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devongall

32 karma · joined March 9, 2011

Co-Founder of Vidyard
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devongall··on Show HN: Record your screen, share and instantly know when people watch
One day soon we hope to add a library - this is where you'd find features like this!
devongall··on Show HN: Record your screen, share and instantly know when people watch
Hi - sorry to hear you've hit some difficulties! support[at]viewedit[dot]com should definitely be able to help!

At this point, download isn't supported. It's something we may do in the future, but for now the hope is that the built in sharing makes download obsolete. Would love to hear areas where DL is important - feedback[at]viewedit[dot]com

Thanks!

devongall··on Show HN: Record your screen, share and instantly know when people watch
Cool! We're working on some other sales productivity tools alongside this - would love to hear what you guys have been doing. I'm devon [at] vidyard [dot] com.
devongall··on Show HN: Record your screen, share and instantly know when people watch
For sure. I think there's a great opportunity for teaching/training/product walk-throughs.

We have a couple customers using the full-fledged Vidyard platform for running training courses, excited to see how this screen recording tech gets adopted by them!

devongall··on Show HN: Record your screen, share and instantly know when people watch
Videos are stored in S3, and then syndicated to our CDNs around the world. The player is HTML5, with a flash fallback, so users shouldn't need anything special to watch.
devongall··on Show HN: Record your screen, share and instantly know when people watch
Yes, length is limited to 1 hour unfortunately. Hoping to extend this in the future, but right now for performance reasons we restrict it a bit.
devongall··on Show HN: Record your screen, share and instantly know when people watch
The product is built by Vidyard, so we make money on the enterprise platform. The use of ViewedIt will always be free. I talked about this a little more here: https://medium.com/@devongall/https-medium-com-devongall-the...
devongall··on Show HN: Record your screen, share and instantly know when people watch
One of the makers here, good question. We think there's a number of use cases - customer support (screen cap what they're doing wrong) and sales (personalized sales pitch) being the most obvious for the time being.

Also, good point on the Chrome Extension messaging, will fix.

devongall··on Why am I being endorsed for skills and expertise I do not claim on my profile?
Drop the "the".
devongall··on How Vidyard (YC S11) grew from 4K to 1M views a day and achieved negative churn
In a freemium model, looking at Revenue churn on the $0 accounts would definitely give you a pretty useless metric.

For some metrics it makes sense to lump the two together. But the distinction between the two is helpful for measuring a product's ability to up-sell itself to the existing customer base.

If you're interested in tracking revenue growth instead of customer growth - then say you have -1% revenue churn month/month, your existing customer base is going to be paying you 1% more the next month (even though you may lose a few customers along the way).

devongall··on How Vidyard (YC S11) grew from 4K to 1M views a day and achieved negative churn
It's a distinction between Revenue Churn and Customer Churn. If customer A cancels their account, it is a loss of 1 account. You can't really have negative customer churn.

Revenue churn would be Customer A cancels their account which was worth $5/month. But if customer B upgrades their existing account by $10/month, you would have negative revenue churn. The negative churn here is negative Revenue churn, ie. upgrades outpace cancelations.

devongall··on Envolve's (YCS11) first year: surviving arson attacks and a 7.0 earthquake
This story blew my mind. Love the perseverance!
devongall··on Vidyard’s (YC S11) video service just one-upped every competitor
Definitely! We've actually got sharing pages built in already for people just wanting to share a video along with a call to action or other content.

We've also done some pretty cool things with Unbounce landing pages - there's an article on the video landing page experience here: http://unbounce.com/conversion-rate-optimization/case-study-...

devongall··on Vidyard’s (YC S11) video service just one-upped every competitor
Definitely something we've considered - they tried doing something similar awhile back, but ended up removing the service pretty quickly.

It just doesn't fit Google's typical monetization through advertisements.

devongall··on One-time Secret: Share passwords etc with URIs that work only once
When I test this, the page is getting cached - and thus my one time secret is viewable multiple times. Interesting little quirk...
devongall··on Ask HN: Who is Hiring? (November 2011)
Waterloo, Ontario (Canada) or the Valley. Rails Developer. Full Time.

We're Vidyard, a YC S11 startup building an online video platform for businesses. We're looking for back and front-end engineers with significant web-development experience.

devongall··on Using Video to lift landing page conversion [Case Study]
On that particular landing page we did not; however, we've since done some testing on our site, and found you're really best to stay under 2 minutes. 60-90 seconds is optimal.

Attention span metrics really help with measuring your particular audience though - as it heavily depends on the message you're sending.

devongall··on TechStars Raises Fresh $24 M, Offers New Startups $100K Each
The names on the funding aren't quite in the Ron Conway, Yuri Milner realm - access to that network is one of the most important pieces of Startfund for follow-on, BD, etc.

That said, it's still awesome to see expansion in funds available for early-stage companies.

devongall··on TechStars Raises Fresh $24 M, Offers New Startups $100K Each
Agreed - seems like the terms could potentially defer the top-quality companies (although most would be happy to have the $ in their pockets), while the start-fund structure makes it attractive to any stage.

I'd hope the money is elective though, as that would certainly solve the problem.

devongall··on Show HN: Taking the Emmys by Storm (screencast on how to develop with Storm)
Been wanting to checkout Storm since the announcement - looking forward to watching the rest of this...
devongall··on My Year of Riak
Definitely agree on the expense of a list-keys operation, be sure to avoid at all costs.

Some of the Riak documentation was incomplete/incorrect which made implementation a little sticky, but the mailing list is extremely responsive and helpful.

Otherwise, have had a great experience with Riak thus far. Looking forward to the ease of scaling as well!

devongall··on Y Combinator Unloads Massive New Batch of Start-Ups
The free plan is intended to add player customization, no advertisements, no out-bound link and analytics over YouTube, along with pretty minimal branding (only on mouse-over).
devongall··on Y Combinator Demo Day: The Ultimate Roundup
The other side of the coin is it could allow more content to remain accessible for free (given the stats advertisers are bound to pay more).

I'd rather enter brand-specified words than my credit card info.

devongall··on Y Combinator Unloads Massive New Batch of Start-Ups
Thanks for the feedback - the last thing we wanted was for the line to be confusing, it was just supposed to indicate that a free plan was available, customers are then prompted to review the plans. That said, we've realized it might be misleading and have removed the pricing comparisons.
devongall··on [dead]
Tend to disagree - comments are on that topic because of the content of the post.

I'd think the relevance of the venue is determined by the level of comments and votes from the audience, the beauty of social sites. While I agree it doesn't follow the typical content of HN, if the audience up-votes then so be it.

devongall··on [dead]
I think the "biggest concern" refers to the Re-Tweet analysis...it had over 4900 RTs, far beyond anything else.
devongall··on [dead]
Seems we're loving the "war on..." tagline these days. While I agree with the sentiment, I feel like the marijuana debate may need to be more of an analysis than a war.
devongall··on [dead]
I really hope you're right! Will be interesting in hearing the analysis on whether Obama focused on what people wanted to hear vs. his agenda.

Was also pretty cool to checkout Obama's Twitsprout stats, seems his team is trying to drop the # of people they follow.

devongall··on What Twitter users asked the president - Boston.com
Interesting to compare this analysis with the one posted from Twitsprout by michaelrlitt. Seems boston.com widely underestimates the Twitter-verse's focus on marijuana...
devongall··on [dead]
Very cool analysis! Let's see if it comes true... Would love to hear the answer to the question from @kim: "Tech and knowledge industries are thriving, yet job discussion always centers on manufacturing. Why not be realistic on jobs?"
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