Why We Invested in @FerrisApp — A New Kind of Video Sharing App
We recently released the video sharing app Ferris and announced that Upfront Ventures led the funding in the company in our seed round of $2 million and I personally joined the board.
We hit the top spot recommended on Apple’s iOS App Store on the day of the launch, which is a testament to the team and all of their hard work. I wanted to spend the rest of the blog post telling you why we decided to fund the company, how we settled on the final product design and our unique way of launching the app.
I’d love it if you’d take a moment to download the app and tell us what you think. Yes, we’ve only launched on iOS for now. That was just a question of limited resources and wanting to get V1 right. We will port it to Android ASAP after our first rev of proper user feedback.
So Why Did We Invest?
As a VC (especially based in LA), I see hundreds of video apps. This accelerated after I co-led the seed & A rounds at Maker Studios, which sold 3 years later for $1 billion to Disney. I see many good video companies (media companies, mobile apps, distribution platforms, monetization platforms) but it’s often hard to distinguish good from great.
I first met the Ferris founders (Paul Boukadakis & Chris Shaheen) more than a year ago. I was simply blown away by their long-term vision for building a video company that stood out both technically and from a product vision. It was scary how closely their views mapped to my own, which I often don’t make public.
As a starting point, when we create videos (concerts, weddings, tech events, sports, kids) they often stay stranded on our devices and at best make it to iCloud. I had always believed that to solve the video sharing problem you had to make it easy and seamless to migrate videos from my phone to my private cloud. Ferris has built an elegant way to pull to solve this problem and has a roadmap that will bring even more magic.
Second, videos that we do share end up in fragments across Facebook, Instagram, cloud services, email or text messages. The team had a retro analogy to a photo album and the magic of being able to show “stories” that were related to each other. If you were at Coachella or Burning Man and shot video people probably don’t want to watch 15 45-second clips. But if you could weave the best 8 seconds of 10 of the videos into an “album” it would be more interesting.
Third, for viewers the product allows viewers to easily scroll through your video album or story without having to watch the full video and if they find it interesting they press the button to consume it. This is critical because I never believed your friends would want to endlessly watch videos of yours and of all their friends. If scrolling through your videos were as easy as scrolling through Instagram photos it would make it easier to digest your “story” without committing to 90 seconds to watch it. If you’re captivated you click and watch.
That’s where Shaheen did his magic. The backend services to enable scrolling, click-and-watch, scroll forward with minimal buffering, etc. is non trivial.
Fourth: Where Ferris really shines is collaboration. While we believe the product is perfectly suited for stand-alone sharing of your video albums it is 10x value when others share with you. Why? Imagine being at Burning Man and 10 of your Burners shot video. What happens to it all (aside from the videos nobody wants shared!?!)? Imagine if your friends could all contribute the Burning Man 2015 album and create a group story. Imagine as a parent if 10 dads or moms shot video at a soccer game or birthday party. Or if at your wedding all your guests could submit their videos before, during and on their way home from the event and you could create wedding albums told from the perspective of all your guests.
And what if this could over time help you figure out who is near your implicitly so that stitching together videos from other people you hung out with is totally seamless. We’ve tested tons of design concepts here and expect much innovation on this front in the future.
That is Ferris. Capturing your moments of life and sharing them in a cohesive story vs. the video fragments shared on social media that don’t form a permanent collection or worse yet your most precious moments trapped on your phone.
So what made it into the film and what was left on the cutting-room floor?
The version we shipped is v1 but built with love. We hope you’ll like it. And we look forward to your feedback. As with most products, eliminating features has been our most valuable exercise.
Some of the concepts we’ve testing include:
- More prominent group story features and proximity sharing (1st degree, 2nd degree, just in proximity). But it turns out that users need to first discover the app and how to share their own stories before being to confused about adding others. You can do group videos but we’ve depricated features and will re-release some others later.
- Map-based metaphors. We’ve always believed that videos have a life that is formed by latitude, longitude and time. That is the story. What happened on the 3rd Street Promenade on Saturday, April 25th at 8pm? What does it look like in the morning at Half Moon Bay in the Winter? We will continue to experiment with this vector
- Video editing tools. It’s clear that just loading your 45-second video as is often isn’t the right answer. We have simple tools to solve this but we will introduce better tools over time. The challenge is that many mobile video apps with editing tools have proved to complex to users and thus slowed adoption
- Video effects. As with editing there is much to be done here if we’re smart: Sound, transitions, effects, looping, etc. But for now we’re focused on ease-of-use an adoption. So we cut concepts to the core.
Simply put — it’s hard when you know the complete set of features that should exist but when testing reveals that you need to strip away the product to its core essence.
And how did we launch?
As tech industry professionals we’ve admired the work and impact that Ryan Hoover and team over at Product Hunt have achieved (in fact, I’ve been following Ryan even since his days at PlayHaven).
There was a time when the whole tech industry was glued to TechCrunch and looked forward to every product release to trial out new stuff. TechCrunch has gone mass and now many, many people read the website. We thought we’d try to get some feedback from product-oriented user community at Product Hunt (and then we also announced on TechCrunch of course). So my first Tweet about Ferris was the following:
I’ve been wanting to share this exciting news for a while. My 1st on @ProductHunthttp://t.co/nafX1uJsoQhttps://t.co/L1I6RUWYJu
— Mark Suster (@msuster) April 23, 2015
The results were fantastic. We saw downloads immediately spike, feedback rolled in quickly and thousands and thousands of videos were uploaded in a very short period of time. Within 24-hours we were featured by Apple. We feel very happy with the results of this experiment.
And now for the hard work. Looking at week 1 and week 2 cohorts. Testing what feature sets are resonating. Tuning product. Building for Android. And searching to see whether we’ve hit product / market fit and refining, refining, refining until we do.
Otherwise known as a tech startup.
