Video for launch day vs carousel of images?
Emilio Lopez
6 replies
Wanted to know community thoughts. I've seen many launches use videos but they come out cornball-ish. You either get the obvious sense that it was templated or the video is just a super long uninteresting demo video. Not dissing the efforts on either side but ultimately making a video from scratch that stands out, in my (biased) opinion, is the better option.
A video that stands out can really add some umph to not only your launch but to your brand as a whole. Your <10 person startup can look and feel like a Series A startup well on their way to success. On the flip side, just designing out a nice carousel can perform pretty well and suffices for some types of launches. However, the benefit of creating a video is that it can be evergreened into content, ads, thrown into presentations to spice things up rather than keeping things static.
I do motion design for startups launching here on producthunt and im surprised as to how many people do not have videos for their launches, and wanted to hear general sentiment as to why or why not. :)
Replies
Alyssa X@alyssaxuu
Personally what I do is create a short video (~10 seconds) that showcases the main features of the product, sometimes even as a GIF. No audio or text whatsoever, straight to the action. Here's a few examples:
- Omni, where I just compiled a few small clips of the product performing certain actions, or searching in the omnisearch.
- Carden, where I literally just recorded myself using the extension and turned it into a GIF.
I tend to speed these up and edit them in After Effects to make sure people don't get bored and drop out. I think it's pretty effective, plus I can also use these to share the product on social media, where it's easier for it to get engagement as well.
That said, I would say having a carousel of images alongside the video is super useful too, people want to know more about the product and features before checking it out.
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@alyssaxuu I like cutting to the chase. Super important when trying to showcase something. I felt that maybe the 'scenes' were a little too fast, it was hard to understand what was going on as a first time viewer without needing context of the product hunt post. But I'm just one person and Omni had a really great launch so who am I? lol
@hatertate Ha yeah, to be honest I use the video more as a way to get the attention than as a way to explain all of my product offerings. Usually people see it and then read through to learn more, it's worked well for me so far.
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