapped startup like me, you may have explored different ways to create an explainer video for your new product. Going to a professional marketing firm can easily cost you at least $15K for a custom made 90 second video.
That is like getting charged $600,000/hr . Really??
Well I know I am over exaggerating here — but really, it is a lot of money that you don’t have to spend before you even have your first customer. Yes, I am sure you will get a kick-ass video, and yeah maybe their process is great and you end up with something so creative and unique. But $15K for 90 seconds? Really?
Since we are lean and all about MVP, I had a really hard time with spending this amount of money, it taking several weeks and ending up with a 90 second video clip. I really wanted a way I could use the MVP approach on my explainer video as well.
So I started playing around with DIY services like Animaker, PowToon and others. I thought doing a ‘cartoon’ style video would be good. I am sure you have seen these many times.
“Meet Joe, he owns a coffee shop and is having a hard time getting customers…”.
The cost of these services was very aligned with what we wanted to spend. And after signing up for their free account, I could tell that their library of assets to use in the video was pretty comprehensive. They also had many options like different character behaviors/emotions to make your video look very unique.
My problem was that I really did not want to spend a lot of time on this. I still had a lot of coding to do to get HashtagTexting.com off the ground. I fumbled around for several weeks trying to get these silly cartoon characters to tell our story. It was so frustrating that no matter what I did, I could not get it to look the way I wanted it to. It was taking way too long and still ended up looking cheesy.
I then stumbled upon another DIY video provider, Biteable. I am not really sure why they ended up on page 10 of my Google search. Maybe because the company is in Australia and I am in the US. I have no clue, but I am very glad that I ventured to page 10 of my search results that day of despair.
In a few minutes of playing around, I had my video.
Their approach is to have the preloaded scenes and templates, and you basically fill in a form for text or images to be replaced. So brain dead easy. No timelines, layers and keyframes or over complex interfaces.
Just fill out a form
and then click a button. The website spends a few minutes building and cranks out the video for you. Then with one more button click, the video is posted to YouTube.
I ended up going for their “footage scenes” because I felt it gave a very professional impression. Almost like I spent $15K on producing it.
When in fact it only cost $99 for a year membership.
Although their library is not huge, they had a nice set of “top down” style videos that I thought looked nice. It also made me really rethink my very wordy “script” that I started with. Sometimes keeping things super simple is best.
The cost, simplicity and time spent producing this felt very MVP enough for me, but hopefully does not look like I only spent $99 on it.
What do you think?
