We have our own, first video! Great!

After always thinking about how to communicate the functions and advantages of Commitly, it quickly became clear to us that we would need a video. We are not that enthusiastic about the classic explanatory videos, but we don't have the budget for a professional video. If you are interested in how this came about, please read on.

Market Analysis & Product Focus

Even at the start of Commitly, we spent a lot of time observing the market. Which players are on the market? How do they communicate? What is good and what is not so good? What do we like? Who are the best? Over time, we have developed quite a good overview. In a Google Sheet we note down all the information that is relevant to us. On a separate sheet, we recorded all the videos we came across and rated them according to the school grading system.

Zendesk turned out to be the clear winner. Here, functions are presented in a nicely understandable, visually reduced way and with a lot of humour. All the points of the website are taken up in the video and vice versa. The challenge for us was that although we knew what we were developing with Commitly, we hadn't thought about marketing at that point. We also knew that a video a la Zendesk would come at quite a cost. So we put video on the back burner.

Beta Test and Website v1.0

Our beta test started on 23 November 2018. In order to have a kind of landing page for the testers, we prepared the launch of our homepage in September/October. In the product road map, we had recorded all the topics that seemed important to us from our past. The claim was great, we will revolutionise the topic of financial management with Commitly! And then the beta testers came and asked their questions. We quickly realised that we were communicating far too unspecifically with the term financial management and were raising expectations that were too high, too broad. In addition, questions immediately arose such as how to distinguish ourselves from other fintech companies such as Fastbill and candis.io. And we do not cover online accounting functions in the classic sense.

Soft Launch & Market Focus

In February 2018, we then launched the soft launch. Finally, we were able to flip the switch from product to market focus! In workshops, we discussed the target groups as well as the functions and advantages of Commitly. The website was revised, the social media channels set up. And suddenly it was there again, the desire for a video.

Script

So we took the marketing messages developed in the workshops and developed a script. In doing so, we borrowed from Zendesk.

But how and where should we get the animations and video sequences? We started sketching our ideas in Apple Keynote. The first slides quickly became animated slides and we already had an idea of the direction it could go in. There was still the issue of the rotated images. Here we found what we were looking for at shutterstock.

Film production

Ok, we had all the ingredients ready, so off we went into Final Cut Pro X land. At least that's what we thought. Although I've had a lot to do with Final Cut as an amateur in the past, creating animated graphics is something else again. Within no time I was at the end of my FCPX knowledge. So there it was, the cruel reality. No music without money, or in our case, no video? Now improvisation was necessary - and reaching into the Apple box of tricks. Apple Keynote has a great way of exporting presentations as Quicktime movies. So we took the stock videos and imported them into Keynote. And suddenly our sketch became the actual film ... Unfortunately without sound.

Setting - simple part

It was much easier to work with a film in Final Cut. We searched for royalty-free music on YouTube and found what we were looking for. To make the animations more lively, we added sound effects directly from FCPX for the messages or typing on Tim's keyboard.

Narration or narrative

That was or is the difficult part. In our idea, a speaker narrates the functions of Commitly. Alternatively, we could also work with intermediate texts and only music, but then we would lose a lot of our original idea. But a professional narrator costs money again and now we were already so far with a small budget. If we narrated it ourselves, it would also increase the authenticity at the same time. We were so close to completion. So I dared to experiment and took on the role of the narrator. Since we don't have a professional microphone, I had to use my AirPods. And with that, the video was finished.

Now let's get some feedback. Gregor, a friend of mine is a partner in a production company. I emailed him the video via WeTransfer. His post-production man was quite impressed and only had one point of criticism:

"I would change the speaker. Doesn't sound professional and has too little pressure/proximity - is also not well miked - and is rather soporific in combination with the music. Suggestion: Other speaker/speaker - better voice recording heard more voluminous/closer/livelier/cleaner."

The final product

In the end, we decided that authenticity and a small budget come first. If there are too many complaints about the speaker, we may reconsider the suggestion of a professional speaker. But until then, here is our Commitly Intro Video.

Edit:

The winner was the professional speaker : ))

(proud)

Credits: Photo by Jürgen Faè