How I rolled my own explainer video for my Saas in a weekend | Hacker News Reader

How I rolled my own explainer video for my Saas in a weekend

medium.com

100 pointscyberferret40 comments

A couple of notes / thoughts:

1) The animations seem slow. I found it distracting as I watched them meander into / out of frame or focus. Can they be sped up some? Especially anything dealing with text...it was painfully slow to watch.

2) Your wife has a gorgeous voice and does a great job! There are a few instances where I detected awkward pausing (perhaps cutting audio to sync / match with the animation?), but for the price it couldn't have been beaten!

3) Be mindful of English. The statement "Not just for big corporates" sounds odd.

4) Include more screenshots of your application. When talking about being able to use it on any device you should overlay images of your application from those devices onto the outlined images of the various devices. Give us a look at how your app appears on mobile / tablet / desktop.

5) Parts of the template don't seem to mesh with what the voiceover is talking about. Prime example: talking about linking to payroll systems (starting around 1m35s). The image is a lightbulb. Doesn't make sense. Perhaps that's just the limitation of the template.

6) Overall time is quite lengthy. We live in bite sized chunks of time and sitting through a 3m video is difficult. See if you can chop it down to just the basics. Give us a taste of your app and then direct us to your site to dig in for more details.

Great job though considering the budget!

Thank so much for your feedback. Excellent tips for the next video we try. Much appreciated.

1. The overall pace of the video - animations and narration - seems pretty slow. People today are used to very fast video editing.

2. You don't start to say what the product actually does until 31 seconds in ("filing cabinet in the cloud"), with further details coming about 45 seconds in, and then the rest of the video to explain yet further features.

3. There are a lot of features, which is very cool - but naturally that does make your one-sentence punch line hard to craft. Example: "HR Partner serves as your digital filing cabinet to effortlessly organize all your employee information, lets your employees keep up-to-date on office memos, and integrates payroll information." That's not that great a sentence, but some soundbite upfront would tell us that more features are coming over the course of the video.

4. Ditto on numbers 5 and 6 above. The "h with an h" caught my ear as well, as I'm US rather than Australian.

Thanks for posting this, and how you did it - we've thought about making a cost-effective video as well so this is really helpful. I'm surprised at how good this looks and sounds (unfair advantage with in-house talent!).

Thank you. Useful tips again here, especially about shortening the message and saying what the product does as early as possible. Much appreciated.

Excellent work and general information. Templates are eating the world. I saw a post on HN the other day about no design jobs--the author got it wrong in his reasoning. Design jobs are shrinking because of templates. It's not economical for me to pay 5 or 6 figures for an original design, when I can have a good enough one to for 60 bucks.

Cool looking site + amazing work if you did the entire HR system yourself. As someone who has worked for an "underdog ERP provider" I love every new player in the market. Good luck with sales/customer acquisition and the entire funnel. That's pretty tough if you are alone. From my experience I think a good strategy is hammering the employee self care and privacy hard. I'd also try to attack one niche at a time if possible (even though that's harder for Saas). I'd also play the "we're Australian" angle harder since that's where you can go door to door and get the non website signups. If it wasn't for your wife's accent I wouldn't have known (it's hidden somewhere at the bottom). I understand if you don't want to do that but growing regionally first is a very solid strategy for any type of business software from my experience. The common advice is to hire good salespeople quickly, if you feel you're up to the task I'd say do it yourself. Running a lean/small enterprise software company is pretty doable. Customers will want to hear "your story". Be prepared to offer that, mention that your wife does the audio of the video if you're comfortable with that. That's the stuff that always sold really well. Do not underestimate how many people will try you because they "hate the big companies". If you talk to enough people that work in the broad ERP domain you'll hear all sorts of stuff that isn't really true. Sell features, IT only cares if the stuff improves efficiency etc...I'd say you can safely ignore all of that. Beautiful and UI are (still) vastly underrated, your product is ahead of the curve on the former and I'm assuming also on the latter.

Note on the webdesign: The top text disappears behind the laptop picture (latest FF, OSX, 15" MBP). Announcing (new line) a beautiful, easy to (image, newline) web based human r (image, newline) managemen ste (half an m). The pictures at the bottom also float slightly over text iirc

Hey thanks for the marketing info, especially the tips on what to make stand out. To be really honest, I am finding the marketing of this WAY tougher than the actual development! I struggle with 'telling the story', so your hints are especially valuable - I really appreciate it. Thanks also for mentioning the design flaws on the site, I will check those out.

Correct me if I'm wrong...but shouldn't you also include the time you spent in your "final cost"? For example, if my time is worth $100 per hour and I spend 10 hours, sure, my debit card shows that I spent $100...but add in my time and now it's around $1100. I could have used that time to work on other things, to generate even more value for my startup, and effectively break even when the company I hired to create an explainer video delivers.

You are right. If I added in my normal consulting rate, the cost would have been the same as the original quotes I got. But for me, I valued the learning experience of doing something I had never done before. To be honest, it was a good change from the core development work on the app, or the social media marketing I had been doing.

I am pretty much a one man show here, so am used to doing everything myself now. In a sense, I still think that the added skills I am learning adds value to my startup. Once I started earning serious income and hire others, then I will have to strive to become better at delegating work that is not my core speciality, but until then, I just have fun learning. :)

I admire your philosophy on this. It's impressive work for 48 hours starting from scratch. I'm also glad you recognise that 2,000 for a video like this is a reasonable rate. A lot of times people don't realize just how much goes into that sort of work.

It takes time to select, communicate with, and manage an outside company. It creates a dependency on that company's schedule and the schedules of all the other companys that the outside company also works for. Those costs tend to be non-trivial even in cases where there is a long term established relationship.

To put it in perspective, it may take a couple of weeks of calendar time just to get to a signed agreement. Never mind a few more weeks to get a final product [if it all]. That's a big break in cognitive flow for a small project that can be knocked out in a few hours.

Only if you actually would have billed that time out (you wouldn't have).

Why not put the video 'above the fold' on your site. I think that would be valuable.

But seriously, you created a full-fledged HRMS site (that also looks nice)? These are sprawling beasts. For the past few years working in HR, I've never met one that both works seamlessly on the input side, and does not need CSV exports of things to make reports look nice. Great job.

Thanks very much. Yeah, I spent about 3 months last year building that. Wrote every line of code myself (around 20,000+ lines of Ruby and 80+ database tables.). Still a lot more to add to it, but I thought to get it out there.

You do realise that Fortune-500 companies have far, far worse HRMS systems in existence? I don't know every F500, but would guess all of them do, including big name consultancies that say they are the bees-knees.

As others have noted: it seems slow.

A good "trick" to dealing with this is to self-impose a hard run time of 1 minute. Having that will force you to make choices about what to include, what not to and really pick up the pace.

There is also www.adobe.com/voice Its an iphone app that allows you to create videos. I used fiverr for the audio (since I am not a native speaker) and adobe voice for the video. The end result was pretty good.

I paid a guy 20 bucks on fiverr for a 30 second video with an Australian accent and cookie cutter cartoon animation. Rolling your own explainer only makes sense if you can outdo someone on fiverr or you want original content which I think doesn't really matter for explainer videos because the video watcher only cares what the product is, people don't buy products on the video alone but I could be wrong.

Good feedback. Were you happy with the results? How much time did it take you to go back and forth to explain the concepts and ideas?

One thing that struck me is that After Effects seems quite reasonable at $20, of course the UK price is more though only about $25 - must be extra to pay for the transatlantic crossing for the data /s.

http://hrpartners.com does not resolve without www. Check that issue.

is it just me or the pronunciation for HR Partner is off at https://vimeo.com/157981359#t=0m24s

(the H is mispronounced)

Well picked up. I think that is really a colloquial thing. My wife is Australian, and she does tend to switch between "aitch" and "haitch" for the pronunciation.

Good tip to remember in future to keep it consistent. I am thinking also that US viewers might be discomfited by her pronunciation of "data". Once again, the Aussie way is "darr-ta" rather than "day-ta".

gotcha! I'm not a native speaker, so I had to double-check how to pronounce the H :)

I can't decide on that. The voice is amazing, and in the US we see foreign accents as "trendy". However if the target market was US (which I have no idea if it is), I wouldn't be surprised if A/B testing would favor an American accent. Just because we hear it all day, so we are much more used to it.

People are going to need to take this more seriously. Bosses are cracking down on pronunciation - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3y0CD2CoCs

I thought that video was hilarious!! Thank for posting! :D

This is how most Australians pronounce H (as 'haitch').

Nice Aussie accent

So you bought a pre-made template used by thousands of others and edited the text...

Exactly. Rather than pay a four figure sum like thousands of other others.

I figured that there would be people in the same boat, with limited finances, who may like some pointers to ways they can achieve the same.

Watched the video. It's pretty slick for $100. I went back to see how much you paid for voiceover, but your wife did it -- that's cheating! Like saying I made an explainer video in a day for free and oh, "my brother is a producer". I guess you could always do that part yourself to cut down on cost. How much would a voiceover actor have been? Did you need to work with Adobe after effects or was it just a library type dependency? If so, what did you think of it, how difficult was it to learn and work with?

You could use something like voicebunny for the voice over if you didn't have access to talent.

Thank you for posting this link.

Good tip. Coincidentally, a couple of years ago someone suggested my wife audition for Voice Bunny to be added to their talent pool for contract jobs. She never did though.

I totally concur it would be cheating if she was a professional voiceover artist. But in reality, she isn't. She's a counsellor by profession, but she has a really nice speaking voice, which I knew and wanted to use in this case. She has been asked by other people we know to do voice over work for ads etc., but she has turned them down on the grounds that it is not her every day job. I guess she couldn't turn me down though... ;)

Oops, I forgot to answer your question. I surprisingly found AE quite easy to pick up. I did Flash action scripting many years ago, so the concept of key frames etc. I was familiar with and managed to get to grips with.

Most of the time came from trying to understand the template I bought. The designed had gone deep with multiple embedded templates within each other to get the animations to work, so I had to unravel some of them where I wanted to change the images or paths. I am sure I was hack handed at a lot of it, but it gave me the results.

This reads like an advert for Envato. Is it sponsored content?

Not at all. Envato was just a source for two of the components I used. No affiliations or anything with them. I probably should have named ALL the other local software that I used to do the audio etc., but it would have become really long winded. I just wanted to point people to a spot they might find useful, like I did.

Might be worth having a list somewhere of every piece of software used so people can replicate your effort if they wish.

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