InVideo founder’s foray into video-making resulted from a personal challenge he faced with ‘too much repetition’ non-fiction books. After product market fit challenges, InVideo today is enabling high-quality video creation which among many things have helped a former Aerosmith band member create a mental health video that potentially saved a life.

Sanket Shah’s journey of founding InVideo is a story of unresolved challenges and his natural tendency to hustle. With a background in electrical engineering, Shah’s entrepreneurial spirit led him down an unexpected path. “I was constantly pulled towards different things and I really truly enjoyed it.” One of these turned out to be converting nonfiction books into 10 minute video summaries.

Sanket Shah

This was borne out of a challenge he himself faced as a student when a professor told his class to read a non-fiction book. ‘Excited’ to finish the book in one-night, he found himself instead conceptualizing the idea of creating a 10-minute reel from it.

And this was how Sanket got started, and he received a USD35,000 grant from the University of Michigan to pursue this as an endeavour and as a business which was aptly named Visify Books.

The creative process

Having built a team of eight and producing 3 books, Visify Books encountered problems with economies of scale. After his last company, Mass Blurb, got acquired in 2016, Sanket stayed on as a director before leaving to create InVideo,

He simply found himself drawn back to the problem of video creation. “I don’t think I have closure from that business,” he said. “I wanted to do something that makes video creation easy primarily because the whole reason Visify Books did not work was due to the process of video creation being very, very large.”

At that time, it took his team about five months to create videos for 3 books. “We were very slow,” he reminisced.

Adapting to challenges

“Product market fit is like black magic,” Sanket said of the biggest challenge that any business would face, especially in their early days.

“It’s something the founder does, and you either get it or you don’t. It can’t be taught, it can’t be trained. The best you can do is brainstorm on the topic. And those were the tough days (we faced).”

“Which is why we also use, say, a Stripe-powered checkout page, because we do not want to build even the payment page. We can just plug and play Stripe, because we only want to focus on the quality of the video.”

InVideo’s first break came in 2017 when Facebook started paying a lot to have newsrooms upload video content. In essence, if you uploaded x hours of content, Facebook would give you a ‘minimum guarantee.’

In this way, which Sanket described as “Facebook switching to video content very classically”, InVideo signed multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars of contracts.

But this did not last for long. Facebook discontinued this practice in late 2018 and InVideo had to adapt and changed its target audience from enterprise to prosumer. Sanket explained, “This is essentially selling to everyone and whoever who wants a high-quality video, whether in the free tier or paid tier.

“And that is exactly when we started working with Stripe.”

The Double A Approach: AI and Anti-Timeline

Breaking away from timelines, InVideo has reimagined the editing process. “We are completely anti-timeline,” Sanket stated, referring to the conventional stacked approach in video editing software.

Instead, InVideo leverages AI that can create videos without requiring users to manually arrange elements on the timeline.

Screenshot from https://invideo.io/studio

InVideo’s AI can understand the content and automatically arrange the various elements for the user, which makes the software very accessible and efficient for a broader target audience – creators who may not have strong video editing skills.

Screenshot from https://invideo.io/studio

Sanket quipped, it is almost functioning like a director that understands what users are saying and creates the video for them.

The advent of advanced AI technologies has been a turning point for InVideo. “For the first time in my life, primarily because of AI, I think that the problem that we set out to solve is most likely going to get solved,” Shah enthused.

This optimism is backed by impressive numbers – over 6 million videos created on InVideo in just 30 days, with users spanning 190 countries and over 150,000 of them are paid customers.

Building a culture of rigorous innovation

InVideo’s approach to hiring and building its team is as unconventional as its product. Sanket has implemented a unique hiring process that includes a paid week-long trial for potential employees that get past the initial two interviews. “We pay people for a week and make them work from our office for a week, and that’s really the interview,” he revealed.

This process is designed for candidates to go through the rigor required when making a decision to spend four to five years of their life with a startup. “You might as well get it right, because if you don’t then there’s a lot at stake.”

“We like to have that little bit of a fight,” Shah noted.”What we realized is that saying yes is very motivating in the short-term. But, when you fight and as the room gets uncomfortable, the best things start to come out. When there is an argument and a question, you start going deeper and pushing yourself to do better.”

“We like to have that little bit of a fight.”

Sanket has discovered that this is how the candidates will start to show themselves as being the right fit with the company.

Undimmed north star

As InVideo continues to grow, its focus remains firmly on its core mission. “Our True North Star is to continuously improve the quality of the video,” Sanket also asserted, implying that all their resources would be towards that and only that.

“Which is why we also use, say, a Stripe-powered checkout page, because we do not want to build even the payment page. We can just plug and play Stripe, because we only want to focus on the quality of the video.”

There would be new features also, of course, and Sanket alluded to an upcoming avatar creation capability.

InVideo had set out to solve the core problem they see in the market today – easy creation of high-quality videos for anyone and everyone.,” he shared, also saying that he hoped to be able to achieve 60% of what they aim for, in the next 3 to 5 years.

“If you take care of that, every other thing like revenue will take care of itself.”

“I think we are 10% done,” the founder had also said, tantalizingly implying that the most exciting chapters in InVideo’s story – and in the broader narrative of AI-powered creativity – are yet to be written.