Animoto is Turning Seven

It was another exciting year at Animoto and I’m extremely proud of our team’s accomplishments in serving you, our dear customer, better. The video industry has come a long way over the past seven years since we originally launched Animoto.com. We don’t take our leadership position for granted, as every day we experience first-hand how video impacts people’s lives and businesses – it’s inspiring!

Our goal is to make it easy and fun for you to create and share videos that are meaningful. We’ve made big strides in our execution thus far but, compared to where we intend to go, we still feel like we’re only just getting started – and that’s what makes it fun to come to work everyday at Animoto, even seven years after launching.

Product Starts With You

While we try our best to anticipate your needs, we always start product roadmap planning sessions with you, our customer. We review the feedback you send through customer service, we poll you through surveys, we invite you into our office for focus groups, we study the data behind how you use our products and, lastly, we sprinkle in a little of our own feedback as we at Animoto are also very active users of our products. We then work through an iterative process to define and deliver features and products that uphold the Animoto promise of being effortless for anyone to create and share exceptional videos.

One result of this research, as you may have noticed in the past year, is that Animoto is no longer one-size-fits-all. For example, we’ve learned that businesses typically use Animoto differently than families, as their purpose is different. Whereas families often use Animoto to share and preserve a family experience, small businesses use it to promote their business and communicate with their customer base.

Product Improvements

To get a better sense for how our consumers, businesses, professional photographers and educators use Animoto, have a look at these newly crafted pages:

• Personal
• Business
• Professional Photography
• Education

We’ve been busy on the mobile front over the past year. In addition to making continual updates to our iPhone and Android apps, we also launched a brand new iPad application, making it even easier (and perhaps a touch more fun) to create, watch, and share videos on the go (or, in my family’s case, from the comfort of our couch or bed at home). The esteemed Walt Mossberg of Re/code recently reviewed the app very positively and remarked, ”it strikes a good balance between speed and simplicity on the one hand, and customization on the other.” Apple has also taken notice as the new app is frequently featured in the App Store.

With the re-launch of Animoto for Business earlier this year, business customers can now customize their videos to be brand consistent in terms of colors, fonts, and even logo treatment. But we didn’t stop there; we also introduced customizable styles, which offer even more aesthetic control of videos, including transitions, photo framing, and text animation. Completed videos are now distributed to your audience more easily through our re-envisioned sharing and exporting features, and we now provide statistics on where your videos are viewed and how frequently.

If you’re interested in trying out these new business features before paying – no problem! We recently launched a free Pro trial so you can now try before you buy.

We continue to work hard to impress the professional photography community, as their obsession with pixel-perfect precision requires us to continually up our game. We believe that if we can continue to win photographers over with the quality of our product then we can win over anyone in the world. To that end, we love partnering with the world’s top photographers to co-design and launch fresh video styles that reflect their famed photographic style. We’re clearly doing something right as we were recently awarded our 5th-straight “Hot One” Award by Professional Photography Magazine in the Slideshow/Presentation category.

To expand our reach even further, we’ve recently partnered and fortified existing partnerships with several complementary services like WordPress, Vimeo, Squarespace, SmugMug, and Wistia. We’re also very proud of our partnerships with Snapfish and Shutterfly, as both companies allow their customers to create Animoto videos directly from within their sites without ever needing to come to Animoto.com.

Our Team

The backbone of Animoto is our people — and you can see us all here. I’m proud to say that we have the most enthusiastic and highly motivated team of people working tirelessly behind the scenes. We’re always looking to bring on new talent to join our already amazing team. I still enjoy doing final interviews for all prospective employees to test for culture fit but, if that gives you pause for applying, it’s a very aceable interview as I recently revealed a lot of my interview questions in a Corner Office interview with the NY Times.

The Animoto team is passionate about giving back. All Animoto employees get one day of paid community service each year to use toward the organization of their choice. As a company we have given our time to several local organizations to show our thanks for the great work they have done in our communities.

We also continue to support non-profit organizations and other humanitarian causes with free access to Animoto for a Cause. At our last company gathering, we divided into fifteen teams and competed to see who could create the best Animoto video for a non-profit. Everyone came up with incredible videos for worthy causes; but we didn’t stop there: Animoto made a donation to each of the non-profits featured.

We Value Conversation & Community With You

On the social media front, we have created distinct communities for our unique customer groups to stay up-to-date on style releases, product updates and news that pertains to each. We’re always very active on Facebook and Twitter, and recently created a new Facebook page specifically for Animoto for Business, and also started a Google Plus page specifically for our growing photography community.

As always, we love to hear from you so please be in touch if we can help amplify your story, improve our product for your specific need, or even just help with your current video project.

In Closing

We crossed a big milestone this past year in that 10 million of you have now tried Animoto. It’s been very rewarding to build a company with such reach, yet for all of us at Animoto it’s always been more about quality than quantity. We want you to fall in love with the quality of our product, and the quality of your Animoto video creations.

Seven years in, we’re proud of our past but really inspired by what’s to come and how we can make your experience and videos with Animoto even better. Thank you for being an important part of our journey and trusting us to help you create videos that matter for your family, friends, and business.

P.S. In case you’re interested in seeing what I do all-day, here’s a video made by one of our employees.