How Social Distancing is Changing our Product Development
Building a new product in early 2020 has turned out to be interesting timing, to say the least. When we started building Verifiablee in January, we had no idea how every aspect of our daily lives would change due to COVID-19. Like every business, we’ve had to make changes to how we work, though as a software startup with only a few collaborators, the day-to-day changes were modest. The bigger changes we’ve seen have come from the companies we’ve talked to in our customer development process, and how we think about our product.
Verifiablee automates the recording and collection of customer video interviews and allows you to build them into high-quality testimonials, case-studies, sales videos and other video content. Early on, many of the companies we spoke to about the product loved the idea, but preferred to use their own video crews to shoot video with customers in-person rather than capturing video on their customers’ own devices. We understand this — for companies that have the budget and the time, a professional video production team can produce excellent results. So we shifted focus to smaller businesses that didn’t have the budget or the time to utilize full professional video production teams to capture videos of their customers.
Of course, that was all before COVID-19 changed the working assumptions for just about every business. Some companies we were talking to, unfortunately, were no longer in a position to work on new marketing initiatives and instead were focused on their own survival. For others, with quarantines & lockdowns becoming the norm, we’ve watched as these companies shifted to working from home and adapting all sorts of new tools to get work done. Around this time, we started hearing back from some of those companies that had been using their own video crews & production teams. Using an on-site video crew was no longer possible — could we help automate the process of collecting video content from their customers? Could we use the customer’s own devices to record the footage?
At its core, this is what Verifiablee does — it lets companies capture customer testimonial footage on the customers’ own devices. But these companies require different workflows, so some of the product details are changing in response to these new use cases. For example, many of these companies need access to the raw video content, rather than a fully produced video, or they want to produce content by combining video footage in other ways than our product is currently designed. So changes in how businesses operate, driven by the Coronavirus & social distancing, are flowing directly into our product development process.
There’s a lot of uncertainty in the world right now and all of us are feeling it in our own homes, our communities and in the workplace. In all of these settings we’ve been forced to improvise and discover new ways to solve problems, from getting basic necessities, to adapting to closed schools & childcare, to getting everyday work done. In the case of Verifiablee, we’ve learned that there are new types of problems our product can solve that we hadn’t even considered when we started.
If these changes sound familiar to your business and you’d like to see more of what we’ve built, come try out Verifiablee and make your own customer testimonial videos.
