Happy 6th Birthday, Animoto!
I’m writing from Disneyland where my family is vacationing for the weekend. My wife and I booked the trip several months ago but only told our kids (who are 5 and 3) a couple nights ago because we feared their little bodies wouldn’t know how to contain such excitement.
I videoed their ecstatic reactions to the news and it’s going to be the perfect intro to my Animoto video of our trip to Disneyland.
The kids have been to Disneyland one other time but were too young to remember it (hoping they remember it this time!) so after telling them the news of this trip we fired up our Roku on our TV, pulled up the Animoto channel and played the Animoto Disneyland video I created from our last trip. We watched it again and again and again and then found ourselves immersed in a series of other Animoto videos from when the kids were younger.
This is what Animoto is all about: reliving life’s best times with loved ones and making it fun and easy to do so.
Every year at Animoto gets more and more exciting. When we originally launched six years ago we were the only simple web-based video creation solution on the web, at least that I knew of. Our focus for the past six years has been to improve the Animoto video creation experience for all types of people, from teenagers to grandparents on the personal side and from non-profits to Fortune 500 companies on the business side. I think we’ve done a pretty good job balancing such a wide range of customer uses but as we enter our sixth year we’re going to tighten our focus a bit. Rather than be a good solution for everyone in the world we want to be the ‘best-in-the-world great solution’ for our most important customers.
Personal Use of Animoto
I recently heard Elon Musk speak at a conference and found myself particularly inspired. For those who haven’t heard of Elon Musk, he’s the founder of PayPal, SpaceX and, most recently, Tesla. He’s doing amazing things that are literally changing our world, from making electric cars sexy and profitable to championing the idea of interplanetary living between Earth and Mars.
At one point in the interview the interviewers asked what he thinks about the craze and hype for the hundreds of flavor-of-the-day photo websites and apps, given that he’s focused on solving humanity’s more highbrow problems. He responded very thoughtfully, saying “If people are able to share photos of their friends and family in a better way, that makes their lives better.”
That perfectly sums up the personal passion I’ve had for Animoto since launching six years ago; and I still firmly believe we can do it better than anyone else in the world. In this next year we’re going to focus more on how Animoto can better enrich lives by making it even easier to create and share great-looking videos that can be relived by you and your loved ones again and again as your families grow older.
Business Use of Animoto
We originally launched Animoto for Business five years ago after the growing demand of a business version of Animoto was too loud to ignore. I’m so glad we finally listened as, over the past five years, Animoto has proven to be a good solution for myriad types of businesses using Animoto to create hundreds of different types of business videos.
Yet, again, we don’t desire to just be good; we desire to be best-in-the-world great for you! As we approach this next year we are going to focus more on how Animoto can specifically help your business make more money using video, whether through generating more awareness, driving more traffic, converting more sales or simply by helping you keep your customers close. We’ll be communicating a lot more about exactly how in the coming months.
From a video quality perspective, our community of professional photographers continues to inspire us with their pixel-perfect demands. We are going to continue working closely with them to delight them, as delivering for them will continue to benefit all of our customers.
In closing, thanks for being along for our journey. It feels good to be six. We absolutely cherish the responsibility of helping your business grow and love that you trust us to remember and relive your favorite moments with your family and friends. Gotta get back over to the Disneyland park to make some more family memories of my own.
The birthday boys and gals from Animoto:
