It’s never easy to launch a startup. And numbers prove the notion: 3 out of 4 startups fail. Worst of all, if that happens when there is a team in place and you have already shelled out thousands or even millions into building a product.
To avoid this scenario, you have to test your business idea before production — show people a catchy promo video of your product to see what they think of it.
You can do so, even before the production of an actual product. As a famous English aphorism suggests — fake it till you make it!
Think First, Act Later
Let’s start with the basics: why do you need to validate your product idea?
«It is done because market validation helps determine whether your product is of interest to a given target market and therefore, whether it would be beneficial/makes sense to further invest in the product. Experienced entrepreneurs recognize that: validating the demand for your product is of the utmost importance.» Without interested customers, there is no need for a stylish design, unique features, or even a top-notch/brilliant team.
The idea is to test your idea before taking any further steps or making large investments. Otherwise, you’ll end up with a product that no one will pay for.
How do you verify the hypothesis for the product? Simply analyzing what people think of it. To do so, you can, of course, go out and interview your potential users or order an expensive survey on the matter. But there is a more agile and effective way: show your potential customers a vivid video showcasing your product to see if the idea appeals to them.
Using a video, you’ll be able to gather feedback on your product, draw conclusions based on it and focus on what proved to have potential, saving hundreds of thousands of unreasonable expenses. Plus, a video will enable you to find first customers, partners and, who knows, maybe even investors!
Make It Sexy
In the video, you can present your product in all its glory — the way you see it in your best fantasies. Just make it sexy! No longer than 30-40 seconds, in the format of an intriguing teaser, using style and language of the audience that you are targeting at.
If you are a tech startup, your audience is almost certainly on social media. And what is the most efficient type of content for social media today? Correct, video! A good promo video about your unique product can drag their attention when they are scrolling Facebook feed or browsing through Stories on Instagram.
Moreover, you can organize its distribution through various other channels: from media outlets to email newsletters, showing it at conferences or to your closest friends to get an instant response.
Cheap, Trendy, Catchy
Why is video efficient? There are multiple reasons:
It’s (fairly) cheap. The price of a promo video is insignificant compared to the cost of product development — it can cost less than 1% of your budget. So a good video is an effective way to get feedback from the market without spending tens of thousands of dollars on hiring developers.
It saves time. At times when we consume information literally ‘on the fly’, there is almost no time left for the thoughtful reading. Thus, video is becoming the most effective way to deliver a message. Within 30 seconds you can present all the information that would take at least several minutes to read.
It’s fast and responsive. Video is a very flexible format: using it, you can test different ideas at the same time and promptly adjust them to what your audience asks for. Moreover, a video will enable you not only to identify a demand on the market but also establish a cost for audience attraction and adjust your business model.
It’s a long-term investment. You’ll be able to “exploit” the video in many other ways. It can help you in marketing, investments attraction and pitching to media. You can also use it at offline events: conferences, meetups, presentations. Thus, the visual content you produce will quite likely to pay off further on.
Well, does this work?
Yes! And there is a real-life example to prove that.
One of our clients, a tech startup Wannaby, which develops a mobile AR platform enabling people to try on shoes, jewelry and apparel before making a purchase, wanted to test their products to find out which app they should invest their resources in.
Jointly with them, we produced over ten videos depicting different of their products. For one of them — Wanna Kicks, virtual sneakers try-on platform, — we made a video when the app itself didn’t exist yet. We made it appear as if it was real back then to show people how they soon will be able to buy new shoes with the help of AR.
Once the video was created, the team widely disseminated it through social media: Reddit, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook — and studied closely the audience reactions. They also reached out to different sportswear brands, that they wanted to work with, and showed the video to them. Thus, they wanted to figure out if big brands and companies can be interested in such technology.
And there was interest! Already at the stage of the video (just keep in mind — the app didn’t exist back then) they established good relations with a few brands and started discussing further cooperation. Plus, the team got access to active sneakerheads, who are currently assisting them in developing new products’ ideas.
So, to sum it up, they managed to receive essential feedback to understand which direction to take in developing the app. The team made sure there was a need for their product, and only after that, they started investing in building such a complex and costly technology.
Do you have a new business idea that you need to test? We are there for you!
In Slon Media, we’re helping companies translate their ideas into a visual prototype. We use the most advanced and cutting-edge tools for video production and distribution to help you get feedback fast while saving money.
