Do you have long videos you want clip and share effortlessly to promote your business?

Hello and welcome to this episode of Speak PR. This is the podcast for business owners who know they've got something great to unlock in their businesses if they can just find the right ways to communicate that. And today we're going to talk about video, and I'm joined by Alex Redmond, who is the founder of Clipshare. Alex, welcome.

Thank you, Jim. How you doing?

Great, thanks. I trust you're doing well too. Now tell us, Clipshare— I've been watching you on, on LinkedIn— what problem Yeah, firstly, thanks very much for having me on the show.

It's really great to speak to yourself and your wider audience, have a bit of a catch-up. So Clipshare is designed to tackle a fundamental problem, which is if you're generating long-form video content, so maybe that's a vlog or, you know, vlog or blog just like this, or podcast, or maybe it's a longer sort of sales and marketing piece, how do you drive traffic to it? Traffic and ultimately eyeballs to that content. So you can actually generate revenue off the back of it, however you're doing that, whether it's ads or whether it's by monetizing through actual services or products. So one of the ways you can do that is by chopping up into little bit of clips. That's the kind of pertinent point, the real takeaway. You might put a call to action on that and then distribute it far and wide across social media. The challenge with doing that is it's quite labor-intensive, quite repetitive, and it's got to be a little bit nuanced between each of the platforms. So what we do is take the pain out of that process and try and essentially automate as much of it as possible. So you can sort of have, you know, let's say 1 or 2 hours a week where you set up all of your content scheduled for the week, and it's all based off content you've already produced and you're simply repurposing it. to get more bang for your buck out of it.

How is it working? Is it choosing certain sections of my video, or am I needing to decide I want a certain section of the video and it's auto-editing?

You've actually touched on some of the longer-term roadmap, which is if you think of the problem statements I've mentioned there and the solutions, you know, you want to get as much computer programming in finding those clips as possible. And that's certainly something that we're thinking about. But in the shorter term, so where we are right now, generally the content creator knows the piece that they've lovingly edited, no doubt for hours and hours and days, and they will pretty much have a handle on where the good bits are. You know, that's going to be a good bit for LinkedIn, actually. I know my LinkedIn audience. That's probably going to be quite good for Twitter. So at the moment, they go in and select essentially those timestamps. in that video manually. But we say manually, it's really not that hard at all. If a lowly non-techie person like myself can do it, I'm pretty sure your esteemed audience can do it as well.

And so with this content, if we've got it on our desktop, then do we need to load that to the cloud, or is it something that you have residing as an app? on people's computers?

Yeah, so at the moment it's, um, uh, it's completely in the cloud, so cloud-based, and that's so we can have, uh, the scalable architecture that we need to give, uh, users the performance they need, because obviously video rendering is quite, um, uh, you know, computing power intensive. Um, so it's all hosted in the cloud, uh, at the moment in terms of, um, because we're quite early in our business life cycle aimed at early adopters and innovators, we're pitching it at, let's say, YouTubers or podcasters, videographers, maybe the smaller social media managers where they have the problem statements I've articulated at a higher volume, where a lot of their content's already hosted on YouTube. So the first-off way that we grab content is by directly linking to your YouTube account. So it's super seamless. It literally It literally looks exactly as your sort of channel tiles on your own YouTube page. There is also a URL, essentially fetcher, we call it, where you can copy-paste the URL in to access that video. And one of our next steps is to have an actual uploader from your desktop, because we've had a few user requests for that recently. So we kind of jig around our product innovation roadmap depending on the user feedback. So we're trying to make it as accessible as possible for what the user base are asking for.

If you're taking these clips and you're putting them across to, for example, YouTube, are these becoming in effect trailers then for the long-form content?

At the moment, the call to action is essentially written in your description box. So if, as an example, if you look at how people might be posting on LinkedIn, they'll typically upload a video. Have a small description and then they'll say something like, link in comments, you know, click the links. And then that link would then drive those, let's say, LinkedIn views to whatever pillar or clip content is that you want. So at the moment, you can pretty much put whichever link you want in that description box and drive the traffic how you see fit. In future iterations, we'll have, you know, there'll be some like dropdown boxes or whatever to make that super seamless because generally people are driving traffic to only a few, let's say, repositories, you know, the YouTube channel or to their website or whatever. So we are envisaging, certainly our users are telling us that You know, it's only 1, 2, or 3 destinations that they want to drive the traffic. So we're trying to channel it in those directions.

Why would this be different to someone just taking from, for example, their iMovie or their Adobe, just taking those clips themselves?

You've essentially got these 2, let's call it almost monolithic industries out there. You've got video editors, so your iMovie, to use our example, but you've also got a lot of the social media management tools and scheduling tools— Later.com, Buffer, Hootsuite, all of the big names. When you get into, let's say, the pro packages on either of those that really have the functionality that you want, those are becoming quite large, unwieldy products that generally need quite a bit of skill set and investment in personal learning to actually get up to speed with some of them. Our premise is there's a huge underserved part of the market where people just don't have time to do that, and they actually just need to get from, let's say, 0 to 1 in terms of getting some video out there. They don't need to be an absolute expert on the video out there. They can get 80 or 90% of the value by just nailing the basics, and that's what our product does. So we bring The best bits in terms of zero-to-one from a video editor, and we bring the best bits from a social media management tool in terms of scheduling, and we bring those together in a really neat package that tackles that underserved part of the market.

Is this also helping people to do some of the branding and the subtitling that other packages are offering?

At the moment, our current software release, we've got the branding uploader on that, which is really cool. So I'm bound to say that I'm biased, so I'm not sure which side of the screen it is, but basically your logo pops up here. It can be whatever you want. We've got a little Clipshare watermark, and obviously that, you know, in one fell swoop makes it look really professional and slick just by uploading that one little thing. And then one of the next releases we'll be doing is to get subtitles in there. So subtitles can be a little bit of a challenge from a technical point of view, not to dive into too much detail because In this kind of natural flowing conversation, you get a lot of ums, a lot of ers, and the subtitles can sometimes be nonsensical. So you need to make sure when you're— from our side, when we release that product into the market, you've got a way of maybe editing out some of that more natural language to make it much more readable. And that's what we're working on at the moment.

And who are the customers and the target audience? You mentioned sort of more high-volume Users of video?

We're getting really good response from YouTubers, so YouTube content creators who— they may be pro-amateur content creators, so they might be still doing this as a side hustle to their day job, or they have just jacked in the day job and now they've really got to invest in getting content out, and it's almost a full-time job in the week. Twitch streamers, other Obviously streaming has gone through the roof in the last couple months for all the obvious reasons. Um, so we're getting some good response and traction, um, on that side. And also, um, I'd say smaller social media managers that are looking to find an edge. Um, so what we found is some of the bigger social media managers, because they're being, you know, bombarded by people wanting to sell them products every day, they want case studies. We're still a little bit younger, whereas the smaller social media managers are much more open to tools that can really give them that edge. So I had a discussion with a social media management firm up in Manchester recently, and their feedback to our product was— there was a quote, I'm better, you know, it's nice of me to say this, but they said, you know, this is the tool we've been waiting for. But the really interesting thing they said that opened my eyes was This will allow us to bring social media management back in-house because it will essentially allow them to restore their margins on that piece of work because it takes so much of the labor element out of it from their side. So that's really, really compelling. You know, if they can add, you know, another, you know, line item to what they're offering from their existing resource, that's really, really powerful.

What sort of skill sets Would an individual need to use Clipshare?

If you can use LinkedIn, you can use Clipshare. If you can use YouTube, you can use Clipshare. If you can use Twitter, you can use Clipshare. If you use Instagram or Facebook, you can use Twitter— you can use Clipshare. It is pitched at the same level of intuitiveness as those platforms, if not easier. So a key premise of our tool is people just do not have time to learn these products, and they have to just work. So part of our offering is to just stay as simple as we can in terms of that user interface. So I think that there's always, when you touch a new product or service or whatever, where you're intimidated by the newness. That's very, very natural. But we've already got some onboarding videos on the website. We've got shorter ones and longer ones to run you through almost from start to finish what the process looks like. We think it's de-risked as much as possible, but, you know, please do, your audience, have a try, have a play about. If there's any builds, please let us know, but it's super easy. Even if I can use it, then I promise you can as well.

What are we looking at in terms of fees for using Clipshare?

So we're currently running our early adopter program, which has a 50% discount across the board for every plan. So you've got a free plan in perpetuity that has basically a Clipchamp watermark. That's how we monetize it from our side and give you value for free. We then also have the monthly paid plan, which is on the Early Adopter Program, £7— sorry, £9 per month. And then on the annual plan, it's simply the exact same thing, but paid upfront with a 20% discount. So I think at the moment on the Early Adopter Program, what's that, £80, £84, I think, for the year, which is— the way I look at these things is that's a tank of petrol in the UK. That's really nothing. That's what we like to say anyway. But going forward, we'll obviously collaborate with our users to find out what the right price point is, because obviously, the sooner we can— Build up revenues from the business side, the more value we can create in terms of launching earlier software iterations.

And you mentioned currencies in pounds and language is English. Could this work for people in Asia, for example, or with French or German? Are there limitations at all?

At the moment, the user interface is English only, but in terms of the output and what you What, you know, files in terms of being inputted, linking up to your YouTube channel, that can be any language you want. And in terms of what files you can then create and then post and schedule to your various platforms, Twitter, wherever, that's in whatever language you choose to post it. You know, there's a description box as per platform that you type in your message. You can type in whatever language you want. In future, we will be doing a more let's say, slick language rollout. But like all these things, when do you do it? When's the right time? Which market do you go after first? And we will, we will get there. But certainly, you know, if you're in China right now or Japan or Russia, so long as you can speak English, you can use the product, no problem.

And Alex, you mentioned YouTube, but what about for companies that are using platforms like Vimeo, for example, for live streaming, or Dazzle?

Yeah, great question. Um, long story short, not yet. Uh, we have got a lot of things in our basket that we want to do. Um, we haven't done Vimeo yet. It's going to be there soon. Um, we're, we're, we're trying to be quite considered in terms of how we do the various platform API integrations. The reason being is over the last few months there's been a lot of moves in the social media market. Look at the big announcement for Joe Rogan's podcast moving over to Spotify. Look at what's going on with TikTok in the US. As a third-party provider in this space, we've got to be very, very targeted for which platforms we invest in hooking up to. Because from our side, if we put a significant investment in terms of software dev, and then we're not allowed to access the market because Donald Trump has done something. That's a key risk. So at the moment, it's YouTube only, or a URL link in the coming days, and then the desktop file uploader. So we think that allow— that package quite early on allows us to access pretty much most users. And then for areas where we're getting more requests, we'll look to prioritize those accounts. So if enough, if enough people shout about Vimeo, we'll bump it up the product innovation roadmap and we'll get that linked up as soon as we can.

Alex, that's great. So you also mentioned there's a share it function. So what's the share part of Clipshare?

Yeah, exactly. So, um, so you've, you've got your long-form content and you've cut up all these little clips, um, that you want to to distribute. So the sharing function is how we do that distribution. So, um, once you've selected those clips you want to then share, you, you click, um, schedule it essentially on the, on the button, and then you've got a scheduling dashboard essentially that sort of tees up those, those clips. You write your descriptions, you select the platforms, uh, to distribute to You select the time and the date because obviously you might want to be targeting an audience in Japan with that one specific clip, or you might want to be targeting an audience in South Africa. So clearly those audiences are going to come online at different times, and then you literally just say post it, schedule it.

Alex, it sounds great. And if people do want to send off an email to you, how do they get hold of you?

Any method whatsoever. So you can hit me up on LinkedIn, it's Alexander Redman. My email address is alex@clipshare.it. You can go to our website, my contact details are all over the website.

Alex, thank you so much for joining our Speak PR podcast today.

Fantastic, thank you very much for having me, and obviously wish your audience some success in what's a very tricky year for all of us trying to build businesses and generate revenue for our clients and also our families.

That was Alex Redmond of Clipshare.it, which is a way that you can start to make fragments and little trailers from your long-form video and upload them, but then also distribute them. And so this is part of our 5-stage methodology, the SPEAK PR, which is Storify, Personalize, Engage, Amplify, and Know. And clip.it obviously is under the amplification module. So thank you so much for listening to this episode of Speak PR. If you like it, please do rate it, subscribe, come to our website at eastwestpr.com to subscribe to our weekly newsletter, or get in touch with me, jim@eastwestpr.com. And in the meantime, until we meet again, I wish you the best of health, a profitable business, And that you keep on communicating and sharing it.

Thank you.