- Hello and welcome to Community Chats.
I'm Aley Hammer,
and today we're interviewing Gary Zurnamer,
the co-founder and CEO of Vouch.
Gary, welcome to the show.
Can you start by telling our audience
a little bit about Vouch
and the problem you're solving for your customers?
- Sure. Thanks Aley.
We're a video collection platform.
What that means is we can remotely
or asynchronously collect video content
from pretty much anyone.
With Vouch you set up questions,
you set up structure for the person recording video,
you send them a link
and they basically record answers to your questions,
and then you get the video clips back into the platform
where you can edit it, share...
I mean, I guess yeah,
the beauty of Vouch is that it can be used for testimonials,
user feedback, support tickets, employer brand,
pretty much anything which requires video.
The main challenge is that video production
is generally pretty hard and expensive,
and for us having one tool for companies to use
to be able to do it all is the ambition for Vouch.
- Very cool.
I mean, as a content creator myself
I can definitely see how useful these tools are.
Gary, Vouch has achieved a lot in its first year.
What have you learned over the past
12 to 18 months about building a scalable product?
- Yeah. I think scalable and video together
becomes a big challenge.
I mean, we started a little bit naively around
the challenges that video presents.
Especially with Vouch, it's all browser based.
There's no app downloads or Chrome extensions,
so ultimately you have to work across every browser,
every device, has to be fast,
people expect it to upload immediately.
There's all these expectations around videos.
I think we learned that
you need to meet those expectations quite quickly
and having a scalable infrastructure that you can trust
and you know that when people are recording,
especially if someone's doing testimonials
or publicly facing content on there,
we need to be sure that we're reliable and scalable.
So that was a big lesson for us.
Basically just that we don't have
to rewrite the codes to do that.
There are tools like what AWS provides us
that can get us there quite quickly
and then we can add our own layers on top of that.
- Well, one thing that I really love about Vouch
is that you're so invested in customer feedback
and that you actually tailor your products based
on what your customers are saying they need.
That's really cool.
Gary, why did you choose the Cloud,
and I guess in particular, AWS?
- I mean, I would say it was an easy decision.
We looked at a few options,
and I mean, for us there's a level of trust,
security, with AWS.
We work with global clients,
and some of those clients are big enterprise clients.
From the beginning we thought about
if we could go into any security reviews
or larger enterprise deals,
how does being a AWS partner or using AWS help us?
That was a big consideration.
It offers an all in one suite for us to cross video
that we've continued to build upon as well.
Everything from storage to scaling,
security, transcriptions,
all those things we're laddering on top.
We're even looking at machine learning and AI
that AWS provides to,
how can we take some of the video elements
and the transcription elements and produce usable content?
For us the key is having
a pipeline of process and development within AWS,
and then obviously the brand name and the security
was a big plus for us as well.
- Thanks for sharing.
I mean, one thing that you keep mentioning is that
Vouch was really driven to use AWS
because you needed to deliver video at scale.
What I wanna know is why is scale
so important to you and your customers?
- I mean, I think in the time that we've created Vouch
there's been something like 10,000 videos recorded,
hundreds of thousands of minutes,
hundreds of thousands of views.
Even though we're quite early in our journey
we're seeing a scale of volume of video
that we knew would come
but we weren't sure of when that time it would come.
For us we just need to know that it works, it's reliable.
That it goes through a pipeline
that we're comfortable with,
and that we don't get the hundreds of support tickets
telling us people can't record.
Luckily today, I mean,
I guess through the hard work of the team
and a combination of technology
we haven't had that.
But yeah, video's tricky.
We just wanna make sure it's fast and scalable.
Those are the two things we talk about a lot.
- One thing I read was that
I think there's been
over 14.6 billion minutes of video watched in 2021.
That blows my mind.
With video consumption increasing so rapidly,
what does the future look for you guys at Vouch?
One thing I really wanted to ask you is,
do you think that your product will be impacted,
with events starting to be in person again
as opposed to all those virtual events
over the last two years?
- It's a great question.
I think you've probably...
Obviously there's the traditional video usage
that we see on social networks,
and I think in business
it started to become more and more ubiquitous.
There's obviously synchronous video
like we're doing now,
where it's a live Zoom,
but we just think that there's so much play
to go for video within the organization.
In relation to events,
I mean, for us, it's great.
We'd love in person events to come back.
A lot of people used Vouch at in person events.
So pre, post and during even.
Going into an event,
what we found when it was all digital
people needed to hear from speakers
and get a sense of who was gonna be there.
So they used Vouch to create these video assets
that they would share during the event digitally,
but the same thing happens at events,
they want video content to showcase.
They need it between sessions.
We have people at booths that are live events,
happy to be there in their swag or whatever it might be,
but they still wanna collect video from the event,
so we have a QR code that you can scan and add an event.
Basically you can leave a testimonial
or some sort of video content for that person at the booth.
We see video throughout the process
but for us we're excited for them to come back
and we think that is a good hybrid world.
- Gary, thank you so much for coming in the show.
Your company is so cool.
I'm a little biased 'cause I absolutely love video,
but if anyone has any questions
please pop them in the comment section below
and we'll get back to you.
Thanks so much, Gary.
- Thanks, Aley. Cheers.