its4tom

Link to thesis on Scribd in case helpful: https://www.scribd.com/document/362484322/Stephen-Hawking-Ph...

The little guy can still succeed on Kickstarter/Indiegogo. We saw many bootstrapped campaigns do well (60% success rate), with videos made in-house or in the $1-$3k range. It's just that the amounts raised aren't as impressive, on average, $25k vs. the Millions attained by glossy campaigns with deeper pockets and expensive videos. Getting in the crowdfunding hall-of-fame has gotten harder, but crowdfunding is still an effective tool for small projects.

Only a few datapoints, but that's a good area to explore next. My hunch is that the findings will be quite different because there's a wider range of video formats for games. In particular much longer intros to set the stage.

That's great to hear! We contaced many campaigns, and received answers from 100 of them. We are very grateful to the companies who shared their video info. This kind of transparency is much needed, in particular in video production. In terms of methodology, one third of the sample is from randomly selected campaigns on Kickstarter / Indiegogo, one third are campaigns that made videos with Videopixie creators (I am a co-founder), and the remainig third we targeted specifically to cover the full range of campaign sizes. Obviously we'd love to do this with even more campaigns. This was kind of a proof of concept for us. People seem to benefit from the data, and we have a methodology in place, so I hope we get to do more of it!

Totally agree. I think that's what we are seeing from the other comments as well. Video is only part of the battle, and a more complete study would look at all the variables together.

Video is interesting in that it accelerates your efforts in other areas. The time you spend making a better video should also help you reach a bigger audience (A), increase conversion thus making advertising (D) more effective, it probably helps with PR too (E) since media outlets prefer to show interesting videos, and with page quality (C) to a degree since you can reuse frames from the video for the page.

So back to your question! how much to spend on video is you have $20k budget overall. From an execution standpoint, we certainly see a sweetspot ~$3-6k for video, in that it allows you to get a clean professional video that looks legit. That's enough to hire a director with a small crew for a day and simple editing. If you spend less then you'll have to take on some of the director's responsibilities to make sure you hit on the requirements we found in the benchmark (location scouting, quality images, tight narration...) We wrote more about this here https://www.videopixie.com/how-much-does-a-kickstarter-video...

I agree the video is well made. The quality is on par with what you'd expect for that budget. And it hits on all the recommendations we derived from the video benchmark data.

Can you tell us more about your campaign tactics, other than video? eg. How big of a mailing list did you have prior to launch? did you advertise? any PR?

Author here! happy to answer questions, and curious to hear about your own crowdfunding video stories.

It depends how much you are trying to raise. We just did a survey of 100 campaigns, and the majority of successful small campaigns (that raised <$25k) spent under <3k on the video. Mind you this was for Hardware campaigns. It's only for campaigns that raise >$100k that you see average video spends above $10k

Videopixie (YCS11) | San Francisco | Front-end Software Engineer

At Videopixie we are building the largest community of video creators and the tools to hire and collaborate with them online. We are backed by the co-founder of YouTube (Jawed Karim), Jason Calacanis, YCombinator, 500 Startups, and many other great angels…. and we’re growing quickly.

We’re looking for people who are smart, self managing, and fully proficient in HMTL, CSS3 and Javascript - so you can hit the road running. Experience with AngularJS is a bonus. There will be opportunities to do full stack work if interested. We use: GAE, python, S3, AngularJS, Firebase, Git, and Grunt.

We wrote and open sourced a popular file uploader - check it out: https://github.com/TTLabs/EvaporateJS As engineering hire #1 you will work directly for the CTO. You will get real ownership on specing, implementing and shipping features. You’ll get guidance and mentoring from experienced software developers.

If you like building UIs and want to help the world be creative, we have a great journey for you, and we’d love to hear from you at jobs@videopixie.com Please link to samples of anything you’ve built.

https://videopixie.com/jobs

Thanks Cristian, founder here, I think today people mostly go to craigslist or get referrals from friends, to find videographers. It's not a great experience and presents some of the same problems/risks we are trying to solve for post-production (ie: not knowing what's a fair price, not knowing what all the options are, not knowing if the fit will be good, not to mention the relative hassle of finding, communicating & paying the artist). But we get asked the question often, and I think you are absolutely right, we need a better solution to find/hire videographers.

It was available as an early alpha. And we've had users all along, which helped understand what people need. But today is our public announcement.

Yes, retailers need more than just hosting. They need help creating the videos (we offer templates, editing tools and professional services). They need the video to be inserted without breaking page layout (we make it easy to add play buttons that expand and play the video in a lightbox). They need video a/b testing (ways to re-edit the video based on analytics). Also Video SEO is technical for product pages, and not done well. We help with that too.