
How I rolled my own explainer video for my Saas in a weekend - cyberferret
https://medium.com/@dsabar/how-i-rolled-my-own-explainer-video-for-my-saas-in-a-weekend-for-less-than-100-a1a5b35f44ec#.k2wpapufi
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michaelmcdonald
A couple of notes / thoughts:

1) The animations seem slow. I found it distracting as I watched them meander
into / out of frame or focus. Can they be sped up some? Especially anything
dealing with text...it was painfully slow to watch.

2) Your wife has a gorgeous voice and does a great job! There are a few
instances where I detected awkward pausing (perhaps cutting audio to sync /
match with the animation?), but for the price it couldn't have been beaten!

3) Be mindful of English. The statement "Not just for big corporates" sounds
odd.

4) Include more screenshots of your application. When talking about being able
to use it on any device you should overlay images of your application from
those devices onto the outlined images of the various devices. Give us a look
at how your app appears on mobile / tablet / desktop.

5) Parts of the template don't seem to mesh with what the voiceover is talking
about. Prime example: talking about linking to payroll systems (starting
around 1m35s). The image is a lightbulb. Doesn't make sense. Perhaps that's
just the limitation of the template.

6) Overall time is quite lengthy. We live in bite sized chunks of time and
sitting through a 3m video is difficult. See if you can chop it down to just
the basics. Give us a taste of your app and then direct us to your site to dig
in for more details.

Great job though considering the budget!

~~~
timroy
1\. The overall pace of the video - animations and narration - seems pretty
slow. People today are used to very fast video editing.

2\. You don't start to say what the product actually does until 31 seconds in
("filing cabinet in the cloud"), with further details coming about 45 seconds
in, and then the rest of the video to explain yet further features.

3\. There are a lot of features, which is very cool - but naturally that does
make your one-sentence punch line hard to craft. Example: "HR Partner serves
as your digital filing cabinet to effortlessly organize all your employee
information, lets your employees keep up-to-date on office memos, and
integrates payroll information." That's not that great a sentence, but some
soundbite upfront would tell us that more features are coming over the course
of the video.

4\. Ditto on numbers 5 and 6 above. The "h with an h" caught my ear as well,
as I'm US rather than Australian.

Thanks for posting this, and how you did it - we've thought about making a
cost-effective video as well so this is really helpful. I'm surprised at how
good this looks and sounds (unfair advantage with in-house talent!).

~~~
cyberferret
Thank you. Useful tips again here, especially about shortening the message and
saying what the product does as early as possible. Much appreciated.

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dontscale
Excellent work and general information. Templates are eating the world. I saw
a post on HN the other day about no design jobs--the author got it wrong in
his reasoning. Design jobs are shrinking because of templates. It's not
economical for me to pay 5 or 6 figures for an original design, when I can
have a good enough one to for 60 bucks.

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kriro
Cool looking site + amazing work if you did the entire HR system yourself. As
someone who has worked for an "underdog ERP provider" I love every new player
in the market. Good luck with sales/customer acquisition and the entire
funnel. That's pretty tough if you are alone. From my experience I think a
good strategy is hammering the employee self care and privacy hard. I'd also
try to attack one niche at a time if possible (even though that's harder for
Saas). I'd also play the "we're Australian" angle harder since that's where
you can go door to door and get the non website signups. If it wasn't for your
wife's accent I wouldn't have known (it's hidden somewhere at the bottom). I
understand if you don't want to do that but growing regionally first is a very
solid strategy for any type of business software from my experience. The
common advice is to hire good salespeople quickly, if you feel you're up to
the task I'd say do it yourself. Running a lean/small enterprise software
company is pretty doable. Customers will want to hear "your story". Be
prepared to offer that, mention that your wife does the audio of the video if
you're comfortable with that. That's the stuff that always sold really well.
Do not underestimate how many people will try you because they "hate the big
companies". If you talk to enough people that work in the broad ERP domain
you'll hear all sorts of stuff that isn't really true. Sell features, IT only
cares if the stuff improves efficiency etc...I'd say you can safely ignore all
of that. Beautiful and UI are (still) vastly underrated, your product is ahead
of the curve on the former and I'm assuming also on the latter.

Note on the webdesign: The top text disappears behind the laptop picture
(latest FF, OSX, 15" MBP). Announcing (new line) a beautiful, easy to (image,
newline) web based human r (image, newline) managemen ste (half an m). The
pictures at the bottom also float slightly over text iirc

~~~
cyberferret
Hey thanks for the marketing info, especially the tips on what to make stand
out. To be really honest, I am finding the marketing of this WAY tougher than
the actual development! I struggle with 'telling the story', so your hints are
especially valuable - I really appreciate it. Thanks also for mentioning the
design flaws on the site, I will check those out.

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ryannevius
Correct me if I'm wrong...but shouldn't you also include the time you spent in
your "final cost"? For example, if my time is worth $100 per hour and I spend
10 hours, sure, my debit card shows that I spent $100...but add in my time and
now it's around $1100. I could have used that time to work on other things, to
generate even more value for my startup, and effectively break even when the
company I hired to create an explainer video delivers.

~~~
cyberferret
You are right. If I added in my normal consulting rate, the cost would have
been the same as the original quotes I got. But for me, I valued the learning
experience of doing something I had never done before. To be honest, it was a
good change from the core development work on the app, or the social media
marketing I had been doing.

I am pretty much a one man show here, so am used to doing everything myself
now. In a sense, I still think that the added skills I am learning adds value
to my startup. Once I started earning serious income and hire others, then I
will have to strive to become better at delegating work that is not my core
speciality, but until then, I just have fun learning. :)

~~~
TrevorJ
I admire your philosophy on this. It's impressive work for 48 hours starting
from scratch. I'm also glad you recognise that 2,000 for a video like this is
a reasonable rate. A lot of times people don't realize just how much goes into
that sort of work.

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zhte415
Why not put the video 'above the fold' on your site. I think that would be
valuable.

But seriously, you created a full-fledged HRMS site (that also looks nice)?
These are sprawling beasts. For the past few years working in HR, I've never
met one that both works seamlessly on the input side, and does not need CSV
exports of things to make reports look nice. Great job.

~~~
cyberferret
Thanks very much. Yeah, I spent about 3 months last year building that. Wrote
every line of code myself (around 20,000+ lines of Ruby and 80+ database
tables.). Still a lot more to add to it, but I thought to get it out there.

~~~
zhte415
You do realise that Fortune-500 companies have far, far worse HRMS systems in
existence? I don't know every F500, but would guess all of them do, including
big name consultancies that say they are the bees-knees.

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michaelbuckbee
As others have noted: it seems slow.

A good "trick" to dealing with this is to self-impose a hard run time of 1
minute. Having that will force you to make choices about what to include, what
not to and really pick up the pace.

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leoalves
There is also www.adobe.com/voice Its an iphone app that allows you to create
videos. I used fiverr for the audio (since I am not a native speaker) and
adobe voice for the video. The end result was pretty good.

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jorgecurio
I paid a guy 20 bucks on fiverr for a 30 second video with an Australian
accent and cookie cutter cartoon animation. Rolling your own explainer only
makes sense if you can outdo someone on fiverr or you want original content
which I think doesn't really matter for explainer videos because the video
watcher only cares what the product is, people don't buy products on the video
alone but I could be wrong.

~~~
cyberferret
Good feedback. Were you happy with the results? How much time did it take you
to go back and forth to explain the concepts and ideas?

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pbhjpbhj
One thing that struck me is that After Effects seems quite reasonable at $20,
of course the UK price is more though only about $25 - must be extra to pay
for the transatlantic crossing for the data /s.

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cosecantt
[http://hrpartners.com](http://hrpartners.com) does not resolve without www.
Check that issue.

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markyc
is it just me or the pronunciation for HR Partner is off at
[https://vimeo.com/157981359#t=0m24s](https://vimeo.com/157981359#t=0m24s)

(the H is mispronounced)

~~~
cyberferret
Well picked up. I think that is really a colloquial thing. My wife is
Australian, and she does tend to switch between "aitch" and "haitch" for the
pronunciation.

Good tip to remember in future to keep it consistent. I am thinking also that
US viewers might be discomfited by her pronunciation of "data". Once again,
the Aussie way is "darr-ta" rather than "day-ta".

~~~
markyc
gotcha! I'm not a native speaker, so I had to double-check how to pronounce
the H :)

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throweway
Nice Aussie accent

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codeddesign
So you bought a pre-made template used by thousands of others and edited the
text...

~~~
cyberferret
Exactly. Rather than pay a four figure sum like thousands of other others.

I figured that there would be people in the same boat, with limited finances,
who may like some pointers to ways they can achieve the same.

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daveguy
Watched the video. It's pretty slick for $100. I went back to see how much you
paid for voiceover, but your wife did it -- that's cheating! Like saying I
made an explainer video in a day for free and oh, "my brother is a producer".
I guess you could always do that part yourself to cut down on cost. How much
would a voiceover actor have been? Did you need to work with Adobe after
effects or was it just a library type dependency? If so, what did you think of
it, how difficult was it to learn and work with?

~~~
retrogradeorbit
You could use something like voicebunny for the voice over if you didn't have
access to talent.

~~~
cyberferret
Good tip. Coincidentally, a couple of years ago someone suggested my wife
audition for Voice Bunny to be added to their talent pool for contract jobs.
She never did though.

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dan1234
This reads like an advert for Envato. Is it sponsored content?

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cyberferret
Not at all. Envato was just a source for two of the components I used. No
affiliations or anything with them. I probably should have named ALL the other
local software that I used to do the audio etc., but it would have become
really long winded. I just wanted to point people to a spot they might find
useful, like I did.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Might be worth having a list somewhere of every piece of software used so
people can replicate your effort if they wish.

