Get Ready — We're Starting Our Engines 👀

October 24, 2024

Justin Kelsey Co-Founder & CEO

It's been a minute since I've sent a proper update — after being buried deep in re-build and re-launch mode — but I'm stoked to share what all we've been up to since then.

🎙️ Announcements

• Brought on Will Arloff as a technical co-founder and CTO, with nearly a decade of experience building SaaS, plus a previous UGC startup of his own
• After working remotely from Miami (with a few in-person sprints) for the last two months, Will has officially relocated to Charlotte as of this week!
• Kirsten (our back-end / AI engineer) still remains in Raleigh, but is able to easily join us for in-person working sprints

🤖 Product

• Completely shut down the v1 (built before Will joined the team) to focus on building and launching the v2, and not learning the entire code base + supporting the v1 version (which would have been a major distraction)
• Simplified the entire platform based on customer feedback from the v1, keeping the features customers loved, and removing the technical debt / complexities
• Created a much more responsive platform using the most recent technologies, versus the more limited ones available when we first started building
• Keeping our proprietary AI-powered video editing engine that has the capacity to instantly edit thousands of videos, with new improvements added by Kirsten on our team (who will continue to own this portion of work)
• Re-launching our "Lite" version next week with basic features for agencies and small businesses, and adding additional features every 2 weeks following, prioritizing what's most requested by current customers
• ​Check out some designs / screenshots of the new platform here​

💰 Fundraising / Runway

• Raised a small round to get us through Q1 2025, but planning to do another small fundraising round soon to be able to support additional growth levers
• Targeting angel investors, family offices, and early-stage VCs looking for an opportunity to get in early before a larger round later down the road

🌱 Future Roadmap

Features we're including in the upcoming "Lite" version:

• Collect, organize, and download video and text testimonials
• Create prompt-based questions to guide customers
• Automatically edit video segments into one final video
• Have multiple "spaces" (clients) in one account (for agencies)

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Additional features that will be added over coming 2-week sprints:

• AI Teleprompter (a favorite from our previous version)
• "Wall of Love" to embed testimonial video grid / carousel on site
• Gift cards, Shopify discounts, and custom gift card rewards
• Shopify and Zapier integrations / automations

🎯 Strategy

• Leverage our existing waitlist / previous customers to get everyone into free plans, with restrictions to encourage upgrading for more storage / features
• Begin running Meta ads targeting agency owners and marketing decision makers through a trusted ad agency partner I've worked with before
• Continue to target agency owners and decision makers for my founder-led sales, given one agency deal can unlock dozens of new customers
• Allow for self-onboarding for smaller businesses, giving them the option to start in a free plan, organically upgrading their pricing as their needs grow

🏋 Challenges

• Building mostly everything again (except the video editing back-end) from scratch using the latest tech out there has been an investment, but the entire team agreed it was necessary for future-proofing and eliminating tech debt

🙏 Asks

• I'd love if you share our site with any business you know that could benefit from more video, text, or photo testimonials for their business, or their clients.
• Shoot them a note to check out switchframe.ai and join the waitlist to get completely FREE access when we start opening it up next week
• Interested in joining our next round or know someone who might be? Simply reply back and I'll send over more details once we're ready.

If you've made it this far, thank you for being invested in what we're building over here. I'll be sharing a sneak preview of the new platform over Loom very shortly, as well as updates once we're live again, so stay tuned!

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Cheers,