Robert Sandie
Was researching CSV icons for viddler analytics. Found some interesting examples from the different vendors we work with. Shared them below, let me know if you know any other good examples!
Yesterday, Dmitry Shapiro, founder of Veoh, put together an incredibly respectful post going over the in’s and outs of Veoh going bankrupt.
First off must say I have a ton of respect for the Veoh team, Dmitry, and the product itself. It was always incredible seeing the pure amount of technology come out from the Veoh team.
Also, being a co-founder of a video site myself, I can’t imagine how painful it must have been getting stuck in court instead of working on the product and going bankrupt because of that. Not sure I would have handled it as gracefully as Dmitry did.
Allow me to take a step into memory lane…
It is 3 years ago and the race of the video destination. Veoh, Revver, vMix, vSocial and the 800 pound gurilla… All of us competing with features, community and spending a ton of money to do so.
What I want to share is how Viddler has lucked out into building built a sustainable business where others have failed:
- 1/50th Raised in Funding – in total Viddler has raised less then $2M in funds. Not on purpose either.. We really just couldn’t raise more funds then this. Whether it be bad location, crowded space, or me being first time entrepreneur, this is tiny round compared to the sites we were competing with. What it forced us to do is stay small, control our budget, and get profitable based on lower overhead. Today, Viddler is 16 people. Everyone on board are rockstars at what they do and we are hiring at a slow and steady pace keeping the quality high.
- Market Maturity – video marketing adoption, personal branding, viewers watching video.. all of this has increased to where we are at a point where our product makes sense, and even worth paying for.
- Bandwidth Costs Affordable - three years ago, the price per GB of bandwidth we were paying was 50x what we are paying for now. If we were paying what we did 3 years ago we wouldn’t have a sustainable business today.
- Video Advertising with No Ad Sales Team - three years ago you needed to sell directly to advertisers to have a chance at selling preroll/overlay inventory. Now with the many different ad networks and standardization with VAST compliant networks it’s all about optimization. The $250k/year + commission VP of Ad Sales is no longer needed.
- English Focus – We haven’t had an international “non-english” presence at all. If it’s questionable, we can’t interpret it, and overseas it’s not allowed on Viddler. This keeps costs down. Veoh was hosting alot of Anime. That content is expensive to delivery.
- Bethlehem, PA – An hour from Philadelphia and two hours from NYC, we might as well be based in the middle of nowhere. This has helped us focus on the product (instead of the local scene), stay under the radar with competition, and hire extremely talented people (no competition in Bethlehem) at significantly more affordable rates then California, Boston, or NYC.
Again, all the respect to Dmitry. Wish him the best in his next venture, and hope this conveys how we are still around, and going to be around for the long haul.
On this thanksgiving would like to detail, things I am thankful for.
- Thankful for being able to build Viddler these last 4 years and focus on passion of online video.
- Thankful for family, that keeps on loving me, no matter how far I am, or focused with work I have become.
- Thankful for having worked the amazing Donna DeMarco, co-founder in Viddler, who has helped build a balanced Viddler and and an amazing family of her own at the same time.
- Thankful for Poland engineering and fact that they don’t celebrate Thanksgiving so they will be able to watch over our servers.
- Thankful for an incredible designer.
- Thankful for every Viddler investor, employee, uploader, and viewer.
- Thankful for a great girlfriend, Dana Fish, that understands why this Viddler obsession might be first thing I give thanks for at this point in my life.
Thankful for the few of you, reading this blog, taking the time to follow this adventure.
As you may have read on the viddler blog, or watched via Andrews amazing demo video, Viddler analytics has been launched for Business Service customers.
A few Viddlers have asked me why this can’t be free for everyone, as Youtube does.
This is a good question, giving away everything for free is a very expensive business decision to pursue. We are focused on profitability and are certainly turning a little 37signal’ish.
To give you a little sniffy sniff.. check out what analytics looks like for me:
Not sure what excites me more, this autonomous helicopter or the fact that Engadget is embedding MIT video (which uses Viddler Business Services)…
via MIT takes the wrappers off autonomous, robotic helicopter with intelligent navigation.
Signal vs. Noise posted an interview by Mark Imbriaco, their super intelligent sys admin: Who would win in a fight between Erlang and Rails?
Viddler has the man, the myth, the legend – The Todd.
I just gotta burst out and say that intelligent Sys Admins are invaluable in a small startup looking to stay efficient.
Exclusive/secret underground footage of Todd working on his computer, matrix style:
Update – forgot to mention the JAMES.. rockstar lefty that comes in as a closer for Todd.
It’s funny how fundraising is such a widely written about activity when it really has little to do with product or business itself.
This is a little video spoof on just that.
My desire to share information and promote tight nits companies is completely selfish. I want other companies to adopt this philosophy, therefor making marketplace more competitive, therefor delivering higher quality products and companies to work with, therefor making my job easier.
We have had our share of bad relationships that I can look back on and all center around the lack of how “tight nit” that organization is.
The goal of this post isn’t to point out bad instances though, but rather highlight amazing relationships.
Stealing a bit of Gary Vaynerchuks thunder, would say these companies are “crushing it”, with regards to how tight nit they are
Tubemogul
These guys have built an amazing analytics company and someone we work with extensively to power our analytics toolsets. They started out of Cal Berkley and have many incredibly smart people working for them. At around 20+ employees they have been able to rapidly build out the best analytics platform in the online video business.
When working with them, if we have a problem an API here or there, they will work overnight to get us the answer or fix by morning. One evening in particular, we had a problem with our flash player and analytic tracker, with everyone out for the day, and not his responsibility, Jason Lopatecki, Chief Strategy Officer, pulled out flash editor, and put together a fix for us. Who has C level officers that know how to code flash?
Incredibly smart and passionate people that are not afraid to wear multiple hats.
Edgecast
The Content Delivery Network (CDN) business is very competitive right now, and get dozens of vendor emails weekly about new CDN price breaks. Having worked with these guys for over a year now, they listen and deliver. This is extremely important as many larger CDN businesses think they have it figured out, and aren’t invested in innovating and listening to there customer.
We have many business service customers we work with. Each of these customers needs to be tracked individually for bandwidth usage. Edgecast listened to this need and not only delivered reporting functions for us with a UI layer but delivered an API with 20+ functions a few weeks after.
And when someone on the Viddler team may call in because we are having a problem with some reporting tool, or inquiring about new services, the level1 support engineer could be the core architect for all we know because of how well versed he is with the status of features and problems within the company. Transparent organization or talented hire? I would assume all organizations have high level of transparency, just that they find passionate and intelligent people.
To get started over there the man to talk to over there is Duane Sulo.
Due to size of Google don’t want to post anything too confidential here. What I will say is that there account reps and support staff are all on point. When working with individual units of Google, they feel like small startups themselves, proving that you can still be tight nit in one of the largest companies in the world.
Woopra
Just started using this product on this blog. But the fact the CEO, John Pozadzides, is talking transparently about business model with his users, just rocks and leads by example on how passionate his company is about his users.
In summary it appears that there are a few key factors in running a tight nit organization:
- Smart/Passionate People
- Ability to Listen and Deliver
- Employees not afraid to wear multiple hats.
Please think of these when building a company or working with other companies as it’ll help foster more tight nit companies.
Also, just a small disclaimer, there are a more companies I want to list, but in order for Viddler to attempt to be a tight company, am going to have to cut this off here.
If you know of a tight nit company, let me know what tight nit company you work with, would love to hear your story via comments, blog post, tweet, viddler, or email rob at viddler.
About Me
Hello and welcome to my personal blog. My name is Robert Sandie, a digital entrepreneur, innovating with my second startup, vid.io. Join me as I update this blog on the daily challenges of startup.
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