Brad Jefferson & Animoto.com - The end of slideshows!

(note: the italian version of this article is available on 7th Floor online magazine)

The web of the late 90's was pretty different from what we are now living online. I recall that, at the startup I used to work for, new features were developed only taking into account the product (surely of high quality) and people were just a marginal aspect. The value proposition was centered in offering our customers the best contents of a certain type, and this should have been enough to be successful. Tom Friedman defines this as the capability of "downloading", that is, to have access to the information. But always according to Friedman, the real internet revolution has begun when people had the opportunity of "uploading" their own contents to the web.

Today's websites focus their energy on the uploading factor. Take Amazon.com as an example, they have made their mayor strength through their customer's opinions. We are navigating in the river of new sites that have been called the Web 2.0, many of whom are just copies of each other.

I met Brad Jefferson, co-founder and CEO of Animoto.com, one of this new uploading sites that declares "the end of slideshows".

Animoto was born a bit by chance (see the garage story) and with a very definite dream. Says Brad: "Our passion is automating the creative process for creating video content that has the type of production value you'd expect to see in film or television. Simply put, when users upload their images and music to Animoto our technology should be able to infer the best way to put it all together into a video - all with a click of a button. We want anyone to be able to make professional looking videos, not just super technical people who own and know sophisticated editing software".

So the next time that you'll come back from a trip (or other event) full of digital photos, why don't you upload the best of them to flickr and then, with a song that reminds you of that experience, you make a video and share it with your friends? It won't be just a normal video, check out this one:

garage story
Animoto was founded by four 30-year-old buddies which went together to high school and three of them to college too. Their common link has always been that they're all incredibly passionate people who love to work hard and inspire each other. Brad specialized in enterprise software at company called Onyx Software, while the other three found themselves working in film, television and music.

"The idea for Animoto came from Stevie Clifton, our CTO, while he was doing documentary work for ABC. As a motion graphics artist, Stevie was responsible for the special effects and motion design that was incorporated into various ABC documentaries. Yet, Stevie is also a software engineer so he was always inventing ways to make his motion graphics job easier by automating certain aspects of his daily grind. One night at a NY hole-in-the-wall sake bar Stevie started drawing up some of his job automation ideas on a dirty napkin for Jason Hsiao, our President. After hearing the idea Jason basically said, "Stevie, that's great that you've come up with a way to automate your job but if we could implement this technology through the Internet so anyone could access it that would be something really special." Jason shared the business idea with me and I was hooked. We then pulled in Stevie's brother, Tom Clifton, our Creative Director, to round out our founding team".

business model
Animoto is based on the freemium (free + premium) model. Registered users can create 30 second Animoto videos for free. Creating a full-length video costs $3 USD or $30 USD for an annual all-access pass that allows for the creation of unlimited full-length videos. "We've also been experimenting with opt-in advertising that we call 'Distractions.' We've found that there's lots of commercial demand for our technology so expect to see some interesting developments on that front in 2008".

funding
Brad explains their starting funding: "We bootstrapped our first six months to create the Animoto.com alpha release. We launched the alpha site to friends and family in March 2007 and the feedback was very positive (albeit, it was from our loved ones). While we were thrilled that our alpha testers were loving Animoto.com, our stomachs sank a bit as we started our budget number crunching".

It takes a lot of processor power to render each unique video creation with a high quality production value, not to mention the bandwidth and storage needs.

"If our site was to become as popular as we had hoped the cost to run the infrastructure was going to mean that we'd require a fairly substantial infusion of cash which is something we wanted to avoid in order to maintain our ownership. We spent a lot of time planning for success so instead of rushing to launch Animoto.com publicly we took a step back and decided to completely re-architect our technical infrastructure on Amazon Web Services (AWS)".

They decided to sacrifice nearly four months to move Animoto.com to AWS, but they knew it was the right thing to do. During that period they continued to improve everything about the site and, more importantly, that extra time gave Brad enough time to find the right investors for Animoto. "With the new technical infrastructure our capital requirements were smaller. In fact, our capital requirements were so small that I was able to look no further than our family and friends to raise sufficient funds to complete our Series A private placement".

the launch
The site was launched as a private alpha in March 2007 and the private beta in July 2007. "Once we felt the private beta was solid we picked August 14, 2007, as our public launch date and a couple weeks before launch we invited a bunch a tech bloggers to take a sneak peak". Tech bloggers loved the service and wrote favorably about Animoto and August 14th was the D-day for the press release which made them public.

"In hindsight, we probably should have focused less on the tech circles and more on mainstream audiences; that's where our marketing focus is now".

relationships
Animoto allows users to retrieve photos from sites like Picasa, Flickr, Facebook and SmugMug to create videos and during 2008 the team will concentrate in strengthening the links with these and other communities.

"We see social platforms like OpenSocial and Facebook as great ways to get more people familiar with Animoto. The very nature - and brilliance - of a social platform, however, means that social networks like those from Google and Facebook can benefit from the value of apps like ours without needing to acquire companies like us".

In any case, during the first months of Animoto's life, several companies have expressed their interest in what these guys are cooking. "It was pretty cool to hear from Google and be invited to their campus to join their OpenSocial initiative just a few weeks after our public launch".

advice for entrepreneurs

• There's nothing better than working with people you really trust, admire and are inspired by
• Prove the feasibility of your idea as early as possible
• Plan for success; failure means you simply move on to the next idea
• Always take more investment than you think you need if it's available

Animoto in brief
- birthdate: Aug 2006
- employees / age range: 7 full-time & 4 part-time / 23-32 yrs old
- target audience: anyone who has access to digital images
- pc, mac, linux or who cares as long as it does the job? "I use a PC for my business function but all of our engineers and designers use Macs. Our entire web infrastructure is on Linux".
- success: in the first four months since launching, Animoto video creations have been viewed more than 10 million times.

"We thought Animoto videos from MySpace bands would account for a large percentage of these views since Animoto is the perfect music video creator but it's been amazing and inspiring to see the different types of videos our users are creating with Animoto: snowboarders touting their latest insanities, Facebook-fanatics crafting their latest "who-am-I" video profiles, football teams reliving their big Friday night win, animal-lovers that can't stop sending us videos of their pets, online daters trying to score just one date with a normal person, DJ's recreating that last night of Burning Man, models and actors working on their portfolio submissions, jazz quartets experimenting with live performance visuals, bikers bragging about the latest mountain they've conquered with evidence of bruises and blood, nature photographers showcasing their latest spread, real estate brokers looking to get top dollar for their listings, third-grade students surprising their teachers with their class presentations, illustrators discovering how to inject their art with even more life, conference speakers needing to kick-start their sleepy audiences, party organizers promoting the next hot bar scene, car enthusiasts boasting their new rims, brides creating the perfect wedding videos, aspiring film writers producing clever comedy shorts, memorabilia collectors showing off their collections, new parents proudly announcing the arrival of their new one, and even families keeping in touch with their sons and daughters serving in Iraq".

On Brad

Brad is 32 years old, married with a daughter who was born January 13, 2008. He was born in California and grew up outside of Seattle. Attended Dartmouth College and played American football all four years ("we went 10-0 and won the Ivy League my Jr. year").

His interests include anything that involves physical activity but favorites include football, mountain biking, running, skiing, snowboarding. His latest hobbies include photography and home improvement.

check out his LinkedIn profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/bradjefferson

- Past experience that was useful for launching Animoto: "At Onyx Software, I managed various teams and was always involved in the selling and implementing of our software. I use my sales and management skills everyday at Animoto. Near the end of my tenure at Onyx I managed the team that provided a lot of the reports to our Board of Directors. At the time, Onyx was a publicly traded company on the NASDAQ. I've found the skills of being able to analyze a company from a top-down and bottom-up perspective essential".

- What digital app/site/service has changed your working experience for good? "the iPhone"

- Digital entrepreneurs you admire? "All who give back in an philanthropic way".

Moo cards, or how to reinvent a business through design and co-creation

Personalization, co-creation and uniqueness have been amongst the strongest design trends in the last 6-7 years. It’s not enough to have a signed garment but it also has to be unique. It once happened only with haute couture or expensive cars and recently it has expanded to consumer products and “normal stuff” and it’s mostly about turning usual things to limited and personal editions. Think of the limited editions of Uniqlo T-shirts, Oki-ni apparel and Freitag bags, or the possibilities to change your Mac, refrigerator or wall by using Shalgo's Mozaikit: all of these let you distinguish yourself, become unique, at an (almost always) affordable price.


Richard Moross (RM) has applied a similar transformation to business cards, which must be something like 300 years old!

Richard is the founder and CEO of MOO.com, an online service that “prints nice things” like:

• MiniCards
• Postcards
• Sticker Books
• Greeting Cards

and other cute paper things.


I had the opportunity to catch RM on the phone for an interview on the origin and idea behind MOO before he left for his next trip, as this guy loves traveling (and photography as I later discovered).

GC> So let’s start with the 101, what’s the origin of the business and the name MOO?
RM> The company is 3.5 years old, but the name MOO came in the last 18 months. The original idea was all around pleasure cards, an alternative to business cards. So it was mostly about design, and we created our social network. The first version of the “business card business” was named “Joker”, but it was kind of controversial, and it was never going to be bought by kids.

He decided to take the business to the next level and get investment, so he needed a new name, short, usable in any language, compatible with the url and easy to remember:

RM> MOO was something I picked because it was sort of sweet and onomatopoeic... it was sort of charming and once I picked it I fell in love with it.

GC> But were you thinking about a cow?
RM> Funny enough it was originally “mu”. Having two Os in an internet brand had been lucky in part... you know, Google, so that is how it came back.

As they started rolling out the cards, people really loved them, but they just didn’t get the social network thing. “There were other far better social networks kind of appearing. It was early 2005 and Friendster was almost at its peak. Others like Flickr had already launched, and it was clear that ours was not going to be as good as the other stars”.

Moross dropped the social service and concentrated in loading their product into other communities. It accelerated the growth of the business and it was at that time that they changed the name. “We raised some money with Index Venture (a UK based venture capitalist firm) amd that’s when we became MOO and the company went from 1 employee to 5-6 people”.

From the business point of view, RM went against what marketing books preach: He was trying to develop his own social networking community, created the cards for them but realized that the cards were the real innovation, so he discarded the social engine and jumped into other existing communities.

RM> Flickr was the first channel we got involved in, and it happened for a number of reasons. First, our CTO was friends with Cal Henderson, which is Flickr’s CTO, so there was a personal connection and we got to know those guys very well personally... and we were all kind of fans and users of flickr.

The second thing that enabled that deal to happen the way it did was that flickr has world-class APIs that we were allowed to build on before the deal. We were enabled to first build the service and then take it and say “Well look, this is ready to go... if you guys want it you can just switch it on”. We actually built everything before the deal, and being able to show someone a working product in a working format was really helpful.

This was their first opportunity to work on integration and they learnt how to plug MOO into other communities and allowed them to propose it to different demographic and geographic regions. It followed that one you have the first agreement closed it was easier to present themselves to others. “It is one small step, and then you can take much longer strides”.

But it was not only the fact of presenting the mini-cards through a number one website that made the job, as it followed that the viral mechanism that spontaneously started inside the flickr groups (Malcolm Gladwell would call it the Tipping Point) was what took MOO to stardom.

They offered for a limited time 10 free minicards to try the service. You could upload 10 different photos from your flickr collection (or from your favs), crop them online and add several lines of personalized text in the back, plus your flick avatar (and the flickr logo). I personally discovered MOO this way, and it propagated like wildfire across several flickr groups worldwide.

RM> Flickr is a community with a fantastic, diverse, creative audience. By giving our product for free to that community we tapped on fantastic evangelists, very passionate and interested people. They are happy and empowered to communicate if they really liked it (and they did! ndr)... so it’s exactly the right place if you have a product that you think is good. It was a wonderful start. We thought mini-cards would be a personal card only, but actually there’s people that use it as their primary business card and others have both. That’s great for us, the combined use if very powerful.

I think that the innovation that RM made is not that he invented a new product, instead he challenged the paradigm of business cards. Take as an example Italy, one of MOO’s strongest markets: italians are very keen on tradition for certain things, and business cards are one of them. The highest standard would be having them printed by a traditional shop like Pineider in Milan, and in the end they are boring, lack of originality. MOO breaks a taboo, and it allows you to make the work by yourself, become the designer that choses from different images (your own or from others) and makes them unique. Each time I give one of my cards to someone I take out several and say “Choose the one you like” and we end up talking about how can you produce your own. It’s definitely VERY viral.

RM> It’s a product that enriches people’s life and makes the experience of giving a card better or more fun, or helps make it stand out. The customer is our salesperson, presenting it to new people that can become new customers. We don’t have above the line advertising. Most digital businesses save the creativity for afterwards. What they do is they create products that they think would appeal to a wide customer base and then employ an advertising agency to have great ideas: soundtracks, quick digital, beautiful people, and they put all their best ideas in the end. What we are trying to do is put all the best ideas in the beginning, in the product development, user interface, copyright thing, the photography on the site, product design, hidden messages, the emails... as many exciting ideas. The kind of stuff most companies ignore. We constantly think on how to challenge something that is boring.

GC> People never put much thought on business cards
RM> It’s something you need, not something you want and I think what we really made is make it something you want to buy.

GC> You have the website, blog, a flickr group and there are other sites and groups created by your users. How do you keep in contact with your customers?
RM> That’s the big challenge for us. We have lots of customers and are very much spread across the different network relationships we have with communities like flickr, bebo, facebook. The first challenge is that you have to get your message to all, but keeping your customer service in one place. It’s like friendship or human relationships: it’s hard to keep in contact with a lot of friends. The trick to do it is consistency, and being honest, and being personal and open. And we try to do that across all those different channels.

GC> The “poke” thing, right?
RM> That’s the great thing about these new generation of social media. The world is more frequented and everyone is connected through email, skype or whatever. What I love about things like twitter or facebook is that they help us to keep in touch, without having to stay long time on the phone, even though they are no substitute for the real thing. You still need to meet people, shake hands, etc.

Richard runs a kind of family business as he works with his brother Dan Moross, who has been there since the beginning, first helping packing boxes and now as operations manager.

RM> It’s very important to have people you trust in important roles. Because MOO is growing really fast, we sometimes have to use customer service to apologize, to reassure people that the stuff is coming, etc. We have a global audience and we live in an imperfect world. I think one of the great things we’ve done is that we make sure that our customer service is very, very in tune with people. We do not just hire inexperienced people offshore, where there’s no connection between customers and the biller. My aim is to offer and exceptional world class customer service, and I’m delighted that my brother is doing that. I trust him. I think it’s kind of farming and free range. You get much better eggs and chicken if you give them room to breath, if you give them a proper job and if they know you like them and they have a great connection with the rest of the business. It’s about giving them the right tools too and one of the decisions we made early on was to try to give people the best environment and working technology (big screens, new computers, etc) to do the job (ndr: most of them use a Mac).


On MOO
Born: 18 months ago
People: 20 full time + 8 during the Xmas rush. They have tripled in the last year.
Age range: from 30s to 40s
Funding: they raised £ 2.75 million of venture capital
Market: they sell to 140 different countries

• 55% North America
• 35% Europe (strongest: Italy and Germany)
• 10% Asia (strongest: Japan)

Offices: 2 in London
Prints: millions a year!

On Richard Moross
Age: 30
Studies: graduated in Politics in 2000
Working: for the past 7 years.

GC> An experience that helped you to launch MOO?
RM> I started working in a small internet startup in 2000, and it was terribly flawed. They had a great idea, very rich in terms of contact, very poor on sales. Over a period of time of 18 months, I had a great opportunity to learn how to do everything (doing a website, writing an email, going to a meeting, doing a cold call). I was one of the cheaper employees, I was the person that could do all the jobs: I even turned off the lights and shut the door. It was a great experience on what to try to avoid.

GC> Online apps and services that have changed your life?
RM> Business: linkedin for our HR. Netvibes is useful to monitor our business, our competitors and keep informed on marketing, technology, etc. Wordpress for blogging. Personal: I’m completely addicted to flickr. It costs me a fortune ‘cos each year I have to buy a new camera to take better pics! I use facebook and twitter to stay in touch. Yahoo’s upcoming and dopplr for events and other info when I visit other countries. For example my parents know where I am on the world, they can follow me on dopplr, they can see my pictures, read the blog. Sometimes people need a bit of reassurance of where you are, what you’re doing, be sure you’re alright. The web is really amazing for this.

• Check out this cool interview to Richard on Intruders TV
• Check out the flickr Moo group for more images.

Digital Entrepreneurs - Jay Bhatti of Spock.com

Digital Entrepreneurs are those entrepreneurs that embrace an idea and make it real using digital resources. Some of them create a new search engine, which lives only in a world of bits and bytes (eg. Google and Yahoo), others jump from a digital platform to the "real" world (like Amazon, etc). Nowadays no one argues about the capacity of these entrepreneurs of creating real business (money!).

Let me introduce you to Jay Bhatti, co-founder of Spock.com. I met Jay just by chance, as I was registered to Spock and he contacted me to ask for suggestions on how to improve the website (he contacted all the power users). We did this interview for the Italian business magazine 7th Floor.


Even if it might seem obvious, the name of this "people" search engine has no relation whatsoever with Star Trek. When Jay and Jaideep Singh (co-founder of Spock with Jay) came up with the idea, Spock was supposed to mean "Single Point of Contact by Keyword" - which is the foundation of Spock today, the ability to search for anyone by keywords (tags).

Spock.com was thought to be a search engine for people (someone called it the Who's Who 2.0), with the aim to find any person in the world. The main difference with other search engines is that Spock acts as a "meta-engine", that supports itself on all the other existing websites, with a particular accent on social networking ones. But its main differentiating trait is that it itself becomes "social" because it allows users to add the information that characterizes a given person, and to vote on that added by others, thus judging the validity of it. So when you look up for someone, you'll find not only links to that persons profile on Wikipedia, Linkedin, Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, etc, but also tags, news, relationships, photos and quotes added and voted by other visitors.


What is your dream for Spock.com?
I want Spock to become the number 1 search application in the world for People. When anyone in the world thinks of searching for people online, they should think of Spock first. When anyone wants to search even within their own network of friends for the right person, they should go first to Spock.


The business model in brief
Right now we are focused on developing the best user experience possible. Longer term, our business model is to display very rich and relevant ads and leads when people do a search on Spock. Very similar to the Google model where they capture intent based on your search.


Where did you get the money for the start-up?
Our funding came from Clearstone Venture Partners and Opus Capital. Two of the top consumer Venture Capitalists in Silicon Valley. We also have small investments from some notable people in the Valley who are advisers to Spock. I think it is very important to get experienced advisers who have done several start-ups to help you through the process.


The "garage" story behind Spock
The garage story behind Spock is that Jay and Jaideep kept complaining about how hard it was to find the right person, even within their own networks, and how searching for people was so fragmented (across social networks, your address book, web documents, etc). They both quit their jobs and spent several months with no paycheck to finalize the vision and pitch to venture capitalists. During that time, Jay lived in Jaideep's Pool house for several months. So, its more of a "pool house" story than garage story. :-)


Follows Jay's advice for digital entrepreneurs willing to launch their own start-up:

do's.
1. Move Fast - The only things we regret so far is not moving faster. Its important as a start-up to move fast. From a development, marketing, to business development standpoint, it does you no good to move slow in todays digital world.

2. Hire the Best - This is the only place I recommend you take your time. Hire the best people possible. Make sure they are smart, motivated, and have the right attitude for your Company. Nothing is worse than hiring someone who you come to realize is not a good fit for your company. And nothing is more exciting when you hire really smart people who believe in your vision and can come up with even better ways of making the vision come true.

3. Be Open - We realized that the more open and transparent we were as a company to the outside world, the better the world responded. It's important that you share your vision with users and the Press. Make sure to say it every chance you get to anyone that will listen. It's important for you to set the vision and PR for your company. Don't let anyone else start defining what you are about.

dont's.
1. Do not be afraid of doing your own start-up. We all feel fear when thinking about doing a start-up. I had it too. But once I committed to it, it was the best decision I made in my life. But make sure that whatever field you get into you absolutely love and are willing to spend your waking day doing nothing but focusing your energy on your start-up and the market you are trying to attack.

2. Dont be afraid of criticism. Doing a start-up is a very hard thing for some people to imagine. Think about what some people say "you are going to start a company with no funding that is going to try to beat Google at something!" I say that if you believe strongly enough in your vision and yourself, you should not let anyone make you believe you cant do something. Make would-be entrepreneurs have ruined great opportunities when they let the wrong people influence them.

3. Dont ignore your users. You are nothing without customers and users. Make sure you listen and treat EVERY user as if they were your only customer. I make it a point at Spock to respond to every user that same day with the proper answer to their questions. Best of all, a lot of product ideas that we implemented were the direct result of user feedback!


Mobility is in Spock's roadmap, but before taking it to mobile, they want to make the online experience amazing.

Why should I look for someone on Spock and not in, for example, Wikipedia?
Wikipedia only give you famous people. Spock will give you anyone you are looking for in the world!

As I currently live in Italy, I asked Jay about their plans and plans & expectations for the Italian market and the rest of the World.

Italian Market - We want to have language support at some point (on the drawing board) for Italy. But most importantly, I want every online user in Italy to think of Spock as the best people search site in the world, and the most open, and the most free. Global - Same thing. We plan to make language support a higher priority next year and want to make sure that Spock is a global product that everyone in the world would have a need for.


To help him in this mission, Jay has recruited ambassadors and evangelists (like Andrey Golub in Italy) from whom he expects that they keep being honest with him on how to improve the service and really working to make sure that Spock is correctly represented in their markets. Jay really enjoy working with otheir ambassadors from all round the world. Most of all, he likes the open conversations they have on how to make Spock reach the potential they all think it has.


Spock in brief
- Spock birthdate: March 23, 2006
- Employees / age range: 25 employees, average age is 27
- Actual pageviews/unique users: over 1m+ unique and 15m+ page view per month (just in the first few months of launch with limited marketing)
- Target audience: anyone in the world who wants to search for people
- Pc, mac, linux or who cares as long as it does the job? They use all of them at Spock


Jay in brief

- 34 years old, Born in Punjab India, interests outside of Spock include reading and playing sports. Check out his Spock profile: http://www.spock.com/jay

- He has no past start-up experience and he says that "Nothing can prepare you for a start-up"

- What digital apps/sites/services have changed your working experience for good? Google Docs. I think they have a real shot at beating Microsoft Office.

- Apart from Spock, which recent digital apps/sites/services would you bet on? My bet would be on kayak.com and thefind.com - both are search sites that compile data and present it in a useful manner for users. One is travel related (kayak) the other is product related (thefind)

- Digital entrepreneurs you admire? I used to work at Microsoft and still have a lot of respect for what Bill Gates did for computing and his passion to make his vision come true.



For more info, check out Jay's presentation on Web2.0 expo on intrudersTV here