I run a video production company — we're five years old and will have 30 employees by June, entirely bootstrapped. I think the best thing is literally the following for the first three years:

1. Handpick 100 of the best companies you'd like to provide video production services to.

2. The companies could relate to a domain you have knowledge, expertise or interest in; let's pick real estate as an example.

3. Craft highly specific outreach to each real estate company you'd like to work with, and ensure that you reach out to a marketing manager, or head of marketing via Linkedin instead of emailing the company email address (i.e don't send your crafted email to hello@realestatecompany.com). It needs to be a specific person and you must put the work in to find them. A premium Linkedin Sales Navigator can do this well, but there are also less expensive tools out there.

4. You'll get responses, so then it's a matter of doing a smaller, faster project to gain trust with your prospect. After that, you'd be surprised how much yield you can get out of a prospect that has a highly recurring business model; real-estate is one such example.

If you're after a cheap way to gain leads, this is it. A founder can do it with pure sweat, and even with paid sales people, I've found the CPAs to be unbelievably cheap when compared to the high LTVs of video production services.

Lastly, I would 100% localise to your state or county and then expand out once there's no more good prospects that you can find. It will be easier for a marketing manager to justify if you're in closer proximity to them; remember they're spending $1000+ at least, so the closer the better.

Lastly, you need to go all-in on a website that plays all your videos; size of portfolio and quality of portfolio matters. You can see an example of our video production company's folio here: https://vidico.com/our-videos/?industry=&type=#our-videos

Hope that helps!

I'm one of the creative directors at Vidico (https://vidico.com/) — if you don't have animation skills in-house, the main area we see founders/marketers contributing is in the scripting and messaging of the video. I'd use an agency for the rest.

The reason being is that creating a video is super time consuming.

Not only that, but if you spend the time, it won't always result in a very unique or differentiated video.

If you don't opt for 2D animation and you're just getting started, the quickest way to get a good result is to use Loom to record your product with a solid 60-sec pitch of you speaking to camera in good lighting.

It's this kind of video production that can be a huge time-saver for any kind of startups who are pre-seed.

There's the typical video production apps like FilmoraGo or KineMaster, but these aren't strictly animation; you couldn't make an explainer video with it if that's your goal.

If you're instead looking to design an app for Android, you'll want to look at Figma and Adobe XD. Figma has some pretty good prototyping too.

We use Figma for most of our UI animations at Vidico. See most of the examples of the homepage for an idea of what I'm referring to: https://vidico.com/

I am really excited by this space, not just at the consumer level with Calm and Headspace, but also at the enterprise level with startups like Ginger and Modern Health. If you're looking to scale customer or client acquisition, I'd suggest the following:

1) Content Marketing — I would take your knowledge as an expert, and write long-form articles on the topic. You then submit the articles to major publishers. I have found this to consistently be the most inexpensive method of acquiring large scale awareness at a low cost. Ads can be tough to make work if you haven't got a decent capital backing for a product like this.

2) Video Marketing — Youtube loves this category of content, and if you can give out a preview of your program, you could start by doing some internal video production of you speaking — people listen to experts that can communicate with charisma. If you have this quality, just keep speaking on the topic consistently, and post three times per week on Twitter, Youtube and Medium.

If you'd like to talk further on the above, feel free to book a call with me, or see more of my work in video at www.vidico.com

Typically if you're only just getting started in video production or video marketing, there's three options (ranked by order of learning curve):

1. Adobe Premiere Rush (fast, easy and powerful)
2. Final Cut Pro X (recommended for short to long term)
3. Adobe Premiere (very powerful functionality)

Our agency uses Premiere for every single video project we've produced. We normally need more functionality than what Rush can provide because of the specific nature of our client requests and project constraints.You can see some of the projects we've created with Premiere here: https://vidico.com

If you do decide to go with Premiere, we've written on a few techniques that will help you with editing: https://vidico.com/news/5-effective-video-editing-techniques-every-marketer-should-know/

Let me know if you need any help with above.

Getting a single freelancer to win massively here is hit and miss — I would say 90% of the best creative talent are either in agency or high-growth tech startups.

You could try Upwork? At least there's some ratings there and some examples of writing. You need an excellent copywriter and someone who can also put together a visual moodboard.

If you'd like your campaign to extend into video or crowdfunding, check out some of our work: https://vidico.com or a specific case study example from one of our video productions: https://vidico.com/case-studies/koala-video/

Hi Lucas — there's some OK advice here. Personally, I run Vidico and am in your space (we don't compete though).

Assaf is correct in that some people might find your offering a little confusing. I get it because I've been in animation for five years. You just need a killer one-liner that summaries your product and value proposition. Something like:

- 10x your subscribers with engaging animations.
- Get more subscribers with animated buttons that stand out.
- Use fun animations to attract more video subscribers.

Something along those lines ^^

You can see we did it here for our explainer videos:
https://vidico.com/explainer-video/

If you get a developer to action the steps in the article below, we basically went from a score of 38 to 90 for both mobile and desktop in literally a day. We're a video production company, so naturally we thought it was all the video content we had on the site slowing us down — turns out it's scripts like GTM and Intercom/Drift.

Here's the article: https://twitter.com/GoodMarketingHQ/status/1166066852344291328

Here's our site if you want to test our pagespeed for yourself!
https://vidico.com

Very big question, but an exciting space for sure. I am a big believer in this model, as the barrier to entry for creating specific, high-quality video content is higher than most people think.

I am happy to run you through all the steps in more detail, but it would take this trajectory if I were undertaking this project:

Pre-Launch

1) Deep Competitive Analysis on the niche you're planning to go after. What video content is currently being served in this market and how good is it? For example, categories like fitness, yoga and web/software development are not areas I would recommend going into for an online video instruction platform — they are saturated as hell. Let's choose something high-growth and relatively new as an example: podcasting.

2) In-Depth Writing on an Ultimate Guide to podcasting. Get this written yourself FIRST and then share it with a podcaster worth their salt for feedback, and even pay them to have them fix up what might be a 10,000 word guide on everything you need to know to setup a successful podcasting channel.

3) Once they say the guide is perfect, divide the guide in 20 chapters (500 words) each. These will be more or less, your templates for your initial 20 video scripts that will form the taxonomy of your initial video content library.

4) Find a video production company that has ideas on how to produce the video content in a way that uses mixed media: some live-action with a presenter speaking, some animated scenes with text, and some found footage or product screens. This approach will cost far less than a high-quality presenter to camera, and you will not get stung on things like continuity etc. Get them to produce 3 before you commit to the company for the whole set.

More or less, you're going to need to build your website alongside all these steps I've mentioned above. TL:DR — it is a bloody time consuming model, and I wouldn't attempt it as a solo founder unless you were doing it full time and had high trust with the video production company you were partnering with.

It is so very worth it if you can get it right, and there are tools like Uscreen you can use which will get you off the ground quicker.

Whilst my production company is probably not the best fit for this project, you could find some inspiration from companies we've worked with: https://www.vidico.com

Happy to talk over the rest in call — this is about 10% of what you need to do.

You could use either Uscreen or Vidello.

We produced a video for Vidello that you can view here:
https://www.vidico.com