Cat(ch) your customer!

Explainer videos for early-stage tech startups.

How your* customers know it’s for them.

*They are not yours until they like you.

As an artist cum developer who loves videos as a media to deliver messages to the right audience, I believe its the right time to use under certain conditions.

1. Videos are really popular and easily accessible(Through Youtube and other popular social media used videos insanely) these days.
2. But, People don’t really like to watch lengthy videos.

Famous and proven video styles

1. Screencast Video
   - Showcases how your product or service works
   - More about education than branding
   - Simple and low-budget
2. Cartoon Style
   - Storytelling (Eg: Shows how you solving your customer’s problem)
   - Characters represent your various brand personas (So the target audience is really important when designing the characters — good to have a unique character designed for your own product)
3. Whiteboard Animation
   - Similar to Screencast video style, but I personally don't like that.
4. Motion Graphics
   - Offer an elegant and engaging style
   - Really powerful and attractive nowadays. Powtoons and a lot of cloud-based animation tools exist out there to get the job done, but if you are not familiar or skillful on producing a video better got for an agency like Epipheo.
   - Here the most important incident is it is helpful to create really short/ lightweight animated Gifs that we can use in websites, blogs. mobile applications, social media and a lot of other places.
5. Mini(or Micro)-Documentary
   - Real people interacting all over the video with mixed on events (product in action, customers using it, makers creating the product inhouse, customers and developers interviewing and so forth and so on)
   - Really powerful as Motion graphics

A good example for Mini-Documentary: Ring Bell

A good example for Motion Graphics: Katoen Natie and Algolia

There are basically 2 types of videos we can have in our main focused scope, early-stage tech startups.

Plot based videos and all-in-one comprehensive(but it should be too small) videos.

Plot based video type:

Here the Plot is based on the Features of your product, the experience of your product and feedback from customers or else the founders or engineers express what it is, etc.

We can do it in the most effective video style so far in the industry for this, Mini-documentary style or Motion Graphics style.

Following is an example of that style:

All-in-one comprehensive video type:

We will reach our customers in single but all things in one video to deliver the full message. That is even we can do at least one minute of time if we manage it in a most creative way to deliver.

Motion graphics are really helpful in this video type.

Following is an example of this type in Motion graphic style :

Last but not Least

Whatever the style or type that you have already decided now, it will give you nothing until you or the video producer will come up with the greatest narration or idea with the script to your product. All rely(your money, time, etc) on this step.

There are a lot of things to discuss that fall under producing videos(Eg: dubbing, sound control, video effects, video rendering outputs, etc). But those are not relevant to this article, but really important when creating these kind of videos.