Q1 Update: Shopify, Wall of Love, & Fundraising

January 15th

Justin Kelsey Co-Founder & CEO

While most of the business world slowly faded to a halt between Thanksgiving and New Years, we took that opportunity to fully focus on building and launching some of our biggest feature updates yet, which I'm excited to share with you today.

🎙️ Announcements

• Approaching first 50 users after re-launching back in November
• Completed first major third-party integration with Shopify
• Started running Meta ads to drive agency sign-ups, fortunately with no cost except ad spend itself (using previous deal I had with an agency)

🤖 Product

• Released Shopify Integration allowing brands to generate promo codes as Rewards, connect their product library, embed videos on product pages, and automatically request videos after a customer receives their order
• Completed the much requested "Wall of Love" feature that allows brands to embed a grid, carousel, or other types of video showcases on their site
• Started rebuilding the AI teleprompter, with plans to launch it this month

💰 Financials

• Reduced the team's salaries up to 35% to account for Meta ad spend, allowing us to keep the same (or lower) burn rate, while still investing in marketing
• All current users are still on free plan ($0 MRR), but adding features (e.g., AI teleprompter) that will require a paid subscription to start using
• We will need to raise more capital this quarter (or merge/partner), providing us with the necessary sales & marketing resources first 500 users

🎯 Strategy

• Continuing pursuing marketing agencies with 20+ clients as our target user, getting them on "Agency" licenses with paid workspaces for each client
• Start targeting e-commerce brands directly now that Shopify integration is live, as well as new revenue channel from the Shopify App Store
• Explore partnerships, white-label opportunities, or even merger with other B2B SaaS companies in the marketing, UGC, video, or AI spaces that could benefit from our instant video editing technology
• Invest my time heavily into direct outreach for agencies, e-commerce brands, and home services companies, plus AI-powered cold outreach email campaigns

🏋 Challenges

• Re-launching the platform right before Thanksgiving meant that most brands and agencies were too deep in launching & running Black Friday / Cyber Monday / holiday campaigns to add anything new to their stack for 2024
• Hit a sales "dead zone" in December where companies had already spent 2024 budgets, were checked out for the year, or on vacations and not buying/using new SaaS tools
• Shopify integration took longer than planned to build, as nobody on the team had experience in their proprietary coding language (Liquid) and had a steep learning curve to integrate our platform with theirs
• Seeing users sign up for free accounts, but not upgrading to paid, so our focus will now be adding gated paid-only features to encourage upgrading
• First month of Meta ads had minimal conversions, though we've been told it can take up to three months for the algorithm to become properly trained

🙏 Asks

• Encourage your portfolio companies, friends, or your own company to create a SwitchFrame account and get their first 20 testimonial videos for free
• If you know someone who may be interested in investing in what we're building, or merging our company / tech with theirs, feel free to connect us directly

📢 Shout-Outs

• Louis Foreman from Enventys
• Samyr Qureshi from Knack
• Alex Smereczniak from Franzy
• Jack Graham from StreetFair
• Lauren Goodell from Zinnia

​

Without going into specifics, thank you all for everything you've helped me with these last few months — both with SwitchFrame and on a personal level navigating this crazy journey as a founder. I seriously couldn't do this without you guys.

💭 Final Thoughts

While I'm still so excited and optimistic for what we're building, I also know we've got a massive uphill battle ahead. The next few months will absolutely be full of challenges we've never seen, both for our company and the economy, in a time when video and marketing are changing faster than ever before.

​

As a team, all we can do is keep building what we're passionate about, knowing that the problem still exists across the world, and doing our best to make people aware of our beautiful little solution to it.