50:3 The low cash growth hack

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Lee:

Welcome to the Trailblazer FM podcast. This is your host, Lee. And on today's show, we have not just one, but two incredible guests. Hey, to Zara and Aaron from Choppity. Guys, how are you doing today?

Zara:

We're doing very well, thank you. How are you doing, Lee?

Lee:

I'm doing great, thanks. I'm feeling slightly outnumbered, but I'm ridiculously excited to talk to you guys. For the folks who haven't heard of either of you and of Choppity, could you give us a little bit of a brief bio of yourselves and also how Choppity got started and what it is, I guess would help.

Zara:

Yeah, sure. I'm Zara and this is Aaron. And we've been working on Choppity for just over nine months now. I think we launched in January. And it's basically an AI video editor for podcasters to make marketing material from video podcasters specifically. Aaron and I both have a tech background. We met in uni. We got married last June. And yeah, I don't know what else to add to that right now.

Aaron:

I think that covers it pretty well. Yeah.

Lee:

Oh, that's fantastic. Could you let us know then how you guys actually started building? I mean, you said you got a tech background, but what tech background are you the programmers? Are you the project managers? Give us a little bit of an insight into how you're working on this.

Zara:

Yeah, sure. So we first met at Durham Uni. Aaron was studying computer science, I was studying math. Our first conversation ever was actually about blockchain and AI and entrepreneurship. And basically, since we met, we've been working on projects together. And we've always wanted an alternative way of, I guess, supporting ourselves and of earning money that allowed for us to be creative and also allowed for us to be autonomous. And so, yeah, that's how we started working on tech and projects together. So everything we build, we build in house. Aaron is our tech guy, tech support.

Lee:

And yeah. And you keep Aaron in check? Yeah, I do. Do you do the marketing and stuff?

Zara:

Yeah, I do the customer facing side of things and the marketing and the talking to people when Aaron doesn't want to do it. But he's pretty good at it, actually, for a tech guy.

Aaron:

I enjoy it a lot. I think one of the things that surprised me was customer support. I didn't think that that would be so enjoyable, but actually, it's really nice when you have customers coming to you and being like, Oh, I really like this, or This broke for me. Please, can you fix it? I really need this to work. Because it really makes you feel like you're actually providing value to somebody, actually helping them with their work, with their life. Because if they have an issue and they need it solved, it's probably quite important to them. And so it's nice to be able to do that.

Lee:

That's incredible. Now, AI seems to be absolutely everywhere, which is pretty cool. And you guys have definitely tapped into that with Choppity. We've been using it now for over a month and a half for the podcast in order to promote episodes. And how it's worked for us is we've essentially fed the YouTube channel to it. W e fed the YouTube video when it's uploaded to YouTube. T hen your AI actually goes through the script for us and then finds what it believes may be potentially good quotes with some form of hook or some form of interesting story. It's been pretty good so far. W e've also added in our own, which has been good. How did you go about building that without giving us the keys to the cupboard, obviously? I understand you need to keep secrets, but how does that AI work in a a simplistic way? How does it find that information?

Aaron:

Yeah, it's a great question. Like I said, one of the things that we do is we suggest these clips. But on top of that, we also do other things like we detect faces and crop those to make sure that they stay centered and all sorts of a manner of AI things. The nice thing about the fact that AI is everywhere is that you don't really have to build all of it yourself. We leverage a lot of paid APIs and open source tech and just bring it together as a really useful one stop tool to do all of this work for you. And it's really just making sure that it's as automated as possible and as flexible for the users. Again, the likelihood is, so even though we both study computer science, there are a lot of people out there who are much smarter than us, and we know that that's the case. And so there's no point in really reinventing the wheel for us just yet. At some point, we will and will develop, I'm sure, some awesome groundbreaking features, but in terms of where we're at right now, we can provide a ton of value just by leveraging what's already out there.

Lee:

That's a really good point. About 15 years ago, we created a product for the events industry and we called it Your Show. I've mentioned it a few times now on the podcast. And we went all in, we built it. We did base it on WordPress, so we had a beginning platform, but then we tried to build every single feature possible. We didn't use any third party applications and we spent absolutely months, in fact years trying to build. What we built was actually a beast that no one really used and no one really bought. So rather than leveraging what was out there, rather than going quickly to market and then evolving, we thought we needed to build perfection before we delivered. It sounds like what you guys are doing is you've built the MVP, you've leveraged the tech that's out there, and now you're taking it to market and you're hearing directly from the customer saying, Hey, can you make this work, or can this work differently? And then you are evolving the product that way, which I think is a very smart strategy.

Zara:

Yeah, well, I think that we've fallen into the exact same trap as you've fallen into on previous projects. And I'm sure that very many first time founders also fall into that same trap of building something and being scared of not showing it to the public until it's perfect and perfecting it according to what you think people want as opposed to what you know and what you've been told that people want. And that's definitely something that we've carried through with us through our development of this project now.

Lee:

That's awesome. Now, with regards to creating something like this, we create a lot of products in my agency, and I started to imagine, how would I go around building Choppity when the amount of video content that you might have to deal with is going to be very different? For example, on our channel, some of my videos are talking heads. Some of them are interviews with one, two, or three people, or maybe even five if I've got a panel. Some of them are a mixture of B roll and talking heads and interviews with other people. There's a whole mishmash of content. How did you go about building something that would be able to deal with the whole myriad of different visuals? You did mention the face tracking, which is obviously a good option, but how else did you go about it? Because I feel like my brain would have gotten that far. I would have had a brain far, and the product would never have been built.

Aaron:

Sure. I think one of the key things that we focused on was flexibility, and there's a fundamental trade off between flexibility and complexity. So the more flexible something is, the more complex it is. And that's why you have video editing tools like Premiere Pro, etc, which are a beast of software, extremely capable. But there's very few people who know how to use them to their full extent. And even when they do, they have to Google stuff all of the time. However, when you are able to niche down and you say, actually, we are a tool for podcasters, that's it. We don't necessarily care about other people. It can technically be used by them as well. But the focus is podcasters, podcasters solely. And again, when we say podcast, we also mean these interviews and talking heads, that thing, speech driven video. It's much easier because there's just a subset that you can focus on and you can nail it And that's what makes it easier. And again, I think one of the issues that often happens is that companies will diversify and diversify too quickly. And then the tool becomes powerful but not specific to anybody.

Zara:

Yeah, that really is the key thing. It's actually starting as specific as possible, doing one thing specifically well and then expanding just a little bit around that, but not trying to serve everybody and not trying to serve every single use case, really just doing one thing well and starting there.

Lee:

Now, one thing that stood out to me as a feature was the ability to actually edit all of the crops. So for us, we loaded our videos in. Your AI suggested some particular cuts, which were good. It also actually did some of its own cropping and cutting as well. So it switched between speakers, which was really cool. However, because of the way we've designed our videos, we've got name badges here or there, and we've got different labels, so you can see them peeking in. And on other tools I've used, you can't edit that. You're just stuck with it. You either go with it or you take the AI suggestion and you edit yourself outside in a third party tool. I love that that you can actually go for every single... Essentially, you've got a timeline and I can crop everywhere and make everything look exactly how I want. I can control the fonts, colours. I can correct the text as well, which is something else that you can't do in certain tools. So there's a few things, at least from me, where I recognise you guys have definitely got an edge. But from yourselves, what do you think makes Choppity different from the myriad of competitors out there?

Lee:

And why should people choose you guys?

Zara:

Yeah. So I'm really pleased that you flagged that up, actually, because that's one of the things that we consider to be our main differentiator and that we've been wanting to make our main differentiator. Because when looking at the options that exist for the specific use case that we're talking about, which is turning podcast videos and to short clips and marketing. The options really are to hire a freelancer, which obviously isn't readily available to a lot of people, to use software like Premier Pro or Descript, which are incredibly powerful, incredibly sophisticated, give you lots of flexibility but are very, very difficult to use, or to use tools like Opus, which will automatically do things for you. But then you don't really have any flexibility to make any changes or make any edits, which means that if you end up paying for them to make 10 clips for you, if three of them are good, then what do you really do with the other seven? There's not very much that you can do. And so we've been keeping in mind the whole time that we want to leverage AI as much as possible to make the process as efficient as possible, but we still want to allow our users to have the full flexibility of being able to essentially change what the AI does.

Zara:

So rather than AI does it for you, AI suggests it for you. And then you've got, essentially, you don't have a blank canvas that you have to work from. You can work from a starting point.

Lee:

That is really helpful. So for us, it usually suggests approximately seven. I think it's seven in most cases, different clips that we can use, but we can then edit that. We can select our own text. And the other cool thing is we can actually move things around. So there have actually been conversations. In fact, in the most recent one episode with Simon Penson, that was season 49 episode 7, folks, if you want to go listen to that. But he said something and then I reiterated what he said afterwards. But it actually made more sense for me to switch that round for me saying what I said first and then putting him on the end as the tag because he reinforced what I was saying. It actually worked better. So again, that was something we were able to do. So it does appear to me, and I know this now sounds like an advertorial, guys, it's really not, but I'm just really enjoying using Choppity here and I'm really impressed with it and I do like those features. I think it's been born from me using Opus and lots of other tools and then never being able to use the content for two reasons.

Lee:

Number one is just the fact that it's inflexible. Here's your 10, job done, like it or lump it. The second thing was just that ability to actually even edit what was there. W e've enjoyed it now. Our experience has been been pretty incredible. I thought you're a young startup at this point. I want to encourage you guys, this podcast has been around for a long time. We have a really healthy podcast listenership, which is wonderful. But our social media is pretty poor, mainly because it's me and one other person, so we don't post much on social media. We've got a fairly good following, but they're not really that well engaged. We've got a little YouTube channel that we've experimented with over the years, and now we're really starting to push our episodes out, etc. Being able to use something like Choppity has been great for us. We've seen this massive uptick, especially on Instagram and over on YouTube, of people actually watching our shorts or watching our reels. For example, our reels on Instagram have gone from 30, 40 views and then becoming extinct to seeing some of our reels getting, say, 2,000, 3,000 views.

Lee:

Or at the moment, at least on the most recent episodes, we're getting an average, I would say, of about two or three hundred views on our reels, which is good. And we're seeing an uptick engagement as well. So people are actually liking and or commenting, which in fact, our most recent one has got 10 likes and one comment, which may not sound a lot to people, but that is like 10, 100 %... I can't do math. It's a lot more than we've ever had. So I'm extremely happy which is great. And then also with the shorts, we were able to get our watch time over the mark as well with YouTube because people were watching those and we're getting quite a lot of views on our shorts as well because a lot of people, they love the long form content. They'll listen to the podcast when they have time, et cetera. But sometimes just being able to give them those little nuggets, which they'll watch and bookmark, et cetera has been great. Now, we have also started a TikTok for literally just to test, I don't do TikTok necessarily. I'm typing it in. I didn't even think I'd mention this, but let's have a look.

Lee:

Will it let me even see it? Do I have to be logged in? I'll send you the stats later. But we started the TikTok and literally all we're doing is posting Choppity videos to it. I'll let you know, guys, in the show notes what the stats for that was as well. And if you're not following us on TikTok, I'm cool. We're on TikTok and I don't dance, but we do put these videos up there, so we'll share a link as well in the show notes. I've shared there a whole lot of use cases for me as a podcaster, which is great. A lot of the people who listen to my show are agency owners, so they deal with clients who have websites and clients who want to create content. A lot of our listeners have therefore started supporting them with their social media marketing. How can agencies leverage Choppity in order to add value to their clients and also add another revenue stream?

Zara:

Yeah. So we have quite a few agencies using Choppity at the moment. One of the big things is the brand kits feature, which basically just allows for agencies who have multiple different clients to save their clients' branding as kits that they can then reapply very quickly and very easily. It massively has sped up the workflow of quite a few of the people who work for us. I don't have the exact numbers right now, but we hear the figures and we're like, Whoa, this is great. But not just that, also... So we just went to the podcast show recently in May, I think it was. And one of the really interesting things that's happening right now in the podcasting world is that... So you have a lot of these agencies that have been established and that have been working for quite a while, and they're very good audio first engineers. And people who are now wanting to start podcasts are wanting to start video podcasts. And so a lot of these agencies, even though they're very skilled and very good at handling audio podcasts, are having to retrain their audio engineers to be able to work with video.

Zara:

And that's proving to be quite a difficult process because of the tools that they're having to use, which are things like Premiere Pro. Again, not Bash and Premiere Pro. It's a very good tool. It's just super complex, especially if you're not used to using it. And so that's where we see Choppity bringing a lot of value, actually, which is that it's super simple and super easy to use. My mom has been able to use it and she's not exactly someone who's tech savvy.

Aaron:

Yeah. And other thing I'd add is that we've had some people use it in use cases that we don't necessarily expect. So one of our customers is working with ted talk type content. So people walking on a stage and talking, and they've been using it for that, and it works just the same. Or we've got people shooting real estate videos where they're just talking about stuff and why you should invest in X,Y, Z. 

Zara:

We have a law firm as well, actually, making little info TikToks.

Lee:

Sounds riveting. Although actually, there are some pretty good law TikToks out there, isn't there? A bit more animated than I would be about law, but that's cool. So it's I mean, that's interesting, isn't it? So you've developed a product that is clearly for one particular niche that is for podcasters on interview led content. So for example, this content would be perfect for me to load into Choppity. So by focusing on that, you've accidentally created some thing that is actually more powerful than you intended because there are use cases beyond what you realized. People can use it for real estate. Sounds like event organizers are going to be able to use this as well. So you've created something there for that is ridiculously flexible. The agencies that are listening, if anyone actually wants to use Choppity, like I said, this is not an advert. I don't have an affiliate link. I gain nothing from telling you to go and use this. But if you want to go and explore, it sounds like there may be some great use cases for you as an agency to add value to your existing clients' content or even your own if you are a content marketer.

Lee:

Do you have any other stories of weird, wonderful ways that people are using the product?

Aaron:

I do actually. So another one that we had was so where we went to university is Durham University, and we were talking to somebody who was affiliated with the council, actually. So you can imagine it's government. And we were like, Well, we were just talking with them. Don't see how we could be useful at all. And so because when you edit something in Choppity, we add captions. We add those TikTok animated style captions. But you can also do what I would call BBC captions, very much so standard captions. Actually, they said, Well, the issue for us is that we have to add captions for accessibility because for anybody who is viewing our video content who is hard of hearing, they need to be able to read and understand what's going on, especially when you're talking about council level content. And so that was a really interesting one to hear that really I didn't think it would... I guess I could have guess that would be useful for that. But yeah, apparently so.

Zara:

The other one was comedians. So we have a client right now who has a client that's a comedian stand up form where there's a bunch of video of stand up comedians. And so they're making promotional content for that. And so they've actually been making really good use of our propping feature. Again, tracking the speakers walking on stage with the smooth animation.

Lee:

So if you were to look at what I watch on Instagram, it's predominantly stand up speaker. So I have probably watched your client's content at some point. I follow all sorts of comedians.

Aaron:

Yeah, but it is actually always nice when you're just scrolling through our own feeds. And obviously, we follow a lot of our customers. But it's nice to be like, Oh, yeah, I know that was made with our software because we recognize it. And it's always nice to have those moments.

Lee:

So you can tell I'm a fan and I'd love a little bit of a sneak peek of what you might have coming up for the application.

Aaron:

Yeah, sure. So obviously, we don't want to give away all of our trade secrets, but we have some ideas in mind. So specifically when it comes to captions. So again, if you've ever tried to edit those yourselves in a Premiere Pro, it's a pain because you basically have to edit it word by word. And we have come up with a way where we could essentially just be way more flexible but still automated. So you could have incredibly animated, super cool animations where maybe you say the word boom or wow or love, and then those words get highlighted and jiggle about the page and animate. I don't know, you say money and you've got money falling down from the... You know, animated. There's all sorts of these things that we can do. And again, automate that so that even if you're just a person who has no idea how to edit video, you can still create ridiculously high quality content. And then let's say you are a person who knows how to edit video, you can do it 100 times faster than you would otherwise, if that makes sense.

Lee:

Well, for us, when we've done that, we literally have to. We use Filmora, we don't use Premiere Pro because that's just way too complicated for us. But yeah, Filmora is good enough, but it takes a long time to create video content like that. Now, you said that you guys are relatively new. This is a new company, it's a new venture. There are also a lot of business owners right now who are in the early stages of developing their business. What advice would you share with them as they are getting started?

Zara:

Talk to your customers every day. Talk to them as often as possible. Don't build unless you're being paid to build something is another thing I would say. I think a lot of people, as people in the tech industry, a lot of people who have startup ideas come to us and they often straight away are asking us, How much would it cost to build this? We're in a fortunate position where we can build things very quickly, but we are still trying so hard not to build unless we know that someone is going to pay us for it. So generally speaking, if you want to build a platform or do anything, start with a Facebook group, start with a calendar link, see if people will pay you for that, and then get to actually building if you're sure that you can actually monetize it.

Lee:

Best advice ever. Validate before the build. And if you've got someone who I get this all the time. Could you design us a website, mate? Well, if you've got the money, I will. But credits, you can't spend likes. I can't spend likes or whatever just because you got a big following. I actually need money. They don't accept likes at the bank. That's really valuable advice. Well, guys, thanks so much for your time. In a weird twist, this video will be loaded into Choppity later and people will be able to enjoy the content that will be going out on social media, which is awesome. But before we go, could you let us know the best way for people to connect with you? If they got any questions and then we'll say goodbye.

Zara:

So the easiest way to reach us is to go to Choppity.com/contact. There you can see both of our email addresses. And you've also got links to our LinkedIn profiles as well.

Aaron:

I just want to emphasise, we literally reply to every single email every single LinkedIn. It doesn't matter if you're interested in buying or you're just like, Oh, this is cool, or you just want to say, I hate it. That's fine. We'll reply to that too. That's okay. We really appreciate it every time somebody reaches out and then talks to us.

Lee:

That's awesome. Well, guys, thanks again for your time. Have a wonderful day and I look forward to speak to you soon when you've released the amazing Batman sounding features. Take care, folks. Cheerio..

Zara:

Thank you so much, Lee.