For the last few years, it has been a privilege to work with folks leveraging viddler technology such as Gary Vaynerchuk.
It’s also been a privileged to work with such a great team that’s focused at delivering the best video technology.
The latest hire, Billy Disney, is first full-time hire outside that development/support workflow, and with the Viddler Spotlight series, has begun highlighting the love affair and “privelegedness” we have with our customers:
And with this amazingness, Billy humbly bakes himself as folks to be privileged to work with.
Yesterday, Dmitry Shapiro, founder of Veoh, put together an incredibly respectful post going over the in’s and outs of Veoh going bankrupt.
First off must say I have a ton of respect for the Veoh team, Dmitry, and the product itself. It was always incredible seeing the pure amount of technology come out from the Veoh team.
Also, being a co-founder of a video site myself, I can’t imagine how painful it must have been getting stuck in court instead of working on the product and going bankrupt because of that. Not sure I would have handled it as gracefully as Dmitry did.
Allow me to take a step into memory lane…
It is 3 years ago and the race of the video destination. Veoh, Revver, vMix, vSocial and the 800 pound gurilla… All of us competing with features, community and spending a ton of money to do so.
What I want to share is how Viddler has lucked out into building built a sustainable business where others have failed:
1/50th Raised in Funding – in total Viddler has raised less then $2M in funds. Not on purpose either.. We really just couldn’t raise more funds then this. Whether it be bad location, crowded space, or me being first time entrepreneur, this is tiny round compared to the sites we were competing with. What it forced us to do is stay small, control our budget, and get profitable based on lower overhead. Today, Viddler is 16 people. Everyone on board are rockstars at what they do and we are hiring at a slow and steady pace keeping the quality high.
Market Maturity – video marketing adoption, personal branding, viewers watching video.. all of this has increased to where we are at a point where our product makes sense, and even worth paying for.
Bandwidth Costs Affordable - three years ago, the price per GB of bandwidth we were paying was 50x what we are paying for now. If we were paying what we did 3 years ago we wouldn’t have a sustainable business today.
Video Advertising with No Ad Sales Team - three years ago you needed to sell directly to advertisers to have a chance at selling preroll/overlay inventory. Now with the many different ad networks and standardization with VAST compliant networks it’s all about optimization. The $250k/year + commission VP of Ad Sales is no longer needed.
English Focus – We haven’t had an international “non-english” presence at all. If it’s questionable, we can’t interpret it, and overseas it’s not allowed on Viddler. This keeps costs down. Veoh was hosting alot of Anime. That content is expensive to delivery.
Bethlehem, PA – An hour from Philadelphia and two hours from NYC, we might as well be based in the middle of nowhere. This has helped us focus on the product (instead of the local scene), stay under the radar with competition, and hire extremely talented people (no competition in Bethlehem) at significantly more affordable rates then California, Boston, or NYC.
Again, all the respect to Dmitry. Wish him the best in his next venture, and hope this conveys how we are still around, and going to be around for the long haul.
Jim Louderback, CEO of Revision3 has launched his blog, louderback.com. Jim is an old-school internet dude, if Jim started this blog only halfway through his internet career he could have registered jim.com.
Seriously though, Jim is great to Viddler and community. If you haven’t done so already make sure and checkout Revision3Beta. If you are looking for another Gary-Vaynerchuk-like “personality” in the video space, make sure to subscribe to his feed!
Now all I gotta do is convince him to get a Viddler.com account and branded player
If you have noticed my videos, I have taken out the Viddler brand and customized the player to really emphasize our positioning on Viddler. If you haven’t seen branding, check out this page with a few of the branded players.
With our “Brand Yourself” launch we have been switching the way we have been messaging ourselves to be a “Powered By Service” rather then a “Brand Claiming Service”. This is certainly a decentralizing our strategy but we really believe that supporting video podcasters is about taking away friction in this video space.
To point this out, Gary gave us mad props on this at his keynote (video still pending upload) but as Donna Papacosta points out, he was pretty adamant about it:
Our marketing on T-Shirt Distribution has the exact same messaging, check out some nice photo’s I found on Flickr of the shirts we printed out:
I love people using Viddler and cannot wait for all the rollouts we are going to push over the next month that are solving problems in this marketplace.
First of all, if you were even thinking about New Media Expo, you should be going.
If you haven’t introduced yourself yet and are going to New Media Expo, do it via Video. All you have to do is tag your video “newmediaexpo” or “newmediaexpo2008″ and it will go in general category of NewMediaExpo Videos. If you want to do an introduction, tag it as “newmediaexpointroduction” for it to go in introduction section.
This morning, this magazine arrived, and was happy to find an interview with Gary Vaynerchuk. Gary makes an excellent point in Affiliate Summit Magazine, Feed Front. It’s about being Genuine. He calls it being a RAT (real, authentic, and transparent). Now, I wouldn’t be big on this if I wasn’t caught up with all the spamming/real internet marketing occuring on Viddler. Check out Viddler Tag: Marketing, to see how big this has become on Viddler. It’s ugly. Cash gifting, lead generation, real estate marketing all seem to fit into this. Some of this has been brought on from TubeMogul, an amazing tool for podcasters to distribute high quality shows everywhere, but also a lead generators tricks of the trade.
At Viddler, we are a little conflicted with exactly what rules to put in place to prevent this and keep Viddler itself a “RAT”. Real Authentic Transparent.
The second post of this blog defines a new boom of entrepreneurs what I called “Digital Entrepreneur”. Still being in college at the time it’s funny how I have followed that path.
Creating a new mission for this blog I will be blogging about myself with this topic in mind. I don’t want to lose the personal flavor. Part of this has to do with a new initiative I have put on myself around personal branding (made redonculously famous by Gary Vaynerchuk). What does that mean in terms of technology? A good blog post on that shall come soon.
Also, I will be changing my bio on right to refer back to that original blog post.
This blog is going to start picking back up. With that my first goal is to get everyone of you that follows me on Twitter to listen up when I got something “worthwhile” to say.
<robertsandie> is a prefix I have been thinking about and is my #1 pick
#robertsandie was another one I thought about but am not really sure that’s the right solution for this (let me know thoughts).
Hello and welcome to my personal blog. My name is Robert Sandie, a digital entrepreneur, co-founder and President of Viddler. Join me as I update this blog on the daily challenges of startup.
