The craft of visual storytelling
'Creativity is the new literacy’ is the concept behind the birth of creative software startup Animaker - a bootstrapped venture that has been profitable from day one, and today boasts of four million users in more than 251 countries and 50 plus languages
Founded in 2014, Animaker is a fast growing creative software company helping individuals, SMEs and Fortune 500 companies create studio quality videos with less time, effort and cost. A bootstrapped startup, Animaker today has global offices in San Francisco, Bangalore and Chennai. “We have grown to more than four million users from 251+ countries and 50+ languages in five years. Animaker’s astonishing growth can be attributed to its strong sense of innovation,” says Srinivasa Raghavan, CEO & Co-founder, Animaker, who had launched the company bitten by this passion for visual storytelling.
The target clients ranges from individuals and SMEs to Fortune 500 companies – those who want to create studio quality videos online with less time, effort and cost. The DIY video creation platform on the cloud has a client list including Google, Dell, Cisco, and others. The products include Animaker, Animaker for Class and Animaker for Enterprise.
Animaker for Enterprise accelerates a team’s content creation process and helps them stay ahead with the next generation DIY video creation suite. Teammates can stay connected by using the in-app messenger and give approvals. Organisations can manage their brand identity with their own custom library of assets including animated characters, props, charts, maps, and icons. Those that can greatly benefit from this product are – Sales & Marketing Department; HR & Internal Communications Division; and agencies.
With a vast asset library, the company offers customisation to its users are looking for a creative platform that facilitates professional quality visual content creation with less time, effort, cost and a certain level of customisation. “Animaker’s vision is to help millions of non professionals to create professional quality videos. The non-professionals we are referring to are the photographers, designers, teachers, marketers, writers who are professional content makers but do not know how to create videos using professional tools,” explains Raghavan.
Animaker’s value proposition is to tap the creativity of people by offering the right platform and tools. Raghavan points out that the millennials and the Gen Z have been very proactive in creating videos on Snapchat, TikTok, IGTV, Facebook, etc. “You can find the most creative brains there. So it is just a matter of time they will use the DIY tools to create a high quality content like a pro. This huge human shift which is in the making is going to be facilitated by Animaker,” he states.
Animaker’s vision is to help millions of non-professionals create professional quality videos. Compared with other tools, Raghavan believes that Animaker is democratising the video market with a platform which solves all kinds of video making needs starting from different styles of videos to addressing 10 different complex steps like video editing, graphics, voice over, music, etc., all at one place yet very simple to use.
According to Raghavan, the innovation behind the creation of such a product with the world’s largest asset library makes Animaker very unique and different from its competitors. Content writers and marketers have till date been using text and writing predominantly to capture the target segment. “But there has been a huge shift in video based content marketing over the last three years where all the content makers want to create videos but do not have the time or mindset to get trained in professional tools available in the market which are creative, feature rich yet very complex to learn and apply,” he mentions.
Animaker’s Experiential Feedback System keeps feeding in live user experience narrations and futuristic thoughts to tune the product building in line with the solution that could excite users on a continuous basis. “We have always been at least three years ahead of our competition. Deep innovation, right tools and Future prediction result in the uniqueness of Animaker,” he says.
With the current user base at four million globally, the company targets to reach 20 million users in the next 18 months.
Timeline on the growth of subscribers:
Starting Sep 2014
0 – 0.5 million users – in 18 months
0.5 to 1.5 million users – in the next 18 months
1.5 to 2.5 million users – in the next 12 months
As on June 2019 – 4 million users globally
“Our mission is to help 100 m users around the world create stunning visual stories. And as a product company, we are highly innovation driven. So when we scale up to 20 m or 100 m, unlike services companies that scale the size, we will be carefully curating our hiring process with very specific additions and focus more on the efficiency. The growth rate has been very consistent right from the beta launch at 2X quarter on quarter,” states Raghavan.
Among the many awards and recognitions the company has received since inception is CII Startupreneurs Award / Best Startup in the IT/ITES Category (2014); TNW Europe – Animaker was declared as one of the top 75 Startups in Asia (2015); and of course when Team Animaker was invited to meet the President of India, Pranab Mukherjee, for its excellence in the creative industry (in 2016).
