Getting to product-market fit is hard. Like, really really hard. In many ways, the journey of VideoTranslator has been around how to find product-market fit.
So why listen to us about product-market fit? Frankly, after working on it ourselves for several years, and helping many of our clients get to the same place, we know a few things about it.
Why Are We Talking About Pre-Product Marketing?
This started over beers with one of our clients. VideoTranslator serves many clients, but a large proportion (75%) of our clients are startups. Why are so many of our clients startups?
See, the reality is the only thing a startup needs to do is… well, survive. Seriously. If you are a startup without product-market fit, i.e. you are a startup, the only thing you really really need to do is survive.
One of our clients made the point that the most useful service we provided was advice on pre-product market fit marketing.
This was a bit of a revelation. You would be forgiven for thinking this is not the case, seeing as we are trying to be an AI firm that provides a specific service, but hey… who knew?
It’s a bit more complicated, seeing as our service is primarily to small-sized exporters, but at the core of it, we were helping our clients to survive.
Those beers were very insightful…
How We Got To Helping Our Clients Find Product Market Fit?
VideoTranslator’s primary product is AI-powered video translation services. That is, practically speaking, the following happens…
Right, so it’s not that complex. First, you upload a video, and then transcribe, translate and optionally add a voice-over. It can be more complex, with all the options around the AI’s, but that is not so important for the purposes of this discussion.
But why would you do this?
Consider a video asset on YouTube. The reality is that search engines are based on text, so to make videos easily searchable we use things like the title, description, and captions.
When you have the captions in multiple languages, with or without the voiceover, it makes the asset searchable by users in different languages.
That it. It’s basically video SEO optimization across multiple languages, which allows clients who don’t speak English to find your product.
Startups are generally desperately looking for someone, anyone, who will buy their product.
Why? Because this way they survive.
This way YOU survive.
How We Can Help You With Pre-Product Market Fit Marketing?
Several ways. And stay tuned for more on this.
We will help you find a market for a product that either, (a) does not exist yet, (b) is a work in progress, or © needs funding and traction.
Product Market Fit For A Non-Existent Product
The client work we do here is mostly for clients who are in deep tech. You have an idea or minimum viable product (MVP) which has a mix of hardware and software components.
These products are hard to sell, and sales are generally to enterprise or government clients in the early stage.
Finding early clients, finding linkages with universities, and finding grants that mix industry, academia and government as collaborative efforts. This is our bread and butter.
Product Market Fit For A Work In Progress
You have a few clients but are not really making money.
How do you build credibility, get interesting and inspiring collaborators, and then pitch it to a big enterprise or government agency client?
We can help. Why trust us? We’ve actually done this ourselves.
Our old app, VideoTranslator 1.0 picked up over 9000+ users (retail) and several enterprise clients.
Our new app, VideoTranslator 2.0 is being rebuilt explicitly to cater to this market.
Why? Again, this is what we know how to do.
Product Market Fit To Raise Funding And Get Traction
You have some semblance of a product. But you need to raise funding, and ideally, a client who can give you stability. How do you do this?
Alternatively, you have some traction, but not a whole heap. Where do you find additional clients to hit the growth numbers you need - we can help with that.
We have significant expertise in finding odd and uninteresting niches. Why would you want that? So YOU survive.
Summary
I get it. You need to go from Zero To One. You are a fan of Peter Thiel. I hear you. But it is not working…
The point is not to go from zero to one. It’s to get from zero to point one, and then point two, and then point three.
That is the kind of service we can provide to your company. Or more realistically, to your vision for the service, you can provide.
Oh yeah - don’t spend money on ads. Pro-tip. Because we have done that too and understand how useless pre-product market fit is.
Ping through an email to hello@videotranslator.ai if we can help you!
