What Would Animoto Do?
Working with good friend and occasional colleague Louis Beauregard, I’ve helped set up a local chapter (Montréal) for the IxDA (interaction design association:
ixda.org). Our ambitions for this group are relatively modest: we’re looking to build a network of people interested in design (not necessarily designers), people who moreover understand that user-centred design is crucial to product and service success.
Being just two guys with no budget, we’re keeping things simple, with an objective to hold two events in 2010. We’re ‘branding’ the events “I Made This!” and the idea is to bring in a speaker who played a central role in conceiving of, building, and bringing to market a product or service. Given our own professional predisposition, guests will tend to be from web startups, but we’d be just as happy to invite industrial designers, service designers, designers of any stripe.
The inaugural event, to be held from 6pm-to-8pm on March 11th, will feature Jason Hsiao, president and co-founder of Animoto. For more information on the event,
check out the announcement on our group’s blog.
Why Animoto?
When I was at Xtranormal I spent the first few weeks doing research and competitive analysis. This was at a time where new players in the social media content creation space were popping up and/or being acquired on a daily basis. Most of them underwhelmed. Some were nice and clean, others were technologically very interesting, many were outright duds. One of the few sites to launch at that time that I pegged as a hit right out of the gate was
animoto.com. I loved their site immediately and—it was in beta at the time—provided a lot of feedback and engaged in pretty deep discussion with the guys. It was great to be a more or less anonymous customer and get such committed, prompt, enthusiastic response from the other side of a Contact Us form.
Animoto rather boldy dispensed with attempts to generate revenue through traffic and advertising, and instead took the novel approach of trying to build an online service worth paying for. Adopting the freemium model, you can play for free and get a great feel for the service—in many cases the freebie is sufficient for casual consumer use—and then you can pay up for premium access to get the most out of the service.
Since then Animoto has launched commercially with consumer and professional options, is cash-flow positive, is regularly winning awards, is continuing to build a clean and hip brand on the web, and has the investment backing of significant players as they continue to grow their business. They also continue to build and nurture their community of customers, taking cues from customer feedback just like they did a couple of days after they first launched.
To this day, when faced with design and implementation decisions as a product designer or manager, I ask myself: ‘What would Animoto do?’
These guys deserve everything they’ve got, and it’s a real pleasure to host Jason in Montréal and I know it’s going to be a great meetup. I strongly encourage anyone interested in social media, design, online business models, and even cloud computing to pitch up, have a drink, listen to Jason’s story and ask him some questions.
