Abhinav Chugh, co-founder, VideoCrisp
VideoCrisp, a new cloud-based system to help businesses and marketing professionals create and edit their own professional videos more affordably, is our tech start-up of the week.
Set up in late 2011, VideoCrisp is currently based at NovaUCD.
“We have a team of five people in Ireland and small teams of developers and animators in India and Serbia,” explains co-founder Abhinav Chugh, who set up the company with Nidhi Kapoor.
No stranger to entrepreneurship, Chugh is also the founder of another start-up, Waybiz.com. He set up the venture in 2010 as a means of helping businesses improve their credibility online.
He says the idea for VideoCrisp came from Waybiz.
“We accidentally got into video space in Waybiz.com and realised the huge market growth but at the same time a big market gap and problem. We wanted to create professional videos for ourselves and our clients and when we couldn’t find any easy-to-use tool, we made it our vision to develop one that could help us, other SMEs and marketers who face the same problem every day,” explains Chugh.
However, he says the target segment is large digital marketing agencies and web-product companies.
“They are usually the first door that their business clients knock on for the video needs, but due to the expensive process and high expertise required to create videos these companies are not able to serve that demand.”
With VideoCrisp, which is officially launching in the first week of October, Chugh says users will be able to create high-quality videos in just a few clicks and without having to download or install any software.
“They don’t need to hire expensive video professionals or outsource their video work. It’s really a tool for people to create videos for their sales, marketing, promotional and social media campaigns.”
VideoCrisp features
So what type of features does VideoCrisp present for users?
“There’s a media library of animations, font and music,” explains Chugh. “People can add text, images, voiceovers and even video clips. You can make a customised, very high-quality and content-rich video.”
To date, Waybiz has raised €100,000 in early stage funding from Enterprise Ireland and private investors. This figure includes €50,000 from Enterprise Ireland’s Competitive Start Fund.
“We also have some great mentors on board, most notably Raomal Perera, who is also an investor in VideoCrisp. Raomal is a serial entrepreneur, mentor, investor with over 30 years of experience in the technology space,” explains Chugh.
He says the biggest challenge when setting up VideoCrisp was finding the right team.
“You start a company because you have a vision and the passion to make it happen but one person can’t build a company. At an early stage, when you have limited money and resources, you need to find the right people who believe in your vision and have the same passion to build an amazing product,” Chugh says.
Finally, his advice for other start-ups is to focus on the right target market. “Find the small market segment which has the biggest need for your product or service,” he explains, “and create a product for them. Sell it to this market first and then think of expanding.”
