Category Archives: Start Up

How To Attract an International Audience Using PowToon: The Story of GradTrain

Guest blog by Sharon Sznitman – Co-founder at GradTrain and Lecturer School of Public Health University of Haifa

Have you ever received information in a text-heavy and non-user-friendly way? Sure – we all do every day. Whether it is at the doctor’s office receiving medical information, at the bank when signing up for a student loan, or at work, when a business presentations take up dozens of text oriented slides. Is this really necessary?

Especially in the globalized and information-heavy world we live in, where language barriers abound, using graphics and effects to convey a message makes a lot of sense. That is how our team at GradTrain connected with PowToon.

It became clear to us that a video with cartoon images as well as accompanying text and/or sound is a powerful way to get messages across, whether it be for doctors to give advice about health behaviors, or for a startup company like ours, that is aiming to get prospective international graduate students from around the globe excited about the new services we are offering – in a clear and impactful way.

Reaching an international audience

At GradTrain we aim to reach a diverse group of people, with different nationalities, backgrounds and interests, who speak different languages. Indeed, we are trying to reach every single prospective international student in the entire world. Not a small project we know, but reaching for the sky is what we are all about at GradTrain. We want to reach prospective international students so that they can hear about how we can help make the international university application process much easier and a lot more successful.

Applying to a graduate university program abroad is a daunting task, that requires not only good academic credentials, but also skillful and strategic decision-making, such as targeting schools and programs, preparing an effective application package, planning course load, securing funding, preparing for arrival and adjusting to a new culture and language. Studies have shown that prospective international students feel that they do not have enough information to make informed decisions about the application process, that communicating and receiving information about the institution they wish to apply to is a major problem, that getting course credits from their home institution accepted was somewhat of a problem, and that getting a study permit is a problem.

Our 2 simple messages

We created a PowToon video in order to tell prospective international graduate students three things:

(1) We know about, understand and recognize the problems you are facing, including: lack of information, high-priced placement agents and the cultural fears of leaving home and travelling to another country.

(2) We can help you overcome these problems by connecting you with people like yourself who have been through the process successfully and with the right information to support your decision making process.

(3) Come join us!

PowToon’s video animation platform allowed us to get these messages across in a manner that is great for an international audience. First of all, while the text is in English in the current version, it can easily be translated into other languages. Second, since it is a cartoon, the ethnicity/nationality/age features of the persons depicted are implicit which is great for our purpose as we want all international prospective students to identify with our video, regardless of where they are from, the color of the skin, their age, the language that they speak, their gender, or economic background.

We hope you like the PowToon video we created and that it encourages you to visit our website and take advantage of our information and services. Also, if you know of anyone else who is considering applying to university programs abroad, please send this post to them so that they too can benefit from GradTrain’s services. And if you have been or are currently a graduate student studying abroad, why not join us as a GradTrain coach? You can send us a message through our homepage.

How I Got Investors To Notice Our Startup

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This is a guest post by Yaniv Nizan who is the CEO and Co-Founder of The SOOMLA Project, the platform for Creating In-App Purchase Stores for Mobile Games. Yaniv’s is also a writer with articles featured in blogs such as: Gamasutra, Codenameone UX Motel and blog.soom.la and a speaker in different industry events. You can follow yaniv at @y_nizan.

When I started The SOOMLA Project less than a year ago I thought raising money will be a piece of cake. My previous startup is relatively successful and as a strong team targeting the rapidly growing market of mobile apps with a fresh product that fits the market like a glove it should be easy right? Well, my 2 co-founders and I soon discovered that raising money is never easy and especially these days where there are so many startups out there and it seems like no talented engineer wants to be an employee anymore.

Following advice from Dave Mcclure, Naval Ravikant and others I realized that the only way to get our promising startup noticed and be fundable is to have traction. How much traction? The opinions vary between 1 million users to 10 million users and as a B2B2C company that means end users.

Eventually we did get to 1 million end users and 2 months after we closed our seed round. I must admit that there was a drastic change in the responses we received when we had the numbers to back up our story. I’m not saying it was easy. It never is. However, there was suddenly interest to hear our story and investors had time to meet me the next day.

Ok, well, getting to millions of users is not a piece of cake either. If you have the marketing dollars then maybe but this is a yet to be funded startup we are talking about. How did we do it?

I guess one thing is to have a product that your customers really love. If you don’t have that it’s almost impossible to get so many users to use your product which is probably one of the reasons why investors insist on this validation in the first place. Assuming you do have a product-market fit, how do you get the word out with no marketing dollars?

We used a combination of Open Code Samples, Content Marketing and Tools that can produce a nearly professional outcome at a fraction of the price. I’ll give an example in each one of the categories.

Open Code Samples

We opened 4 main open source projects on Github – https://github.com/soomla. I then started answering questions in forums such as Stack Overflow, Gamedev, Unity Forums and many others using code pieces from the open projects and linking back to them. Using this method, we were able to get very targeted audience to the code projects. These days, every third visit to our project pages turns into an SDK download.

Content Marketing

I identified a knowledge gap among mobile game developers about how to use the power of In-App Purchase and virtual economies in their games. Bringing my knowledge from online monetization, video advertising and e-commerce and extending it by interviewing leading game designers and reading about the subject I was able to create a massive amount of useful content about the subject and started sharing it through our Blog and Facebook Page. The result was a base of thousands of fans and established authority in the subject.

Cost Saving Tools

Among many other online tools, the one that saved us the most amount of money was PowToon – Our intro video was less than $100 while others can cost $3,000 and even more. I tried to create a video that will be fun to watch and will convey the problem and product in a way that anyone can understand so it will be highly sharable. Making a ‘talking cartoon’ video was the way to go and Powtoon does exactly that. It’s not as good as using professional tools like After Effects and 3d illustrators but it’s about 50 times more affordable and it allowed us to get the point across. I found a voice artist was on Fiverr so it was about 20 times cheaper than a professional one and it was just as good.

Soomla intro explainer video made using PowToon

Start UpLoaded Animation Studio Make an Animated Videos With PowToon

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Guest Post By Stephen Bardle MD Start Uploaded – A video based startup Toolkit

Start Uploaded is a new type of trade directory and information hub for startups and small businesses in the UK. Our Business Model is based entirely around video. Our clients – business service providers like accountants – can embed video content into the platform to build their brand, generate new leads and offer guidance in their area of expertise.

PowToon is an indispensable technology provider for our business. Powtoon’s high-quality yet cost-effective animation platform means we can develop new video content for our clients at an incredibly reasonable price.

For example. One of our clients, an accountancy company, wanted to develop a series of vibrant Info-Animations on tax and accountancy issues for UK companies. We used the PowToon platform to develop the animations. What did the client think? They were very happy: “Will commission new animations in the very near future!”

Aswell as uploading the Info animations to YouTube and the client’s website, we embedded them into the Accountancy section of the Start Uploaded website, generating more Quality Video views for the client.

Powtoon is a powerful platform which rewards creativity and ingenuity. If you are a startup or SME and video is at the heart of your business model, then check out PowToon today.

Animated Videos for your Small Business Marketing

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How Your Small Business Can Use Video Marketing

If you own a small business you know you have all these great services to offer and you know you can’t afford the marketing budget some of your larger competitors have. Do-It-Yourself animated videos solve the budget problem. So now what?

5 Ways You Can Use Video Marketing to help your small business:

1. Home-Page Explainer Video

This Video Created by Realty Ninja for their new website explains the new visitor what the service does. It’s great because people don’t like to read long explanations about services. An explainer video often takes a less formal approach via a case study that the viewer can relate to. It illustrates what it’s like to use the service rather that describe features and benefits. And the results? Studies show that home-page explainer videos can increase conversions by 300%.

2. Landing Page sales pitch Video

Here is an example we used for our Small Business Landing Page.

In this sales pitch video we address the visitor directly and follow a simple format: 1) address the viewers pain, show how it can be solved 2) present PowToon as the solution 3) show the impact PowToon would have on the user’s world and 4) top off with a call to action.

3. Promotional video

Have an event, launching a product? How about those webinars or private consultations you give? This video is a great example of how to get people sold on your event and sign-up for it. It features instructions, benefits, calls for action and humor. This video is great for sharing on social networks and posting on a blog.

4. Thank You video

These can be very powerful because they create emotional engagement and therefore are likely to go viral. This particular example has a unique twist to it. But you can make a simple thank-you, happy holiday or a congratulations video and email direct or send via social networks.

5. Video Blog with info-videos

An info-video does not have to be as long as the example below but it could also go much longer as long as it offers real content. Visitors will appreciate your sharing of knowledge and come for more and since video ranks so much higher on Google search, your blog will stand out of the crowd.

10 Must-Have Websites for Startups

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As a startup we can appreciate good advice from other startups. So, we decided to share our favorite online services so other startups could benefit from our experience. Specifically, the ones you might not be so familiar with. Presented in no particular order.

1. Visual Web Optimizer

Visual Weboptimizer is a fantastic tool for conducting A/B testing on your website. The features are great for the price and you even get a free heat-map with your test. You can create a variant on visual web optimizer without having to change your actual website which is cool.

PowToon is a free animation software and PowerPoint Alternative

Heat maps and A/B testing

One of the things we learned by looking at the Heatmaps is to install signup buttons in strategic locations: just like this one (Nice plug, right?):

2. Licensario

Licensario solved a big problem for us: How to manage licensing, payments, refunds and upgrades for our rapidly growing client base? By allowing them to handle all this for us we are able to focus on developing PowToon rather than developing all kinds of back-end stuff.

3. UserVoice

UserVoice is a free service (With pro options) for managing customer support. The interface is great and it’s full of features. We could not give the service we do without UserVoice.

4. Trello

Trello is a free service for agile project management. It’s much simpler and easier to use than Jyra. So we use it for managing all non-RnD tasks.

5. Chartio

Chartio collects events from your servers and allows you to present the data in various charts. We track almost everything there and all departments can read the data after its shown in a chart.

6. HootSuite

We have a bunch of social networks and we really value keeping in touch with our users and fans. Hootsuite allows us to manage all our social networks and stay in touch no matter where we are. The free version we have found to be just useful enough. We like to keep our social engagement real but if we are on vacation we will create some social posts and schedule them for when we are away. That’s nice.

7. PowToon

We do in-fact consider Powtoon to be a fantastic tool for startups. This is the tool that allows you to pitch your idea before it’s fully developed into a product people can easily understand when they hear about it. In fact, we used it to build our mailing list before we launched the official product. And now we use it to explain what makes PowToon so great.

8. iDoneThis

IDonethis is simple. At the end of every day you get an email asking you what you did today. You respond and the next morning you get a report showing you what everyone got done. Sounds simple right? We find it very useful.

9. Fiverr

Fiverr and oDesk are a real must for any startup. Need someone to do something that could take them 5 minutes and take you about 3 days? This is where you find them.

10. Cllck to tweet

Click to tweet makes it easy for you to do this (click on the image below):

Insightera uses PowToon at their trade show booths to attract attention and increase visitor interaction

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“If the guys at Powtoon were standing across from me right now, I’d jump up in the air and give them a big high five. Although Insightera had used Powtoon for many campaigns in the past…we really experienced the magic while presenting at tradeshows. After talking with visitors, I noticed some of the same questions were being asked over and over again and thought, “wow, I wish I could create a quick video presentation -right now- that addresses the issues of all these potential customers.” So, I went straight to Powtoon- and within 15 minutes I was showing a professional presentation about Insightera’s real-time software to all my inquisitive visitors.

I’m a salesman; not a programmer, not a techie and definitely not a graphic designer- but this tool is just so user friendly. I had a professional looking presentation or ‘Powtoon‘ in minutes. Powtoon is way easier to use than Keynote or PowerPoint; you just drag and drop everything and anything onto each slide. You add music and vocals using a bar at the bottom of the page and presto! You’re done.”

Instead of giving a sales pitch to each visitor, we used Powtoon to emphasize our software’s key features …VISUALLY. In the B2B market you have people coming to you at all different stages of the sales cycle, so we were able to make a few different videos (some funny, some general, some targeted to high tech marketers) in order to adapt to the different audiences that visited our booth. Simply put, we love you guys!”

Yanir Calisar, Insightera

Reachli Saves Thousands Making Landing Page Videos

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We always love it when our customers share their Powtoons with us and tell us how they-benefited from using Powtoon. Here is an email I got from a loving customer today:

“PowToon saved us thousands of dollars in creating our incredible landing page videos. It was super easy to setup and our users loved them. Best of all, when we rebranded from Pinerly to Reachli, editing the videos to reflect the new name took seconds. We now use PowToon to create our tutorial videos and couldn’t be happier! Thanks Team!”

Vlad Barshai, Account Executive. Reachli

Must Read Case Study: How I Increased My Conversions By 300% Using PowToon!

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Today Daniel opened his email and found this mail from Raul waiting for him. I had to do a double-take when I saw the impact PowToon had on his business.

Rather than tell you about it, please read his mail for yourself:

Daniel,

I will gladly like to contribute to your site. You guys have done so much for my business which involves highly technical products and very NON – tech customers. We created over 100 videos first in an effort to increase our eBay conversions. You can see here a comparison of what our eBay listings looked like before and after.

BEFORE: SimpleWifi eBay listing before including PowToon

Listing on eBay before Powtoon

Before: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&rd=1&item=200641641828

AFTER: SimpleWifi eBay listing with PowToons

Listing on Ebay with Powtoon increases sales by 300%

After: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&rd=1&item=130627046383

We are currently working on our website so that every single product and tutorial section have a video.

Due to the increasing emphasis on video to search engines and the engaging nature that a video has, I can attribute most of my recent jump in sales to Powtoon. It has allowed me to use images and text to explain the technical aspects of how my products worked in a 1-2 minute video compared to a 3 paragraph text page which then increased my conversions by 300% in the first month!

Customer service inquiries have also declined dramatically! Where as before I would get 15-20 questions a day to now only receiving 2-5. And of those, I most of the time just link the customer to a video which has the answer! Saving me about 2 hours a day from before.

I love PowToon and I am a huge fan! So like I mentioned to Oren before, please feel free to reach out to me for anything you guys need!

-Raul

We have nothing to add other than GO BUY RAUL’S STUFF!!! http://www.simplewifi.com

How People use PowToon Animated Videos to REALLY get Attention

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At PowToon, we’re always brainstorming ways to benefit our users. Our most recent idea was to reveal how people – just like you – use PowToon to boost their businesses.

Let’s look at:

How a real-life PayPal employee used PowToon to astound his bosses!
How some users – even those without any prior design or animation skills – can use Powtoons to double website opt-ins and massively increase customer engagement

But first! We are about to move out of PowToon’s free beta phase and I wanted to thank you for joining us on the journey so far…

When we started PowToon in January 2012 we had a dream…a dream born out of a huge frustration: Everywhere we looked there were these amazing 90 second animated presentations, but there was no way of creating them yourself.

To get a professional-looking result, you had to either spend $5,000-$15,000 on an animation studio, or take your chances with an outsourcer who would “only” charge you $2,500 and after weeks of production you could still not change anything without his help.

We were very frustrated by this and saw that lots of businesses and marketers were crying out for a solution. Our dream was to create a DIY product that would allow anyone to achieve professional results with hardly any extra effort over and above a PowerPoint or Keynote presentation.

One of our co-founders, Oren (aka. Dr. Osm in the below Powtoon), offered his award-winning animation and design skills to the effort – and our mission became to extract and bottle these skills. This resulted in a ridiculously user-friendly software that allows anyone (even me!) to create super professional animated presentations.

No joke. Check out this Powtoon. I made it myself (said as if praising a 5 year old)! But seriously, I’m so proud of this because it embodies our dream – to allow anyone to make professional-looking animated presentations, an impossibility before PowToon… (by the way, if you’re wondering about the voiceover – a professional voice over guy costs $20 in our marketplace)

Bottling Awesomeness

[Blog Post: How we came to create PowToon]

My only request to the team was for the final product to be super simple, functionally, and to allow anyone to achieve professional-looking results. Today we have over 42,000 user generated Powtoons! And people are using them to achieve astounding results. Below are some examples of how people are using PowToon to further their businesses and careers:

How People use PowToon to get their client’s attention

1. Live presentations: bring the WOW-Factor to your presentations

I recently received an urgent email from the innovations department of PayPal. When I replied, I got the type of reception usually reserved for royalty. Turns out one of their executives had signed up as a PowToon beta tester and had used it to present to his bosses. Their reaction?

“HOW DID YOU DO THAT? WHERE DID THAT HAND COME FROM? – WOW!”

The boss wanted to give his entire organization access to PowToon right there and then!

Using PowToon in a live sales environment is guaranteed to grab the prospect’s attention. All that’s left is to close the deal.

2. Website Landing Pages pointing to Opt-Ins:

Double your opt-in rates on landing pages Ryan Deiss (a gifted marketer and obsessive split tester) tested landing pages a million ways from Sunday and he found that a cartoon style message doubles opt-ins compared to just written text. Look what Chris Bloor is doing to get customers to watch and listen.

3. Startup pitches

PowToon is great for really getting your message across in 90 seconds or less and making it look professional without the associated cost. Countless start-ups are opting for PowToon Awesomeness to convert their elevator pitch into visual stories.

4. Animated CVs

To grab a potential employer’s attention, do what Kjeld did…Oh, and you should also know that this one can be reused as a template. Just integrate your unique bio!

5. Websites: Training users how to use your site

Train users on how to work with your website or app in a fun and stylish way–like in the following clip.

6. Teachers: Flipping Classrooms – Musical Instruments

This lesson deals with musical instruments. Not bad for a first Powtoon, is it?

7. Campaigning: California 2012 Proposition Voter Guide

8. Recipes: Let’s bake a lemon cake

Powtoons make cake recipes far more interesting! (By the way: LOVE THE ACCENT)

9. Jokes, Fun and Nonsense

This Powtoon won first place in the PowOlympics! Entries had to feature instructions for a new sport people wanted to see in the next Olympics.

10. Music Videos

Add visuals to a song to create cool music videos.

Please take a moment to share how you used PowToon in your business in the comments below.

Case Study: How we saved $2,000 with PowToon

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A short animated video is probably the best way to explain how your product, service or idea works and what makes you different from the competition. Your website has a very slim chance of attracting attention of visitors without a video. Target audiences will remember more when the delivery medium is engaging, simple, and contains powerful visual metaphors.

There are many studios in the market that have a talented team that knows how to produce a video and some of them are really good. When you are a young start-up company that runs on a tight budget, producing an animated video is a luxury you sometimes just can’t afford. So, you keep playing other company’s videos over and over, with the longing that one day you’ll create a cool animated video and this slightly hoarse narrator will do the voice over for you.

I used to be that guy, until I came across PowToon, Do-It-Yourself animated presentation tool. Creating an animated video (or Powtoon) with PowToon’s application is fun, easy and more importantly, it is affordable. I would like to share with you my experience in producing such a video.

Getting Down to Business

My company, Licensario, helps SaaS businesses better engage with their customers by providing targeted pricing insights. My goal was to create a short video (up to 100sec) that describes the SaaS company’s problems in the first 30sec, and then explains how Licensario solves this problems.

Creating an animated video by yourself, can be summarized in 3 simple steps:

Writing the script. No one knows the product better than you. This is why this step is the most critical step in the entire video production. Take the time and polish your script, so that it will be engaging and easy to understand. Don’t be shy to ask for feedback from co-workers or friends. On PowToon’s blog and on the web in general, you can find useful how-to tips to writing a killer narrative for your video.
Storyboarding. With PowToon’s application, it is very simple to convert your script into a storyboard. First, break the script down into slides and try to determine what the visual effects are that you would like to show in each slide. PowToon offers large number of visual styles, which are constantly being updated by their creative team. Lay down these styles on each slide and then adjust their appearance effect (pop, appear from left/right, fade, etc.) and timing.
Voiceover. PowToon’s application allows you to upload a voice over file (MP3) to your Powtoon. You should use a professional for the voice over (don’t record it with your laptop’s microphone!). Surprisingly (or not) the Internet has prevailed over the real world also in this domain. You can find professional narrators on the web that will provide voiceover file for a few tens of dollars.

I obtained a few reviews from my teammates, edited the presentation to reflect their input and I have just completed my first DIY animated video. I was very excited about it. The last thing I would have to do is to download the animated video in a standard media player format and publish it on YouTube.

PowToon’s membership plan

PowToon offers 3 membership plans: Free, Presenter and Marketer. With the Free plan, you can export your video to YouTube in a low definition quality. If you want your video in HD quality, you have to subscribe to the Marketer plan, for $47/month.

I began my post by saying that a young startup has to carefully monitor its expenses, and this is where I believe PowToon has the advantage over all other studios.

At first, the subscription option seemed odd, but then I realized that this is probably the best plan a startup company can wish for with their fledgling budget.

As a startup company, I will be experimenting with pretty much everything I try to deliver. I will A/B test my tag line, landing page, value proposition, feature set, pricing and so on. My animated video is just another test I am experimenting with to interest customers.
Despite the feedbacks I got from my colleagues and advisors, I have no idea whether my video is good or if the message I try to deliver is clear. I may have to perform several changes based on feedbacks I’ll receive from my business partners and customers. Moreover, I may want to produce additional videos that I target to specific customers.

Having said that, the option of producing a single animated video for $2,000, doesn’t seem practical at all. By subscribing to PowToon’s service, I get all the freedom and flexibility I need, in order to produce many videos.

Do you want to see the final video? Hit the Play button.

This is a guest post by Tal Atzmon, Chief Business Development Officer at Licensario, a new start-up gives SaaS businesses the insight and tools to find their optimal pricing model.

About Licensario: Licensario is a smart billing management system for small and medium SaaS companies. By implementing pricing algorithms and combining them with the user’s behaviour, Licensario gives software companies the ultimate tool for pricing their software.

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