Brands are cancelling all marketing activity except this....with Vimmi Co-CEO

Now you've no doubt been looking at your social media and had products be displayed to you, maybe in 15 or 30-second clips, and they're increasingly powerful. And you may have wondered how that happens. How does a shoppable video get made? How does it get delivered to your phone? And what makes great video content if you've got a product or a service And you'd like to also engage and start using shoppable video. Well, if that's the case, you're in luck because I've got one of the pioneers of the industry here. He is the founder and CEO of a company called Vimi. He's based in Tel Aviv. His name is Ayten Kota. Ayten, welcome to the show.

Hey, Jim, it's a pleasure to be here. Thank you so much for inviting me.

Well, I, you know, I am so happy to have you here because you can help me to understand what my daughter is watching on her phone because I have teenage daughters and they're constantly getting these short-form vertical videos. And it's a fascinating industry and one I know nothing about. So help us to understand what is shoppable video. And you're going to also tell us about sort of the TikTokification of the industry and really of merchandising and retail. So, and I think at the end you're even going to share with us some amazing coupons so that people can try Vimi at the end for their own products and services. So, Eitan, take us away and tell us about shoppable video and what Vimi does.

Yeah, so Jim, we are all immersed in this endless scrolling where we spend time on TikTok or Instagram or any type of social media platform. And those are primarily triggered by videos. So video is like everywhere. According to Cisco, video is like more than 82% of the worldwide internet traffic. So Video is being used in so many different use cases. And we saw the emergence of video being used for shopping and for commerce in China with the rise of live shopping. And you've spent your time, your good share of time also in China, and you saw the growth of how many dollar values or RMBs people are doing on a daily basis in China on live shopping. And this new concept was introduced to the West probably 3 or 4 years ago. Primarily with the primary intention to deliver or to direct users to the brand.com website. But what we saw and what we understand now is that social commerce is emerging as one of the largest business opportunities out there for any brand or retailer or any type of business because it's become so difficult to acquire customers or shoppers to your own .com website. But people are spending time in those social platforms or marketplaces and other publishers' websites and affiliates. And why not deploying our ads or our shoppable experiences where people are spending their time? So what Veeam is doing, we are connecting, connecting, connecting our platform to existing e-commerce platforms that brands might have. We're syncing product pages to our platform and then we can associate product pages with videos. And those videos in one click are deployed in a lot of destinations, what we call destinations can be your own TikTok account or TikTok Shop account, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest, you know, could be also Amazon or Walmart, any type of affiliate engagement that you have, you can just copy, copy an embed code from our platform and deploy it. And then you have an interactive video player that people can purchase from within the video itself. So the idea is to deploy those videos across a big list of channels. That brands can partner with. And it's very true that short-form videos is increasing dramatically in terms of adoption because primarily, as you said, the TikTokification of things where TikTok taught us that it needs to be authentic, it needs to be short. And, you know, high production values and long-form values are probably something from a different era or something that is probably for YouTube. By the way, YouTube long-form video is growing as well. Right. So video is like exploding in every type of use case. And yeah, I mean, it's the idea is to become more authentic, going back to your roots, trying to explain your differentiators in videos, in very short videos, use the right hooks and get attention, not only attention and impressions, but actually conversion. So we enable shoppability, what we call in each one of those platforms that are fully integrated to our platform. And each one of them provides different ways of checking out, like in TikTok Shop. The checkout must be within the TikTok app, right? And then you can even have fulfilled by TikTok in terms of shipping. And so this is one aspect. And in the other platform like YouTube or Instagram, you can obviously tag product, but you can redirect to different product pages to complete the checkout. So we enable this from a single backend, saving a lot of time and resource for our customer.

Wow, there's a lot in there with VIMMI, and that's V-I-M-M-I. By the way, .net.

Correct.

For those of you that are looking to dash to the site already. So, Eytan, you've got a couple of things in there that I'd love to talk about. One is from a workflow point of view. My understanding is that people would have made a video offline, maybe using their mobile phone, for example, and they're uploading that to your platform, to Vimeo, and then it's a distribution platform. Is that right? So you load once and you, if you like, syndicate that ad to multiple platforms. Is that right?

Yes, correct. So you upload videos that can be obviously prerecorded, short-form videos, usually vertical or long-form video. It can be 16:9 or horizontal video. We manage that in a very, very professional way in what we call digital asset management. So archiving and storing those videos in a professional way, like like you are becoming, for example, a broadcast station, right? So we manage all your videos, which if, if we deploy our video player inside your website. So we provide also the streaming capabilities, the content delivery network to support the streaming to your website. And once you have that videos deployed in the, in the platform and all, as I said, the first step is syncing all your product pages. It's very easy to associate product pages to those videos and you can have multiple products describe in one video. And once you do that association, and then in one click, you can just deploy these videos all over your networks. And this works for prerecorded or video on demand type of video. The other form of video is live, but we know that live is very, very powerful, creates a lot of powerful emotional engagement and relationship between brand and potential shoppers. And it's a very powerful way to create this loyalty relationship, which is very, very important these days. And so in our platform, you can go live and again sell your products when you go live. Again, you associate products to that specific live event. You can invite co-host or a moderator to answer people's questions on the chat and we aggregate. Of course, we stream these live shopping events to your own website, but also to all your social networks and even to Amazon Live and many other platforms. And people are asking questions through the chat system. This is also a part of the platform. And a moderator needs to reply to this question again from a single dashboard. And you indeed can create video checkout or video experience, video shoppable experiences also in a live event. By the way, we record all the live events and what we see that Sometimes 50% of the sales happen 24 hours after that live event because if you do it right, you need to continue marketing, market those events after the live event as well. Of course, you do the marketing pre-event and during the event, but if you do it also post-event, it creates a lot of other additional sales opportunities with messaging and campaigns that you can do from the Vimeo platform as well. Yeah.

So in that sense, you're almost creating a, well, a commerce-led webinar, aren't you? You've got the chat and people be able to convert there and there, maybe a special offer. And you're right, I lived in China for 14 years and we watched mobile commerce and streaming taking place, especially of course when you've got a large geography and maybe the unit price is not that high. If people could look at that good or service from their mobile phone, they didn't have to travel. No cost of taking a taxi to the shop or the time it would take to get from one part of town to another. wouldn't make it worth that kind of purchase, right? With live streaming, they can literally watch it as and when they want to, but this ability to purchase inside the app is amazing. So what about the metrics? Because that's the other part of it in terms of how well is that campaign performing? How do you help with that?

Yes, because we see a lot of companies want to do that. So we don't need to educate the market. People, brands owners and business owners know that video works, but they are struggling to find a way to make it work for them first because they never, never did it previously and they say, okay, video is probably too complicated and I need to prepare a lot of times, which is not the case, right? And maybe they don't know exactly how to choose the right host or how to convert. So we help a lot with that and we have like a white glove business unit that helps those customers with even with content, with sourcing content, working with influencers, and also giving them a lot of knowledge how to do things in the correct way. And definitely if you go live in a live shopping event, you need to build up towards this event. The buildup is through various marketing campaigns where you add it to your newsletter, you probably deploy it on social media and announcing this, maybe even providing some special terms like a discount or a coupon code or whatever kind of a new loyalty program. Try to provide something which makes people join the event because when people are joining the events, all of the people that are participating in the event, they have high intent to purchase because this is the only reason why they are here, right? During the event, you need to make sure that you describe the product correctly and it's very different from one brand to the other because you need to understand where you are in the marketing funnel. Like if you are in awareness stage, consideration or decision, right? So that various type of content that you need to create for each one of those, of those steps in the funnel. Like if you're in awareness stage, so talk a lot about education, education. So educate the more the people about the market, not the, not just specifically about your products, but the market that you operate, what are the trends, a lot of market information like statistics and some variety of checks, checklists, things that helps the users when they are in consideration phase and they are comparing. So provide a lot of comparisons like don't be afraid to mention your competition. We see this also very powerful in blogs these days where all the versus blogs are being written by the brand or by the vendors themselves, right? It used to be written by the affiliates, but now the vendors are providers themselves are writing it because it helps a lot on the Google ranking. So in the consideration stage, a lot of how to provide some case studies. And when you are in decision, in the decision-making stage, talk a lot about your product, right? Provide some functionalities, the values and prices, right? So it's very important to understand what type of content you want to create in each one of those major awareness, consideration, and decision steps. Also pay attention that for live event, Most of the time people want to move away from just putting themselves in front of a camera because they think that they're not good at, but people are looking for the authenticity. They're looking for the, that you know how to answer the questions in real time and you are the real thing. If you pay some influencer or some celebrity to do that for you, it won't be delivered. So we see a lot of bad experiences because brand owners wanted to go with a specific influencer or a specific host. that they didn't have the right knowledge or information to deliver the right questions in real time. And the whole event wasn't that successful. So I believe a lot in founder-led growth, founder-led content, executive-led content, employee-generated content, not just UGC, but also EGC. So think about employees that are going live or in front of a camera. This creates a very, very powerful Brand sentiment and loyalty.

Yeah, you've raised a lot of amazing issues there as well about how you can make this accessible, if you like, without a big budget, right? You know, my show is all about people being able to do this without a big budget. And I've looked, you know, with Vimi, by the way, you also have a free entry level, don't you? A starter plan for people, which we could talk about a bit later on, but you've actually got a starter plan which will get people going. And one of the thoughts that seems to be coming to the fore now is in this age of AI, that authenticity is going to be in a way the currency, isn't it? But where do you see AI, Eitan, playing a part? Because you talk about authenticity on the one hand, what about using AI to, for example, to create content or this use of avatars? What's your view there?

So before you go ahead and create the content, you need to decide what type of content you want to create. And I believe a lot in consistency and daily publishing, right? So you can use ChatGPT or any other tools out there just to create, to define your, who you are, what you provide, what are your products, who are your competition, what, what describe your audience, who is going to buy your product. Or by the way, it can be a product service or even a digital product. Once you have that in place, ask ChatGPT to create a content plan for you for the next 30 days, for example. And I think any business owner can create a list of 50 pains that his customers are experiencing right now. So on every pain that you listed, you need to provide some kind of a value. Or maybe it's not 100% solution, but some kind of a good tip that you can create in a video between 30 seconds to 60 seconds. And you can create a lot of these. No one cares about the background. No one cares what shirt do you wear and how good you look. Good lighting, good audio is important. Just go out there, be yourself. And talk about, about those pain points, talk about the benefits that you can provide. And again, try to create content depending on the various steps of the marketing funnel that I've described right now. So they make it daily, make it consistent. And this is guaranteed going to be your best marketing channel out there because today if you want to grow organically, okay, obviously you can pay a lot to Meta, which is getting more and more expensive and also on Amazon, right? We know that. But one of the last, you know, places that you can go organically is through videos, right, on social. And this is, you know, where I encourage every business owner to focus and spend more time in. It's going to be amazing. Go out there and post. We'll be back after a quick break.

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A couple of questions. One is just TikTok, Instagram, YouTube. What about video for LinkedIn? Because many people are using LinkedIn for B2B. Does this work? Does Vimi also integrate to LinkedIn, for example?

Yeah, so LinkedIn is obviously for B2B, and yes, we are fully integrated to that as well. I can tell you I post like regularly, like daily on LinkedIn, and I create a lot of video commerce-related content. The video posts are performing, you know, by far better than any other. So you talked about AI. I must mention a new app that I'm using. I'm using an app called supercreator.ai. This app is— you can just, if you want, you can just type a few keywords of a topic you want to create a video and the AI will create the script for you and will break it down to scenes. In each scene, you can obviously take a video capture of yourself and you can add more assets. Can be in the background, on top of you, right below you, split the screen and you build. You can create those few scenes and just compile the video and it's done. So I spend more maybe half an hour on each one of those video and it's look really polished, professional. And there are other tools out there like that. But here is a quick way to like spend 20 to 30 minutes on one video and make it go viral. I think last week one of my posts reached close to 30,000 impressions, like within a few hours, just from spending 20 minutes on one topic, which I— if you ask me if this is the most interesting topic out there, no, it was one of my big list of topics. I don't know why this topic generates so success, but the video part and you know, the scenes and the switchover between the frames. I think it was very, very important. And that gave me a lot of confidence to continue, obviously something that I do a lot in terms of those video posts.

Well, okay, supercreator.ai, we'll put that in the show notes as well. Eytan, what we haven't talked about, what I'd just like to ask you though, is about the kind of uplift or the kind of success. You've got hundreds of brands using your channel. You're serving literally millions of videos every day. You've been in operation for over 10 years. So you're established, you know what works. What kind of uplift are people, companies getting when it comes to video? Is it possible to give us some numbers, some metrics?

I think I can share various statistics with you. Again, not mentioning specific names, but we have customers like that, they switch their entire market, they shut off their entire marketing channels and all they do is just live streaming all day long because they found it to be the most effective way in terms of ROI and everything. So this is one example. Another example that we see that those events are creating conversion rates which are like 50% conversion rate for live shopping event if you do it correctly. Of course, the industry average talks about 30%, 20%, 40%. There's no exact number, but it all depends how do you build up towards this event and if you have the right incentive to provide the users. So this is very, very important aspects of what you're trying to convey. I can tell you one of the brands that I interviewed to my podcast on Ecom Pulse, they are like in the furniture industry and they launched TikTok and TikTok Shop. This is the last product you can even imagine that.

Exactly.

So they he said that we have a TikTok shop and we're creating a lot of videos for TikTok. And I said, why do you do that? I said, he said last quarter we grew 30% in our overall company sales without selling even one dollar on TikTok, but we can attribute 30% growth for our TikTok videos.

Okay.

It works even in a sort of a high-ticket item in what you'd perceive to be like a junior demographic.

Yes, yes, correct. Sometimes you go to TikTok and you'll just be there not for the purpose of conversion, but for the purpose of increasing your overall sales. And you'll be surprised where this attribution will find you along the sales cycle.

That is fascinating, Eitan. So it's wonderful. And people will be able to go to vimi.net. And Eitan's got a coupon for us. So do stick around at the at the end, he's going to give us a coupon. We've got about 5 or 10 minutes left to carry on to find out also about you as an entrepreneur, because you have listed a company on NASDAQ. You've had this business for a decade. Just, you know, tell us a little bit about how you've got this business noticed, because, you know, that's what this podcast is also about, is how entrepreneurs manage to bootstrap their businesses with Yeah, so I've been working for a company that, you know, we raised a lot of funds from venture capitalists and firms.

And also we floated company, this company on NASDAQ. It was back in 2005 with Scopus Video Networks. And with Vimeo, I've decided to, together with my partner, Amnon Sherif, we decided to go private. I mean, and use our own funds for the growth. And what you need to do, you need to develop quickly. and find good friends that are happy to support you on the process. Of course, like with Scopus Video Networks, it was a hardware company, you know, those units you put in racks and also now everything is SaaS, right? So in a SaaS, things are moving very, very fast. And if you, if you're thinking of like spending 18 months on development and then putting this product or introducing this to the market, it's probably the wrong way to do that. So I believe in what they call land and expand, like iterate very, very fast, define a very, very limited specific sets of functionalities on a product that they can quickly introduce to a certain limited, like laser-focused definition of your ICP or personas, show them this functionality that makes some kind of a difference, get feedback, iterate like on a daily basis with customer feedback and break through this A very limited set of functionalities. Once you break through this initial steps, you can then introduce more functionalities to your existing customers. This is the then expand type of approach, like narrow, having this narrow innovation type of mentality rather than having this broad vision about a huge, you know, platform that you're planning, which is very, very difficult. You need a lot of funds for that. So if you're bootstrapping, go narrow, go like laser focus on product definition, on market definition. And once you've been able to get in, expand. We were lucky at the beginning to win some large enterprise customers with those limited functionalities. Okay. And I can tell you that throughout the years, we've expanded what we are providing to these customers, you know, tenfold from that first RFP that, or the first project that we've started. When we started Veeam, we get noticed primarily through Going to like physical exhibitions. Okay, there were there were like you need to prepare it correctly, engaging with all the networking tools and creating all these meetings beforehand, and this creates a lot of business opportunities for us. Today, it's like the other way around. Today, it's all about founder-led growth, founder-led content. So I I create a lot of content. I post. Primarily on LinkedIn, although we do that also on the other channels. But LinkedIn is a primary area where we operate. And another important thing is that partner up instead of building up your marketing team. Of course, it's important, but the sales team, try to delay as much as you can hiring of a sales team, right? And focus on PLG, on product-led growth, because If you have an amazing product, the word of mouth is creating a lot of leads for you. And if you are hiring sales too early, sales, they have their ways to maneuver even average products and execute a transaction. And it, you need to work very, very hard to win each additional sales and cost of sales are going up and up. So if you focus on PLG, on marketing, having this amazing product, don't hire sales. And this creates virality and network effect. Once you know that you have achieved this product-market fit, and it can take sometimes a very long time, right? But it shouldn't take more than 6 to 9 months from the get-go. Once you feel you have a product-market fit, then yes, you can do a lot of things in terms of expanding your sales outreach capabilities and partner up. What I mean by partner up, Any company can find partners who are serving their end users in a B2B, for example, or even on a D2C. So partners doesn't cost money. If you are able to work smart in getting their attention to spend time and resources on promoting your solution based on various terms that you provide them, then for them, it's again that land and expand type of mentality because they're already working with the customers that they're trying to approach. And they are introducing a lot of business opportunities to you. So this is what we did. We partnered a lot. We iterate very, very fast and being very, very agile in terms of our mindset and the way we release software versions. Even until today, I think we are releasing between 2 to 3 software versions every week, right, to update our platform. And that's kind of a mentality that we've built from day one and very good partnerships that introduce us a lot of opportunities and content creation. that gets us in front of our brands, our end users. And of course, the podcast, which is probably one of the main marketing channels that we use, that is bringing us a lot of relationship building and expanding our network and building connection with important stakeholders in the industry.

Eitan, thank you. There's like a masterclass there in how you've done it. I am going to ask you one question though, because you said we managed to land some early clients. What did you say or what did you have that got them across the line? Because, you know, I've launched products, you know, and you're sitting there opposite someone and they go, well, they've got to take a risk. They're happy enough with what they're doing or they're not willing to be the first. So the mission-critical question to some degree is, What did you say or what did you offer to convert that first customer? Yeah.

So for us, it was, I mean, we were targeting those large enterprises. Okay. And in enterprise sales, you have a committee procurement type of process and the sales cycles are very long. This is where I grew up, right? As a sales manager and obviously as a VP sales and CEO of companies. So I'm very used to work on this type of environments. And we weren't the first to introduce, you know, that online video platform, you know, 10 years ago, but we were there and we showed probably more agility and more commitment because during these processes, customers, presale processes that may take 6 months, customers ask you a lot of things. You can go to a POC and then you have some feedback. And if you iterate fast and like tomorrow you give them the solution, this is very, very powerful versus the big companies that, you know, it took just to schedule the meeting with the product manager, it took 2 weeks. During 2 weeks, we iterated 20 times with our customer and showed them in the lab what exactly they need. So this creates a lot of impact towards customers that probably help us to win the 2, 3, large enterprise deals. These was like 7-figure deals, right? So it helps a lot with projection and cash flow and just establish yourself as a company in terms of the ability that you can grow and execute better in various ways. We lost a lot because we lacked also the who is Vimi, right, at the early days. Yes, they knew us probably from our background, but as a company, we were new. And we didn't have these large VCs or large strategic partners that we have today. So it's really, I mean, you don't need a lot of them, you need very few, and you need to grow with them together and just balance your cash flow in terms of cost management based on those projections. Because in our business, it's like monthly recurring type of income or nearly ARR. So You can plan, and it's very, very. This is the great thing in SAS, right? That you can plan forward, and if you work with these large enterprise, it's like you can go and describe those companies with with debt loan providers and with the banks. And so there is a way to establish credibility in terms of how do you manage your finances. So this is this is was this was our story, and this is how we started.

That's wonderful. And that need for speed, I think, and the responsiveness. And in a way, as you say, that's a function of scale. And ironically enough, the smaller you are, the more that plays into that opportunity, doesn't it?

100%.

So if you're on your own, you can be as fast or faster than the biggest company. So that's really wonderful advice. Eitan, I'm going to ask you before you have a kind offer for people, to use Vimi, what would be a book or a podcast that you have either listened to currently or that you've read?

So one of the powerful concepts I heard lately is different is better than being better. So how do you differentiate yourself as a company, right, versus the others? So there are like various, so there is a methodology how to do that. And I read a book by Jesse James, Marketing for Supervillains. So that's the book. It's a really fascinating way to quickly and practically adapt things to your own business in the way you describe what you do and who you are in a very differentiated way versus the competition.

Jesse James. I had to see if they're a relative. Jesse James, which used to be a great outlaw, of course, wasn't it? Jesse James, Marketing for Villains. Yeah. Well, look at that. Eitan, thank you so much. You have kindly offered something for our listeners.

Sure. So we are providing a coupon code. We can call it UNNOTISED20 that will provide 20% discount for Unnoticed listeners for 3 months. And we will share this coupon code obviously in the show notes and you can use that, I think, in our platform like quickly after this recording. You can go to vimi.net, it's vimi.net/pricing, and you can start probably selecting one of the packages. You can start with a free package and obviously grow from there.

Nathan, I'm excited. I wonder if I can launch my new course through Vimi because it sounds fascinating and frankly a lot more innovative than going through Facebook ads and the traditional route. Yeah.

Of course.

If people want to get hold of you, Eitan, how can they do that?

Yes, I'm quite active on LinkedIn. It's Eitan Kotter, E-I-T-A-N. Last name is Kotter, K-O-T-T-E-R. So that's the best place probably. And obviously our website, vimm.net.

Perfect. And we can, presumably, we can see your 30-second videos all over the internet, especially on LinkedIn.

Yeah.

Eitan, thank you. This whole shoppable video And this whole ecosystem that you've introduced is brand new for me on the show. So thank you so much for coming on the show to explain it.

Amazing. Jim, thank you so much for managing the Unnoticed for so long, more than 800 episodes, right? Already.

That's right. Yes, I've got 800+ episodes now.

Thank you for this amazing service you provide to all entrepreneurs out there. Really. Thank you so much.

Thank you. Well, it's my passion. My vision is to have conversations with entrepreneurs like yourself and really curate these and be able to share your wisdom with another audience. And that's really the mission that I've got. You're sharing videos and I'm sharing knowledge. So it's wonderful. Thank you so much for your gratitude as well.

Thank you.

So there we have it, shoppable video. If you're not using it, you should be using it regardless of the product. You are selling, and vimi.net is the way that you can do that. It's a free sign-up, or you can use UNNOTICED20 as a coupon if you want to go for one of the slightly bigger packages. If you've enjoyed this as much as I have, please do leave a review because it really helps me to know that you're enjoying it, and share it with a fellow unnoticed entrepreneur. I've got a few people in mind that I know I'm going to share Vimi with who have got products, and I know they're going to use this and find it very valuable. And until we meet again, I just encourage you to keep on communicating.