Would you record a video on my site?
I launched https://vidhug.com a few weeks ago and things are going alright - as slow as one might expect, but I also got my first handful of paying customers, which is a great feeling!
In a nutshell, VidHug enables people to create a "group video greeting card", where you:
- Create a "card" that includes a recording page
- Share that recording page with people you want to join in and record
- At the end, it creates a nice montage of everyone's contribution
Here's a sample recording page I created just for IH:
https://app.vidhug.com/sample-for-indie-hackers/r1HBiiJ4X/record
(who knows, if I get some interesting videos, I'll post the result!)
The thing is, customer satisfaction is obviously heavily tied to the end product: the montage. And the #1 determinant of how good that montage is, is the participation rate of the people who were invited. More videos = more content = more laughs + more tearful connections, etc.
In essence, I've got two funnels that I'm managing, both important. The funnel of users signing up to VidHug, creating projects, and paying for the service, but also the funnel of the people they invite to their recording pages. I really want to maximize their "conversion" rate, where a conversion is recording a video (or, after a future update, uploading a photo).
Currently, my approach is one of slight peer pressure: the creator of the VidHug has the ability to share out some of the videos on the recording page (as I have done). And once more than 1 person has recorded a video, it displays a prominent counter of how many videos have been contributed.
Understandably, not everyone is comfortable with themselves on camera, or with sharing a video with a website they've never heard of before. Obviously some people are inherently more likely to share than others, but I'd love to hear your thoughts and ideas: would you record a video for a friend or family member? Why or why not? What would change your mind or push you in the right direction?
I think the idea is interesting and signed up to see how the onboarding / creation flow is. A few bits of quick feedback:
Your product is visual...so show it to me! The landing copy describes it fairly well but there should absolutely be a demo of the final result (maybe just a video) to show how it works and how it makes the recipient feel. This would go so far, I think there is a huge potential to play on emotion and community in a good explainer video.
My first (and lasting) thought was that this should be mobile based with the flexibility of link sharing. I tried it on my phone and it worked well enough, though, so that's good!
Right after I took the leap and signed up, you stopped me from doing anything until I confirmed my email account. You want to get a user to their first "success" moment as quickly as possible and this is the opposite of that. I would only force confirmation after a certain period of time / enforce an upload limit. Once I did click the confirm link, it took me to a dead end when it should really redirect me to the app.
Brett
Thanks so much for signing up and giving it a try, Brett!
Yes! I totally agree and everyone I talk to, the first thing they ask for is an example. It's been a bit of a chicken vs. egg problem at this stage in that I've got some early users, but no one has created the final product yet. When they do, it will absolutely feature on the landing page (with their permission of course). The other option is to "fake it" with friends & family as actors, which I'm also considering.
That's good to hear. Intentionally kept it as a web app vs phone app because I wanted the least amount of friction for someone to record a video, so app install is out of the question. Your comment makes me think that I should give the people coming to the recording page the ability to share out to their network as well though, to increase the number of invites.
I hear you on that one. The e-mail confirmation dead-end is partially something I'm locked into for now due to my stack. I'm using AWS Cognito for user authentication and management and they just don't have an option for the verify link to redirect you, unfortunately. I hope they'll add it soon. On the plus side, I just shipped Login With Facebook today, which is seamless with a single click.
Thanks again so much for giving it a shot!