I’m an advisor for GadgetTrak and their founder, Ken Westin, recently showed me a video he produced for the grand total of $250 if you don’t count the cost of the FinalCut software ($250) and Flip HD camera ($200). It is a pretty amazing piece of work for something he did himself using low cost tools available to everyone.
GadgetTrak Laptop Security – HD Version from Ken Westin on Vimeo.
In addition to using his own footage from the Flip HD camera he also used video from iStockphoto, which I also use for all my graphic images on my blog. The footage cost him a mere $100 with unlimited rights to the footage and no licensing fees. Additionally, he used voices.com for the voice over on the video for $150.
I found this quite amazing and a credit to Ken’s lean startup mentality and resourcefulness. A bid for a video of this length would run you around $6,000, the bid Ken was given originally, and could potentially cost much more. Would you get a more polished and professional product? Perhaps. But this is simply incredible work for the money.
What I love about things like this is not that it is taking away from the professional design firms. Believe me, they don’t do much business with early stage startups because it is too expensive for the startup and not lucrative enough for the firm. Instead, this is putting powerful tools within the reach of a startup if they are willing to roll up their sleeves, learn something new, and take advantage of all the great tools and resources that are available today.
You can bet that I will be using this method for any videos I produce in the near future.
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I think it’s great that the average person has this capability within reach. I own a production company, http://www.mobilecastmedia.com. The thing you have to keep in mind is the average person is not going to have basic video editing skills and a project like this will take a month or more for them to complete and usually doesn’t turn out well. For example, with the thousands of choices that come up with each iStockphoto keyword search, to find a good piece of footage or still photo can take 2 – 4 hours (each shot). I’ve spent more than a day looking for more difficult shots. What’s a month worth? Are you going to try to learn every thing about all of your marketing activities? Video editing, webmastering, Illustrator, InDesign, Joomla, copy writing? It’s going to take years and your startup is going to fail in the meantime. If you’re already a producer and it only takes a week, it might be worth that week. Otherwise, your time is better spent networking at in-person events.
Thanks for your comment John and I agree with you for the most part. There will always be a need for more professionally produced videos and as companies get busier and need higher quality they will need to turn to production companies as I have myself on many occasions. My point here is not that production companies are obsolete, far from it, but rather that for many startups with a very limited budget, video used to be out of reach as a medium to communicate and now it’s not.
I would disagree with you on how long it takes to find good footage. 2-4 hours? Certainly not for a still photo, perhaps a little longer for video since you have to watch the segment. Even if it was 2-4 hours, for many startups investing this time may mean the difference between having a video and not having one.
Thanks for your comment.
Thanks for your response. It does take 2 – 4 hours per photo and longer for motion shots. For example, we made a video last year promoting our business video podcasting services. There are no results in iStockphoto searches for iphone or ipod. You can, however, see these shots if you search for “headphones and listening.” Search these terms gives 10K results. After hours of searching, you get a great shot, but the person has a tattoo or there’s something else that doesn’t work.
We spent three days searching Getty and iStockphoto getting the still shots you see in the 30 second video below. All the motion shots we filmed ourselves to save money – HD shots cost a lot. To reduce search time and get better and more unique photos (see next point) we are using Getty, which costs us $200 – 400 per still shot. I don’t even want to tell you how long this video took to produce – and we already have the skills. Here is the video with the shots:
http://bit.ly/28subB
Especially for more generic shots, it is important NOT to use a photo that is being used by thousands of others (you can see the downloads). We sell to businesses and in last year’s iteration of our website, I had a prospect recognize some of our stock shots – it made us look cheap and we didn’t get the business. It’s hard to find a GOOD shot that FEW are using. We DID in fact use less popular shots for this site, but because they were good, they became popular and recognizable in the coming months. That’s why even small companies buy out the rights to photos. If you want to use stock photos, you will spend a long time searching.
I was recently reading “Book Yourself Solid” (which is a great book for service startups) and I believe this is the book where they say to skip certain expensive marketing things like brochures because they are too expensive. Videos are also expensive. The average person could not produce the video you have listed. In fact, with some of the editing in the piece, I would expect it is two weeks of work for an editor with a year of full time editing experience.
Everything looks easy from the outside. The average DIY person gets stuck and either wastes a lot of time or “pushes it through” and lets the quality slide. Most of the DIY videos I see do more to cheapen brands and hurt sales. If they don’t have the money, the average startup is better off getting out and meeting people to generate sales.
John, you make some great points. Wasting time when you don’t have the expertise and producing deliverables of lower quality are both things that startups should avoid.
I simply wanted to point to what is possible for those individuals who put their mind to a project and have some level of aptitude for the video medium. I have often found a correspondence between technical talent and a passion for video in companies I have worked with. If you have someone with those skills in your startup it is possible to produce something that represents your company well.
Technology demonstrations and short product presentations are something, for example, where I believe that video can add significantly to the online experience and can be achieved by startups.
At the end of the day, I was impressed by Ken’s initiative and what it cost him to produce the high quality end result. I do believe that he is a skilled individual, but I also believe that there may be other startups out there that have employees with similar skills and could get good results as well.
You are right that “everything looks easy from the outside.” This represented hard work and skills that are acquired through experience. Thanks for adding so much to this post.
We all agree here. To be honest if I could afford a professional production company to do a video for us I would have. I actually plan to bring on a professional company to film some clips for us once we can afford to do so. One thing this has allowed me to do is to take more of a director’s role and identify the key messages I want to convey for the company. Working through this process also gave me more ideas I will implement once we can afford to do so. I would particularly like to work with professional actors as well to work through some scenarios.
John your comments about bad quality productions hurting the brand are spot on. Actually, what gave me the idea to do the video is looking at my biggest competitor, they are a large publicly traded company with a massive marketing budget and here is the video they produced:
http://bit.ly/1LTLcl
The entire video is stock footage, I even found the majority of their footage when I was searching for clips. I thought it was pretty cheesy how it was implemented and figured I could do better, a lot better. I do wish that I could get some scenes filmed professionally to really “tell the story” visually vs. having to use stock footage and plan to do so once we can afford it.
I do have some skills that most others do not, I designed and developed our website, built the backend, as well as design our print collateral and our packaging and learning Final Cut came fairly easily. However I don’t think building a basic video is outside the realm of most people’s capability, of course the writing, sequencing and telling the story is particularly difficult. If anything the process led me to appreciate the work that production companies do, while at the same time making sure that when I am ready for the professional production I get what I pay for and can communicate clearly what I want.
Super cool example of what is possible with common tools, some confidence and creativity. John has a right to be worried. Consumer technology is always what was once the property of “pros”. Keep getting better John or become obsolete!
I’m most impressed with getting professional voice overs for $150. I’ve helped produce videos at past companies, and by far this was the biggest failing of the video. Most companies will either use an internal resource or someone at the video production company. In most cases, those voice overs can ruin an otherwise great video.
Great article, keep the “low cost tools” thread for start ups going.
Great comments from everyone. One thing this discussion has brought up in my mind is the skill set you might look for from your web master or other marketing employees. John is right that it does require a strong skill set to produce a quality one like I included here, but the capital investment, which used to be a significant barrier, is now almost non-existent.
I can post a job requirement which places an preference for experience with video editing and FinalCut in addition to web capabilities. With the prevalence of self publishing through sites like YouTube and the relatively cheap technology that puts video production in the hands of the masses I’ll bet that this experience is more available than one might think.
One thing I should point out…Webmaster as a position is dead. Nowadays think “Communications Director”
Also, the best web developers I know come from a liberal arts background and not a technical one and are always learning new skills. Seriously I think some of the best programmers I know actually have history degrees.
Thanks for your responses. I agree with your points and that online video is now viable for startups that have some talent and a bit of time. It’s especially good for showing and demonstrating – good for product companies. For service companies, it’s a little harder to show a service, but I find customer testimonial videos are effective here.
As with so many creative tasks I would suggest crowdsourcing as another alternative to producing such videos. Although not quite for $250 you could produce similar through a number of crowdsourcing sites for well under the $6000 mark !
You can control the script the look the feel and yet relieve yourself of the time taken to produce. Earl days of any start up both time and cost are critical.
Number of options
wooshii.com (interest declared)
poptent.com
99designs (soon apparently)
Hi Scott et al,
Thank you for sharing this interesting article! Ken sent me a link and I was thrilled to see the video and hear one of our talent in action.
I’ll be embedding the code for the video and linking back to your article on our blogs at Voices.com.
Thank you again for telling Ken’s story and also for the link!
Warm wishes,
Stephanie Ciccarelli
Co-founder of Voices.com
It was my pleasure Stephanie! The service you provide at voices.com is really of great service to technology companies looking to produce videos in house. It enables them to accomplish things that would have simply been out of reach to them before. Thanks for your comment.