During Nasscom Product Conclave, you will always see a series of amazing speakers giving you a lot of amazing gyan from their experiences as entrepreneurs or intrapreneurs. One of the most resonating lessons I learnt during the 3 day mega event was during the panel talk between Varun Agarwal (Co-founder, AlmaMater) and Subhendu Panigrahi (Co-founder, Venturesity & the moderator). Varun is already a very well known as a prolific speaker as well as for his bestselling book, How I Braved Anu Aunty & Co-founded a Million Dollar Company.
What Varun said during the panel was very true that start-ups are grounds for innovation, yet most start-ups and entrepreneurs have very little focus on innovation in marketing. A lot of early funded start-ups just take the regular route to marketing using standard Google Ads and Facebook campaigns.
He believes that only with a phone camera and using your head to create the right video, you can make your videos viral that will eventually lead to a great marketing for your start-up and boost sales.
If you take the video Varun created on ‘Anu Aunty – The Engineering Anthem’, it was completely created in Rs 1.5 lac. The video already has over a million views on YouTube.
Varun also gave the example of the very popular ‘Dollar Shave Club’ video which had the CEO of the company just talk about why you should use DollarShaveClub.com. The video went viral gaining over 20 million views on Youtube. He also spoke about ‘First Kiss’ video by Wren Studio that just uses an empty background, a camera, some lights and asks two strangers to kiss. The video has garnered over 108 million views on Youtube.
He used all these examples to help the audience understand that your video must make a subtle connection without pushing your product too hard to prospective customers. He also spoke about two of his other videos that went viral which include his INKTalk as well as the video he created on Mime through Bollywood. Both these videos quickly crossed a million views in just a few days.
Varun mentioned too in his talk that everytime one of his videos went viral, AlmaMater sales increased. Another important insight that Varun had was that Facebook videos are a better platform to get more people to see your videos and make them viral as compared to Youtube. I do agree with him on this since Facebook is built in a way that promotes and aids quick sharing of videos across profiles, pages and groups, and with a massive sitting audience it makes virality comparatively easier to achieve.
He also said during the Q&A that explainer videos don’t work to the extent of going viral and lack innovation.
I think all of you will agree that Varun is an expert in making viral videos and I hope everyone takes his advice of using a simple camera and your thoughts to create a beautiful video that will make more people take notice of your product / services. And, you never know, it might go viral too!