My First Startup.
We all have heard of success stories where companies like Google and Airbnb which practically started from a basement/ living room actually went on to become multi-billion dollar businesses. Everyone likes to read success stories and wants one for them. But today, I am going to talk about what my failed startup taught me.
Yes, I had my own startup. Meet “Make My Video”.
The Product (Service):
Fresh out of B-school, I and one more friend wanted to do something on our own — something simple yet something that could create value for the users. Both of us had minds which were fueled by creativity, so we decided to wear entrepreneurial hats and get our hands dirty. In 2014 (our graduation year), there were approximately 1.8 billion photos¹ taken EVERY single day. We felt that the potential of photos was still not fully tapped and we decided to start our very own personalized video creating service (Didn’t you guess that from the name?).
Business Model:
We realized that there was a humungous growth in photos being clicked as the smartphone penetration was increasing, people were starting to express their feelings more and more through photos. While it was pretty straight forward to upload photos on a social media platform like Facebook, there was a section of the market comprising of people who wanted to make personalized videos for their loved ones but could not do it due to various reasons (explained below). We decided to move into that space and simplify this process for people.
Go ahead, check out our concept video:
Business Model Breakdown:
Service Offered: Personalized Video (content) creation
Product: 3–7 minute long videos
Target Audience: People who believed in expression through pictures but couldn’t make personalized videos due to lack of technical adeptness, a dearth of time, little understanding of design and most importantly people who didn’t possess the skill of being able to tell a story with pictures.
The problem being solved: Making a video for someone requires time, effort and well, creative skills. Not so much with MakeMyVideo. Here’s how:
How did it work:
A user could visit our website, sign up and fill up this form. Then we would reach out to the customer with a personalized link for uploading pictures/ videos that they want to be in the video. We also encouraged users to upload captions with some pictures (specific things that they’d want to mention) and leave the rest to us. Next step was calling the user and understanding the exact reason for the video (birthdays, anniversaries, valentines day or professional) so that we could create relevant content. Voila, your video is ready!
How we reached the Critical Mass:
We leveraged our B-school’s alumni network and sent out emails about our service and also offered discounts to the first few users. This helped us get our first order within 5 hours after the mail was sent. From there on, it was only uphill. Meanwhile, we also created a FaceBook page and a YouTube channel to showcase our work. This helped us get even more traction. Since our initial work was highly indicative of the quality of our content, we decided to be choosy about what kind of content we produce.
What happened next?
We had started the company just after we graduated and before we joined our jobs. We worked on multiple projects through this short break and also started getting better at it as time passed. At a point in time, there were so many orders that we decided to hire one more person (one of our B-school batchmates) for handling customers. This helped us shed some load and we both could concentrate entirely on the QUALITY of the videos. However, soon our full-time jobs started and we were finding it increasingly difficult to be able to do justice to both. After a lot of contemplation, we decided to shut the company as we were not ready to compromise on the quality of our product at all. And that was the end of MakeMyVideo.
Lessons Learnt:
- Product Conceptualization using Design Thinking: If you think your product improves the lives of consumers, make it. The reason why I think our service did well was that we conceptualized it using a technique called “Induction²”. Induction is a reasoning pattern in design thinking which allows designing a service/ product when you know what you have (pictures/videos in our case) and what is the value (personalized video) wanted by the user but the “how” is missing. We found a solution to the how.
- Reaching the Critical Mass: For any service/ product to take off, reaching a critical mass is utterly important. Critical mass³ helped us to get more traction via word of mouth as well visits on our website through referrals. We leveraged our alumni network and that turned out to work very well for us. This was instrumental for us as we were able to showcase the actual product portfolio on our website and build credibility.
- Analytics cannot substitute genuine user feedback: We were determined to get better since day 1 and we continuously engaged with our customers to seek feedback on the product. Ours being a personalized product which had customer sentiment to attached to it, feedback was what helped us deliver the product that the customer really wanted. Keeping this in mind, we use to do multiple iterations for free initially until we got a strong foothold of our skill. While this may not be possible in the real world, it worked very well for us in the “Introduction” stage of our product’s lifecycle.
- Scaling the business versus maintaining Product Quality: MakeMyVideo was our brainchild, something that was very close to our heart. Towards the end, when we were struggling with too many orders and too little time, it was excruciatingly painful to decide to shut it down. Both my partner and I were adamant that we didn’t want to compromise on the product quality. The result? We still get occasional emails/ FB messages about how the customer or his/her friends loved the video and want to get another one made :) It is also very important as a product owner/ manager to know when to roll back the product/ shut down the service.
This whole journey was almost 6 months long and was such a fulfilling experience for me. I learned so much that I wouldn’t trade a single minute of those 6 months with anything else. This is also how my passion for building a product, managing it and making customers happy came into being.
Still not bored? Go check out some of our work at MakeMyVideo YouTube Channel.
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