The startup industry of India is flourishing, especially rising entrepreneurial drive amongst the younger generation of India. With numerous success stories, the Indian startup ecosystem has witnessed a remarkable increase in venture capital investments, attracting both local and global investors.
The “Crafting Bharat – A Startup Podcast Series” powered by AWS, and an initiative by NewsReach, in association with VCCircle, unlocks the secrets behind these successful entrepreneurs’ journeys aiming to equip aspiring entrepreneurs and business enthusiasts with invaluable insights. The podcast series is hosted by Gautam Srinivasan, famed for hosting a diverse range of TV and digital programs, currently consulting editor at CNBC (India), CNN-News18, Mint, HT Media, Forbes India, and The Economic Times.
Given the importance of artificial intelligence (AI) in today’s technological context, a seasoned entrepreneur Sanket Shah, CEO of InVideo, is changing the way people create video content. In the Crafting Bharat Podcast Series, Shah talks about his founder journey, building AI-enabled video editing software and upcoming trends in the industry.
Explore the tales of Indian Startup founders’ transformation from dreams to reality, navigating challenges to seize opportunities through the Crafting Bharat Podcast Series.
Segment 1: The Incubator
Between the 2012 to 2017 phase how did your seed of an idea for Invideo germinate, considering you had founded Visify Books and MassBlurb (with Pankit) in the meanwhile, and how did it evolve further in the 2017 to 2019 period? Give us the highlights when it comes to the ups and downs?
I was thinking about starting a business in India while I was in the US, but I think that’s not how it works because to do a business in India then you need much deeper Indian insights. You need to be in India and work here, you can’t sit somewhere else and think that I will start a recurring business in India. In 2014, there was NACH where you needed to fill a form and submit it, for them to initiate recurring payments allowing you to start a recurring business. That was my biggest mistake to think that way. I never got a closure from Visify Books. I thought that videos should not be made like this and sometime in 2017, I started InVideo.
Crafting Bharat, Episode 3 With Sanket Shah, CEO, InVideo
Your seed round in May 2018 and the second one in October 2019 were tepid. But the third round in Feb 2020 brought in $2.5 million, that helped you launch your automated assistant, then in October 2020 you got another $15 million as Series A, and then the biggie, $35 million in July 2021 for Series B. What changed in 2020 that drove investors to you?
First, We operate in a bottomless market; the market is extremely large. I believe that over a billion people in the world are going to create videos and I don’t think there is any debate there. Second, it comes down to confidence in the founder. Track record and talking to the founder gives that confidence to the investors to invest.
I read somewhere that you are now the largest prosumer SaaS company in Asia. What are the lessons that you have learnt in scaling up Invideo from a tech standpoint?
If the creators can create videos in a very natural environment that’s what I think gets to a billion users. It is a series of stability, how it’s distributed and how it can all be tied together. The future of all the software is in the browser and it is also across all devices. Our entire system works on AWS and the scaling was very smooth. AWS supported us in a very early stage.
Segment 2: The Accelerator
You met Sam Altman of OpenAI recently. What did you two talk about?
I met him for over 2 hours, and it was a fun conversation. We briefly talked about what to expect in the future. There will be a requirement of more electricity for advancement in the world of AI, which hopefully will get solved by nuclear fusion. Second, is that compute has become extremely important.
What do startup founders need to focus on when thinking of the risk?
It’s very risky. I do not think you can do this journey for money. You pick up this journey for fun. The gratification point of this journey is not the money you will get later, because most likely you might not earn money.
Is it a better approach to release a good product and improve it to perfection with feedback received?
In my opinion there needs to be a judgment and a time to launch but the earliest you go out is the best for the business.
The startup ecosystem in India has grown tremendously in the last decade. The increasing adoption of digitization coupled with government initiatives have opened new avenues for budding entrepreneurs.
Stay tuned to the Crafting Bharat Podcast Series as they bring you these inspirational entrepreneurs for insightful and candid discussions with Gautam Srinivasan.
Company Profile is an initiative by StartupTalky to publish verified information on different startups and organizations. The content in this post has been approved by the organization InVideo.
Videos are one of the most effective ways to convey thoughts, ideas and concepts and is fast gaining popularity among the netizens. According to YouTube reports, mobile video consumption increases 100% year after year. Facebook generates 8 billion videoviews on average per day, while 53% of customers engage with a brand after watching a video on social media.
However, to take advantage of this growing popularity of videos, one must concentrate on creating effective and creative videos, which is not a simple task for everyone. But now with ‘InVideo’ making great videos is indeed becoming everybody’s cup of tea. InVideo is a web based software that helps you create fantastic videos, no matter whether you are an expert or an amateur in video making.
InVideo is a software on the web that provides seamless creative video creation services. It helps marketers, entrepreneurs, agencies, other small businesses to create professional-looking videos with ease. InVideo works with an intention to make video creation an effortless and friction less process.
While there are video making software, which are either too simple that creates videos which is no better than PowerPoint presentations, there are some other software that are too complex to be used by a non-expert. InVideo’s USP is that it is a synthesis of both simple and complex video creation softwares available, thereby, having the best of both in one place.
Prior to InVideo, the trio founded ‘Massblurb‘, an online automated platform, helping restaurants manage their end to end online presence. After ‘Massblurb’ got acquired by ‘Mobikon’, they decided to come together to set up InVideo.
Currently, Sanket Shah is the CEO of InVideo. An Electrical and Electronic engineer by qualification, Sanket did Master of Science in Quantitative management from University of Michigan. Sanket worked with organizations like ‘Right Relevance,Inc’ and ‘Mobikon Asia Pte. Ltd’ in different positions. Apart from being a founding member of Massblurb, Sanket also founded ‘Visify Books’ – an interesting platform that presents main content of various books in video format. At InVideo, Sanket leadsthe Marketing and Sales department of the company.
Pankit Chedda is the CTO of InVideo. After completing his B.E from University of Mumbai, Pankit studied ‘Masters, Information Systems Management’ from Carnegie Mellon University. He worked in technical positions with organizations like ‘comScore, Inc’, ‘CouponDunia’ and ‘Mobikon Asia Pte. Ltd.’ At Invedio, Pankit manages core tool technology.
Harsh Vakharia, a chemical engineer by qualification, did M.S. in Industrial and Operations Engineering form University of Michigan. He worked in companies like A.T. Kearney and Mobikon Asia Pte. Ltd. Harsh looks aftervideo technology and its details at InVideo.
InVideo currently has a team of 45 people.
How was InVideo Started
A personal problem faced by the founding team has led them to establish InVideo. Back in 2012, the founding team were working on creating 10-minute video summaries of non-fiction books. The process of video production was a major hurdle for them back then as it consumed a lot of time.
The team started looking for alternate solutions and realized that there are only two kinds of video creation tools:
That allows the user to create a very basic video (which is worse than a presentation).
Or one that will require a trained video editor to create a video.
While the simple video creating platforms have minimal scope for creativity and customization, the advanced versions are too complicated for a normal person to create high-quality, innovative videos. Identifying such a gap and personally experiencing the absence of a platform that caters to the needs of an ordinary individual who wants to create innovative high-end videos; Sanket Shah, Pankit Chedda, and Harsh Vakharia have put in collective effort to create the InVideo company.
When we researched, there were only simple video editors and complex ones; it did not work that way. So we did it! We ended up sitting beside a customer, observing them what we did – says Sanket, InVideo CEO
Before launching InVideo, the team studied the customers’ needs extensively through primary research. They reached out to large news channels and eventually validated the idea. Further, they built a basic engine to get a direct response from the customers before launching on a full scale.
InVideo – Name, Tagline and Logo
InVideo Logo
The company deals in Video making, and hence the name ‘InVideo’
If there’s any piece of content, our goal is to help people transform that content into great videos. So it’s like your content in the video. Thus the name ‘InVideo.’ – Sanket on explaining the thought behind the name.
The InVideo business model operates as a SaaS (Software as a Service) model. It is basically a software distribution model in which InVideo hosts applications and provides them to the customers over the internet.
The InVideo revenue works on a freemium model, with paid plans starting at just $10 per month.
InVideo – User Acquisition and Growth
InVideo has over 800,000 users from more than 150 countries who have created videos in over 75 languages.
When we had started building the technology, we had found partners like Republic TV, Network18, etc., who helped us in understanding what we should build.
As InVideo was been built taking input from the customers, the company has managed to emerge strong and successful. With strategic planning, the team was able to build a market fit product, and from thereon, the mouth referrals have helped the company to get popular.
So we built this company with our customers. And so it’s so successful. We went ahead and built the entire company with our customers.
Furthermore, InVideo has undertaken intense marketing campaigns and growth hacking. Besides, they also adopted numerous other strategies and techniques to popularize the platform.
InVideo takes great care of customer expectations and designs its products in sync with customer demand. The company also has a 24/7 customer support team that responds in minutes.
Adobe Creative Clouds revenue is 6.5 billion, and they are only targeting professional video editors. We think that our market size is at least 10x because we are targeting anyone who is desiring to create a great video – says Sanket about InVideo’s target market
Apart from this Launching LTDs has also helped them a lot in gaining new users.
InVideo’s Net Promoter Score (NPS) has increased by almost five times, from 12 to 59 in just three months.
Over the long-term, InVideo envisions to create an ecosystem like Adobe, enabling every marketer, entrepreneurs, who desire to create a video, to be able to do that easily. Now, InVideo wants to expand from a web platform to a cross-device and cross-function space. They are aiming for 5 million users in the next two years. The team is also planning to create a platform that will help users in creating templates.
Our vision has been very simple, that actually we want to take over the world. When people think about video, they need to think about InVideo.
So, if you are on the lookout for making a video, do give InVideo a try!
Frequently Asked Questions – FAQs
Who are the InVideo Founders?
Sanket Shah, Pankit Chedda and Harsh Vakharia are the Co-founders of InVideo.
What is InVideo?
InVideo is a web based software that helps you create fantastic videos in a matter of minutes, no matter whether you are an expert or an amateur in video making.
Is InVideo free?
InVideo works on a freemium model so you can access InVideo for free but the customization options and the features you will be able to access are limited.
Rishi Mundra
