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.
In a recent strategic conversation someone recently said “wow, you guys should be marketing this more” when referring to # of customers, big accounts and profitability.
We do put much of this stuff on the blog and on Twitter but she was referring to the more traditional marketing techniques: Sponsoring events, parties, keynote speaking, press releases, email newsletters, etc.
This brought me to defend staying low key. Allow me to share reasons….
Benefits of Staying Low Key:
- Competition doesn’t pay attention (we have features implemented better then our competitors and they still haven’t caught up)
- You wouldn’t believe the amount of people buying into video hosting that don’t attend big shindig conferences or give two cents about press releases.
- Save time and money. What matters and what sells is usually how good your product is and how fast you are innovating. Also if your not spending a wild amount on marketing you can offer your customers with a more affordable product.
- Other companies do operate like this and succeed. For instance, has anyone seen Getclicky? Two guys building one of the best analytics toolset in the business. They are low key, no mainstream marketing strategy, and after investigating have a outrageous # of customers.
This isn’t to say we aren’t looking to improve our marketing strategy. Just a slight argument for staying under the radar.
And I will keep the company name I work for out of this, cause I know I have google alerts setup on our competition. #stayinglowkey
Was researching CSV icons for viddler analytics. Found some interesting examples from the different vendors we work with. Shared them below, let me know if you know any other good examples!
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.
A few Viddlers have asked me why this can’t be free for everyone, as Youtube does.
This is a good question, giving away everything for free is a very expensive business decision to pursue. We are focused on profitability and are certainly turning a little 37signal’ish.
To give you a little sniffy sniff.. check out what analytics looks like for me:
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.
#stayinglowkey
