Six tips for making a better demo video for your startup
There comes a stage in any new web startup when the founders complain, “It’s so hard explaining all this on the homepage in words and pictures! Wouldn’t it be easier and better if we just showed it to them in a video?”
Well, no. Compare Hollywood box-office takings and the top 100 videos on YouTube and it illustrates how anyone can get a large audience, but it takes talent, experience and some budget to make something that puts money in the bank. Your startup’s demo video doesn’t need to make money directly, but it needs to convert visitors to customers, and those customers need to make you money.
In the course of my work I see a lot of demo videos, so many in fact, that I don’t watch most of them, because so many are so very, very bad. I could compile a short piece of my own, a “Top Five Worst Demo Videos” (let me know if that sounds like fun.) Clearly anybody can capture video from a computer screen and talk about it, but it takes some planning and some experience to create a great demo video.
Whether it cost you 30 minutes of your time or $2,000 to outsource it to video freelancer, it’s wasted money, wasted time and a waste of a conversion opportunity if your demo video isn’t watched. More importantly, it doesn’t convert visitors to customers.
Here’s a great demo video, produced for Dropbox.
After the click, my guide to what makes the difference between a good and a bad demo video.
No waffle
A good video has to be both quicker to consume than the text-and-pictures version of your Learn More page and more informative. For a typical page and a typical early-adopter with good skim-reading skills, that’s not very long at all.
Every second wasted watching a video feels like an hour. You’ll clear your throat, tell me your name and title, say nothing for a moment while you scroll down the screen and jiggle the mouse to check the pointer’s responding, and then tell me what I already know (“I’m going to show you some of the features of Product X’).
By now I am so long gone, the dust of my passing has fallen, compacted, become moistened by falling rain and germinated seeds. All you’ve succeeded in doing is pissing me off and making me reconsider using your product.
If your face is not in the video, don’t mention your name, your job title, or thank the viewer for watching. Even if you are in the video, don’t greet the viewer — you’re not ‘there’ with them. If feel you really must introduce yourself, limit yourself to, “I’m Joe.”
Don’t step the viewer through the process of registering a user ID and a password (they will know how to do that.) Don’t take time to point out the obvious elements of the interface and where everything is located. Just get started doing.
A ‘learn more’ video five minutes long is four minutes and thirty seconds too long. Need to show more than 30 seconds of functionality? Consider cutting your demo up into separate videos for each major feature, so users can skip straight to the feature they most want to learn about.
Cut, cut again
The best way to keep your duration short and your fact-to-fluff ratio high is not to run an unedited video. Invest in some video editing software (or choose one of these free web-based tools) and cut, cut, cut. It takes a real professional to get something completely right in one take, and if you’re not a professional you will need to edit together the best of several attempts to get the quality I expect as a visitor.
If you are smart enough to be a Mac user, iMovie is good enough, and you should have a free copy. If you want the best, ScreenFlow is absolutely fantastic for exactly this kind of work (I give it 5 stars). ScreenFlow offers two really important features; it allows you to zoom and crop video to bring out smaller elements of interface in a ‘call out’, and it allows you to record one or more audio tracks separately. Let’s talk about those two points in more detail…
Maximise the frame
Keep in mind the size (in pixels) that your final video will be displayed in, and plan your video recording so that you maximise your work for that limited size. Keep in mind the format (4:3 vs 16:9) your final video will be published in and record in that format so you don’t have distortion or letterboxing on the final video. If you’re going to host your videos on YouTube or Vimeo, keep in mind the final dimensions of the video will be limited by that hosting choice and record accordingly.
Next, minimise interface elements that distract and make the workspace smaller by turning off browser toolbars, status bars and bookmark bars. Is your interface dynamic enough to cope with a little browser resizing? If so, resize your browser window to pack the most interface into the smallest space without obscuring important elements. Then, if you have an editing tool that allows you to zoom and/or crop, get right up close to the action, especially if your browser interface is small and complex.
Record your soundtrack
People (and men in particular) are very poor at multi-tasking, and this becomes very apparent in a demo video — it’s actually very hard to demo interface and speak at the same time. Moving the mouse, clicking or selecting things from menus really messes with the part of our brain that manages speech and we compensate by introducing stutters, umms and ahs — stuff that reduces viewer comprehension and retention. If you sound distracted, I’ll get distracted too.
Fix this by recording the video of your demo first (talk to yourself while you do it, if you must, but don’t record the audio or delete it afterwards.) Now, playback the video and record an audio track where you talk about what’s happening in the video playback. It might take a couple of takes before you know the video playback well enough to make the audio commentary sound confident and authoritative but you’ll find it much easier than trying to manage the interface demo and the commentary at the same time. Which brings me to…
Don’t speak a script
Planning your demo video with a brief script is a great idea — you want any kind of narrative, demo videos included — to have a strong beginning, informative middle and climactic end. But writing a great audio script is a whole separate profession and speaking a great audio script is a whole other separate profession, both of which take years of dedicated practice to get right. (Watch this great bio video on Don LaFontaine, the original and the best.)
You can’t write and speak a great script, so don’t try because you’ll fail and I don’t want to see you fail. Instead, be yourself. You’re a startup founder for many reasons, but one of those reasons (I hope) is that you can be persuasive. So celebrate your natural persuasive self and use that instead of a script. Don’t try to use fancy language or fashionable buzzwords you wouldn’t ordinarily use because they’ll trip you up. If you’re naturally high-pitched, don’t try to be Don LaFontaine. If you’re naturally nasal, don’t try to be Patrick Stewart.
Watch that video you’ve recorded of the demo a few times so you can remember what’s coming up next, then play it back again and this time, record yourself talking about what’s happening on screen. It might seem a little weird, but hopefully it will be refreshing, different, animated and real when it is playing on your website. When you play it back, if it sucks, then face facts: you cannot be the demo video voice of your new web startup. Choose another member of the team, or if there are no other members of the team, recruit a friend. But for Jebus’ sake, don’t get an amateur actor friend or a sexy bubblehead bimbo. Actor friends will way over-act it and sexy bimbos may look sexy but they rarely sound sexy.
Be creative
The team at Commoncraft are well-known for their “In Plain English” series of videos that explain many common web technologies using stop-motion video and hand-drawn illustrations. This video, for Aussie craft startup Makedo, is the best stop-motion animation for a startup I’ve ever seen.
If you have a boring interface, or you have a reason to show real people and real physical objects instead of menus and mouse clicks, please, I’m begging you, give it a try. It can be so much more engaging and entertaining, and while it takes longer to create, it can really pay off.
If you’re a Mac user, here’s how to get started with stop-motion animation the quick-and-dirty way. Take a digital SLR still camera and set it on a rapid-fire mode so that shots are taken at a regular interval. Cue up your real-life scene, Commoncraft or Makedo style, and then act it out in front of the still camera, so you capture the whole thing as a series of still photos. Next, import them into iPhoto, and then choose Export… from the File menu. You’ll see you can export the still photos as a QuickTime movie. Drag the exported QuickTime movie into iMovie and you’re more than half-way towards creating your stop-motion masterpiece.
Useful resources
How to optimise video production for YouTube (eHow).
How to optimise video production for Vimeo (Vimeo FAQ).
Check the comments section of this Techcrunch story on demo videos for links to a range of production houses that tout their ability to do great demo videos.
Leave a Reply
Additional comments powered by BackType
