Breathtaking Animations In 3 Clicks With The World’s Easiest Full-Auto Video Animation Software!

Hello and welcome to this episode of the Unnoticed Entrepreneur. Today I'm really excited to have Joey Soto joining me from Preston who's going to tell us all about how we can use videos. Joey, welcome to the show.

Hey Jim, thanks a lot for having me. Really excited to be on.

I'm excited too because I discovered Videos, your video platform, some time ago and it's liberated me in terms of creating cool animated graphics and videos. So tell us about videos and how you help entrepreneurs get noticed.

So Videos is a web based video creator. It allows pretty much anybody to create really exciting looking video animations and video content for their brand online. It's pretty much as simple as just choosing a pre created template that we've designed ourselves, customizing it and then creating it in the Cloud literally takes 2 minutes, 3 minutes, and you've got yourself a really flashy asset that you can use in your content.

How can you make it so simple? Because if you use one of these desktop apps or you normally go to a studio, a graphic design studio, they charge you thousands of pounds to make like a sting or a bump for your video. So how are you doing this and making it so accessible?

So we essentially have taken the animation heavy lifting bit out of it, where we've got a massive animation team here that churns out animations every month. So we do all the cool kind of, you know, the tracking and all of that stuff that normal people probably wouldn't know anything about, including me, by the way. I'm not an animator myself. So we take all of that part out of it and templatize the whole technology. So all the user really does is comes in and changes certain parts of the animation that we've allowed the user to change. So if you want to make like a logo bump, we will have a generic logo that kind of moves around within this really great anim we've created. But the software will allow you to just replace that part of the animation. Now it might sound like that's going to not make it look really cool, but the way that we've designed it is that your logo will move in semantic space, in 3D space, so it will look like as though it's supposed to be there, if that makes sense. So how it all works, I couldn't really tell you to the specific degree of the tech because we've got some very, very clever developers that have helped us do this. But the vision that we had when we first started, we just want to make it so that if I want to go and make an animation. I just want to pick a template that looks really cool, that I can customize with my own colors like that. So you can change all the colors so it matches your brand, so nothing's off brand. And I want to be able to add in my own assets to make it mine, essentially. So in some ways it pretty much just takes out all of that complication from the user. Because at the end of the day, if you're running a small business, most of the time your expertise is not in design or visual, but that's where our expertise is. So we take that away and we make sure that your thing looks good. The problem with desktop applications is you're trying to learn something. You try to learn the software on how to actually create that asset. But then it's not just about learning the technical part, it's also about learning the visual part. You have to make it actually look good. And if, if you don't have a design flair or that creative and you're going to make something that doesn't look so good. So we solve a lot of problems with a really simple tool. And it sounds really simple, but there's a lot of complex stuff that happens in the background that makes it really simple.

Well, Joey, as a user of videos and we'll obviously share how to spell it in the URL in the show notes, I can say that it is really wonderfully simple to use and get some great results. Do you want to just share with us like some of the applications? Because there is, you know, for example, the logo animation. What other sort of uses would one or your users have for videos?

Yeah. So, you know, one side of it, as you said, is branding. So you can brand up all your video content really easily again just in a couple of clicks. Or you can create things like lower thirds and alpha animations is what we call them. So alpha animations are things that overlay on top of the video. So if you're making content for LinkedIn or Instagram or whatever, you can essentially add these elements on top of your video content. Things like arrows and titles and, you know, all kinds of graphics and elements that make your video stand out from the crowd, essentially. So it's all about trying to make your content more engaging. At the end of the day. We don't at the moment do like full end to end video. So you couldn't create a full video right this moment. And I say this moment because that's something we're going to open up in the next few months. But right now it's make your video content look a lot more flashy by adding all these extra elements in. In the day we're in right now, you've got 5, 600 hours of content being uploaded literally within 60 seconds. So we have a tremendous amount of content that's being uploaded online. And what that means is two things. One, people love video, obviously because it's the most consumed media that there is now. The second thing is that it's extremely saturated. It's very, very competitive. And if you don't stand out, if your content doesn't look exciting and interesting, then you know you're going, you're just going to be kind of thrown out, like no one's going to notice your content. So the whole idea with this is to grab attention and get noticed. You know, for a small business you might not have the budget to be able to do that, to go and hire a massive agency or a big design team to help you do that. So what we're doing is essentially making it a lot easier for people to do that on a very small budget.

Joey, perhaps you can give us an idea of all the number of templates because sometimes some of these platforms have got one or two templates and it can get a bit dull. Is it, you know, five or six templates we're talking about with inside videos or what sort of scale are we looking at?

So if you're a monthly subscriber, you get access to, I believe, over 2000 different templates. So there's a massive range of different types of templates and we add new ones every month as well. So I think we add around about 30 to 40 new templates every month. So there's always fresh stuff coming in, which is really important because our design team keeps an eye out for what the new trends are, what's working, what's not working. Because design trends change so frequently and that's something that we're always on top of. If you buy our perpetual license, our one time license, which we do sell again because we're trying to make this a accessible for everybody. If you buy a one time license, you get access to 250 templates roughly. So there's still enough there to play around with, experiment with and get enough variety for you to create something cool.

Fantastic. We'll talk about pricing at the end. But what about branding and corporate branding? If one uses a platform like Lumen 5, for example, and even Canva now you can upload your brand guidelines. And especially if you're working with an agency or a va. Joey, Then you might ask them to create the animated videos, but you've got some design guidelines. Otherwise you're trying to manage all of that later, not be consistent. How do you help the business owner to stay within the corporate guidelines?

So what we do is we have a level of the product called agency, which allows you to essentially save your brand guidelines, in a sense, we call them like asset type, asset packs or asset folder. So when you're creating your content, you'll get prompted to basically select the colors that you use in your brand or your corporate style or whatever. And you can select your fonts, you can upload your images and things that are relevant to your particular brand or whatever. So every time you go and make a template, every time you go and you make a new video, you can essentially use that template process. So the whole idea with this is it's a good point that you raised because a lot of businesses do make a mistake of sometimes doing too many different types of designs and too many different creatives, which again, starts creating this disparity in what your brand is supposed to look like. So what we encourage is save your colors and things like that into the platform and then every time you create, you can just use that as a template that then goes and fires off your designs. So we just try to make it as simple as possible and keep people consistent.

Okay, that's wonderful. Yes. Because the proliferation of content means that your brand can also get really diluted too. So, Joey, tell us about music. Because it's one thing to have moving images, but many people now are getting involved with sonic branding, as I believe it's called. Do you help people with. With providing music or do they need to download and upload new music? How does that work?

So all of our templates have audio baked in. So we have a full audio engineering team here that creates sound effects and plays music as well. For every sing template we have and everything is really high grade, super professional, you can also select between different options. So we don't just have one option per template. We've got between three and five options per template. So we're always cranking out new audio for every single template. So it's a lot of different assets that get created. Thousands of templates, thousands of audio tracks that we haven't produced. So there's a lot of material there for people to play around with.

And what about the production in terms of once I've got the video clip? One issue is duration, because we don't always want the standard 30 seconds. Maybe need a 10 second or a 20 seconds. Can I control the duration as well?

So in this moment, no. Right now we have all the assets. Right now between 0 to 30 seconds, I'd say on average 16, 17 seconds for a template. Now what we're developing at the moment for our next releases, we'll have the option to kind of add templates in and take templates away. So you'll be able to actually start dictating how long you actually want your piece of content for. For now, the work around that is to simply just drop the template into any video editor. It could be like Imovie for example, which is free, or Movie Maker. If you're on a Windows machine and you can just trim the video down, or if you're on your phone even, you can literally just download the template onto your phone and you can just trim the video on your phone. Literally takes a couple of seconds. But hopefully in the next few months you'll be able to do that all kind of within the app natively.

Yeah, because I think that'd be really useful because I found when I've downloaded a clip that if I trim it too much, I'm losing the end frames. So it'd be really good if you can give one of parameters being set the duration of the clip. That'd be really useful. In terms of download formats, I'm using it, but I'm going to let you explain. Joey, what do users get in terms of files, formats to use and terms like resolutions?

So most of the templates at the moment MP4, so traditional MP4 video, you can get.mov as well, which.mov files are traditionally used when you're overlaying a video. So if you're putting like a some sort of effect on top of another video, you have to have a transparent layer which is dot mof. But then we also do this really cool export to GIF as well. So anything that you create in videos can be exported as a GIF file that you can embed on a website. But what we do and what we encourage our users to do is actually use them in emails. Because you can create these really great looking animated call to actions inside your email, like an arrow pointing down or a really cool text call out and you can actually have a moving animation right inside your email. And that's something we've done for clients and a couple of enterprise clients to see how we can improve their click through rates and that kind of thing, which is how we kind of encourage people to use that. But you could do it however you want, but Those are the three kind of main formats. And then every video is HD. We're also doing a couple of 4K exports as well. But at the moment, like, we're kind of believers in just trying to keep things lean. You don't really need to have 4K output for web video at the moment. Moment. Maybe one day you will, but right now, HD output is more than enough for web. It saves us a little bit of money on export, but it also saves you a bit of time on upload as well. And bandwidth too.

Yeah, I found that the quality, the resolution is really good and can be drag and drop straight into a platform like Descript, which is what I use. Joe, what about the ip? If it's being created in your platform, do you own the IP or do I own the ip?

So we give a commercial license with the purchase. So if somebody buys into our platform, you own the rights to the content you export. Obviously the templates are our IP, but when you render that video out as an MP4, you can do whatever you would like to do with it, whether it's using it on your own platform, sorry, on your own website, or even if you wanted to go and sell it to someone, you could do that.

You could. Okay, that's important, isn't it? Because ownership of what you create is really key in this. Joey, are there any trends that you're seeing within videos, the kind of videos and stings that are being created, or the kind of music that people can also upload to your platform and embed in their videos? Any particular trends that you're seeing to show what's becoming popular?

You know, I think these days, less is more. Simple stuff works really well at the moment. If you look at, even just from a general design perspective, a lot of the big businesses, big tech businesses are moving into this minimalistic design style. If we look at Facebook and all the new kind of tech platforms, everything seems to be sans serif fonts and really slick and minimal. And that's what I'm noticing. Just with the video thing as well, you know, everything seems to be quite minimal, but then the other side of it as well is not overly professionalized. I think that's something that I kind of am an advocate for, is keeping things. It doesn't have to always be super corporate. I think, like, I think corporate is starting to become this thing that a lot of people can't resonate with, a lot of people can't relate with. So a lot of our templates are a little bit more Edgy, some of them are quite glitchy and things like that. But we've got a lot of wide variety of different styles. Like what we try to do with our platform is try to cater to a lot of different types of businesses because we can't try and pigeonhole ourselves. So we try and create stuff that can be used by anybody, whether you're a Starbucks, a Tesla or Vodafone, or if you're just somebody sat at home wanting to make something for your YouTube channel.

Okay. And also I think very useful for people in training to create animated. I've done that, created like animated titles for my training course, using videos. Tell us, can you, if you don't mind a little bit about how many users you've got. Is that okay, Joey, to share? Because I think you've been going for seven or eight years now, what sort of traction you get.

Sure. So we have around about 250,000 users now. You know, it's been a long journey at the moment, a quarter of a million. And we'd hope that we can get to that kind of half a million mark over the next couple of years with some good aggressive marketing. But we'll see how we go. But yeah, a good size customer base now.

Yeah.

Great.

And that's important because if you're going to be looking at using videos, you want to know that you're not alone. Because you've got the ability to continue to invest in the platform, haven't you? And in the new templates. You talk about growing the business. Joey, you're one of the three co founders and currently the CEO. You said we sat. Sounds ominous, but I know that you're the visionary there. How are you getting the company noticed as an entrepreneur?

So our main channel right now is paid advertising. So a lot of our growth, I'd say like 90% of our growth has come from running YouTube traffic, Facebook traffic, Google Ads, that kind of thing. And even, even out of those three, I'd say the majority of our growth has come from YouTube advertising, which sounds super simple, but once you've got the kind of formula down to what type of marketing pages you need, what kind of video ads you need, it's just a case of looking at your numbers and making sure you've got a cost per acquisition, you've got a good conversion, and then just running that traffic, and then what we do is we just rotate our advertising. So just make sure we have new creatives all the time and just run people through those campaigns. And that's pretty much what we've been doing, we also leverage our affiliate program. So we've got about 10,000 affiliates that have promoted videos over the last seven years. So that's another thing that we're looking to introduce soon. But primarily it's just paid advertising, really.

Okay. Yeah. And that's how I found you as well. In fact, we must let people know the sort of value because I personally found your platform to be amazingly good value. Do you want to share a little bit about the pricing?

Sure. So in this moment you can buy a license for $67, which works out to like 50 pounds if you're in the UK. And that gives you access to the core products. So you can use 250 templates, you can use them as many times as you want. So there's no limit on how many videos you can create or anything like that. You can make as many as you want. And that's just a one time fee if you want to get access to all 2000 templates and make as many videos as you want and get new templates every month as well as like a couple of extra features, which I won't go into here, but it's a more fully fledged experience. $37 a month. So, you know, really low cost investment if you're a business. It's just kind of something to have in your toolbox that we're not going to be one of those bills that you look at and say, wow, you know, that's really expensive. It's more like something that sits on the side and you can just tap into. So we want to keep it that way.

Yeah, that's really, really powerful pricing. And if you're an agency, of course you're getting amazing ROI on that if you're subscribing, because you can obviously use it for your client videos and for presentations as well. So it's really fantastic. And Joe, what next then, for videos? Where do you see it going and adding more? The unnoticed entrepreneur out there.

So what we're doing now is pretty revolutionary. Nobody's doing it at the moment and I have no idea why. But what we're essentially about to do is totally automate the creation of these videos. So a lot of our customers want to make full length videos yourself. Jam. You might want to make like a trailer for your podcast as an example.

Yes.

So what you would do is you would log into videos and instead of just having this massive selection of templates, what you're going to have is an option to choose a recipe. And our approach to this is we're going to give you different types of recipes to give you ideas of why you're actually creating a video. Video. Because again, the one big thing we see with a lot of small businesses that they don't know why they're creating content, they're just creating content. So from a marketing perspective, we want to say, okay, tell us what your goal is with this piece of content. Do you want to make sales? Do you want to grow your email list? Do you want to create brand awareness? So what is it? When you select what goal you have in mind, we're going to show you a different bunch of recipes that we've put together that will be catered towards your goal. So as an example, if you choose a brand awareness recipe that's going to be made up of a bunch of different ingredients. So an ingredient is a template, in a sense. So one recipe might be right. It's going to start with a logo, stinger. Then there's going to be a cool title. Then we're going to show customer reviews, then we're going to show a product of your image, and then we're going to show call to action. So instead of just going and rendering one template, we're going to essentially create the full thing for you. Now, that part's cool. But the coolest part about this is that the way we're going to do that is by gathering data from you. So the more you can tell us about your business. So, okay, my podcast is called Beyond Noticed, and this is my logo. These are the colors I use. This is what my podcast does. So all that data you give us every single time you log on to the platform, we're already going to have created the content for you. So you don't need to do anything. All you got to do is select what you want and the video will already be made for you. You can make some tweaks if you want to, and then you can just publish it from the platform. So the whole idea with this is we want to. Our mantra at videos is just three clicks, you know, and the whole vision of this mantra is that we want to get to a stage where small businesses don't have to sweat trying to create content. Because it's hard. Making content like creating content every day whilst running your business is a chore. It's like hoovering your house, right? It's like, it's not something you really enjoy doing, but you know, you have to do it to keep up with your competition. So the idea is we're going to take that pain away from you by curating content, but not just any crappy content. It will look really good, it will look really professional, and it will look like the type of stuff that an agency would make for you. But we're going to automate that entire process.

Great. That's fantastic. And in alignment with my own story, not just a generic storyboard. Joey Soto, thank you so much for joining me. And I am a user and I love the products. I'm really excited you've kindly come on the show. How can people find out about you?

You could either head over to my LinkedIn I use my name Joey Soto, or you could head over to videos.com which is spelled V I D D Y O Z E dot com. I've got a pension for weird names. So that's where you can go and check out the the product if you want to check it out.

Great. And that's Joey Soto. That's an X O T O as opposed to S O T o. That sounds like that, doesn't Joey?

Yeah, it's like I just can't spell anything.

Well, you're in video, not in text grading. Joey, thanks for joining me on the Unnoticed Entrepreneur today.

Thanks, Jim. Thanks for having me.

Be my pleasure. And all these details will be in the show notes. So thank you for joining me. Jim James on the Unnoticed Entreprene.