BANYAK yang bingung bagaimana memulai sebuah ide. Kisah viddy.com adalah salah satu contoh proses kreatif yang memberi inspirasi.
Dimulai dari kesulitan pribadi. Lalu mencari solusi. Dan lahirlah produk berdasarkan solusi masalah nyata sehari-sehari.
Berbagai peralatan (devices) memungkinkan setiap orang merekam gambar untuk sebuah video. Bagaimana mengambil gambarnya, mengeditnya agar ringan di-upload dan ringan pula diakses. Pertanyaan itulah yang melahirkan viddy.com.
Ide "sederhana" itu melahirkan satu situs social media dengan 37 juta register user. Itu lebih banyak dari register user Instagram ketika dibeli Facebook 1 miliar dolar AS.
Cerita selengkapnya di sini:
Sumber: Mashable.com
The mobile social video space is touted as one to keep an eye on, with various services springing up that make sharing and watching short clips as easy and addictive as Instagram is for still photos.
Viddy, a two-year-old, 20-strong startup based out of Los Angeles, has recently emerged as one of the potentially big players in this market.
Currently offering an iPhone app and web platform, the social service is growing fast and has ambitious plans for the future, including expansion onto other mobile platforms. We spoke to one of the co-founders, JJ Aguhob, president of Viddy, to find out more.
The Viddy concept came about when Aguhob spotted a gap in the mobile social video market, an idea that he explains was “borne out of frustration.”
“During the summer of 2010, I was travelling with my friends and shooting a lot of really great videos, but the process of creating and sharing videos to the people I wanted to share with was extremely laborious and time consuming. I would take cameras with me, go and shoot a lot of footage, splice them up in Final Cut and then share them through my .Mac account, but during that summer I tried to figure out how can I make this experience better and make this process easier,” Aguhob tells Mashable.
“A lot of the issues I was facing on the hardware side was with DSLR cameras that were too bulky, so I started to use micro four thirds cameras, but they were still too heavy. I ended up using my iPhone for the majority of filming — it has really great optics, and it was connected to the Internet which made sense. Back during the summer of 2010 they weren’t any really great editing programs, the only one that really existed was iMovie, but then sharing that content out to different social networks like Facebook and Twitter, I found the user experience to be not really optimized for the consumption of video — and YouTube felt a little bit impersonal.”
“That moment of clarity was when I created these really short, amazing clips with my friends I got an insane amount of feedback — mostly postitive — saying they loved the video and wanted to see more of it. It was fun and rewarding to create this content, so why couldn’t there be a better experience to share that with my friends and family?”
And so, along with Brett O’Brien and Chris Ovitz, Aguhob created Viddy, a mobile social network where users can edit video footage, apply cool filter effects and music and then share clips with not just their followers on the service, but quickly and easily to their favorite social networking sites. There was a twist though — Viddy clips are limited to just 15 seconds. We asked Aguhob why.
“For us, it was creativity and brevity. We really wanted to focus on the right moments to share, as opposed to sending out raw video that didn’t really have a lot of context to it. It was a lot of experimentation and research … 15 seconds felt like the right time for people to find that key moment within a video and create a really digestable, shareable piece of content for their friends and family easily.”
15 second clips are also more easily digestible from a mobile data point of view. The iPhone app is easy to use and very speedy. After all, if attention spans are happy with 15 second clips, they’re not going to want to spend too much more time than that creating the clip in the first place.
“We’ve spent a lot of time really optimizing the technology in order to render the video quickly on devices. Obviously we felt there was some value in actually seeing the creativity, seeing the process unfold. You really put your heart into it, and then you can see the rewards and benefits of creating really great content.”
Despite rival services like Socialcam, Mobli, Color and Klip in the same niche marketplace, Viddy has now notched up 37 million registered users (more than Instagram had when Facebook bought it for $1 billion) so you could argue there was indeed a gap in the market. The fact that among those 37 million are a whole host of popular celebrities — such as Justin Bieber, Jessica Alba, Britney Spears and Taylor Swift — has only helped the app’s growth.
In May 2012, Viddy completed a $30 million Series B funding round, valuing the company at over $300 million. Although these figures might seem surprising, what you have to consider is it’s not just the celebrity shine and numbers of signups that has got investors interested. Unlike many startups, Viddy has seen the potential for the business market right from the start, with a series of brands not just using the app for marketing purposes, but teaming up with Viddy for contests and special production packs.
“A lot of brands came to us,” reveals Agohub. “From a brand persective there are companies that are trying to tell their story as a brand that were kind of struggling with sending out text or pictures, they really wanted to tell a full story through video.”
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