Thoughts on Rocketium's journey

I shared this in November 2018 with AR startup Scapic for an entrepreneurship e-book.

Rocketium and its purpose

Videos are a great way to communicate an idea, inspire action, or tell a story. However, creating a video is a complex and time-consuming process that requires trained professionals, expensive hardware, and several hours. Rocketium simplifies and speeds up video creation so anyone with a web browser can create a video in minutes. Our vision is to transform digital content from plain text and images to visual and dynamic video content.

Motivation to start up

The idea for Rocketium started from a very personal need to make it easy for lazy people (like me!) to become better. I used to spend a lot of time playing video games, especially The Sims. The successful and happy characters I created in the game made me realise that all it takes is building skills through continuous improvement. We created Rocketium the product to enable anyone to create inspirational and educational content that can help others become better. The reason to build Rocketium the company was to create the type of enduring organisation I would want to work for, where every team member learns and grows.

Why now?

Video is ubiquitous and every report, industry expert, and technology company talks about the dominance of video - 80% of the world’s Internet bandwidth is used by video, 90 minutes of our day is spent watching videos, and $32B will be spent this year on video advertising.

Despite this enthusiasm, we are still in the early days of video. Even today, we consume 12 times more text online than video. Businesses spend 6 times more on text and image ads than video ads. 88% of commerce and listing websites only have images and text but no videos. The pattern is clear - Internet users want to consume video but businesses are not able to keep up and scale their video capabilities.

Consumer interest in video is driven by a variety of factors - we spend 5 hours a day on mobile devices where watching a video is easier than reading, wireless and cellular speeds are doubling and costs are halving every 2 years making high-bandwidth video consumption feasible for almost everyone, and we are more comfortable with visual and short-form content thanks to GIFs and social media.

The early days of online video were dominated by media companies and social-first brands who carried over their existing skills of storyboarding, content, and styling. Many businesses lacked such specialised skills and, hence, did not adopt video as a storytelling and communication format. Today, with the rise of short-form videos, video consumption on messaging platforms, and the growth of Stories and vertical videos, businesses want to convert existing text and images to short videos. They want to use such videos wherever they use text and images today - websites, apps, emails, newsletters, advertising. The shift in mindset is that instead of thinking of video as a completely new medium with its own learning curve, businesses now want to transform their existing digital content into video.

Our journey so far

We started Rocketium in 2015 as a gaming company. We built the product for 6 months, after which we validated the need with users. We quickly learned that the concept itself was too difficult for users to understand. We quickly adapted the product to a rich and visual slideshow creator. When we spoke with customers about this product, we learned that they have a big need for quick but professional video creation. We responded and changed our business from a consumer-focused slideshow creator to business-focused video software.

Today, we serve 80,000 businesses from 40 countries. 13 multi-billion dollar companies are our paying customers and they include everything from IT companies, TV broadcasters, newspapers, insurance giants, and software startups. We are proud to serve several nonprofits, educational institutions, small business owners, and government organisations too.

Measuring success

We build world-class software products that are used by customers around the world. We are at the early stages of what can become a successful organisation. A successful organisation is not just one that solves customer problems and delivers a great service. A successful organisation is one that keeps innovating and adapting to customer needs. If Rocketium has to be successful, we cannot do this by sticking to our current products, technology, or customer segments. We cannot do this by limiting ourselves to what we know and what we are comfortable doing. We cannot do this if our team does not learn and grow.

Our ultimate measure of success is the number of entrepreneurs we create. In the process of building Rocketium, we want every team member to know how to build delightful products and offer service that we ourselves expect. This, coupled with the success they create at Rocketium, should equip them to start successful organisations themselves.

Next 5 years

Just like our vision for the rest of our team members, my goal is to make my learning and growth compound. Five years ago, I was a software developer and I was good at building software, working in a team, and managing my personal activities. Today, as a startup founder, I am good at creating a vision, building teams, setting goals for my team, delivering business results, and helping individuals succeed at their professional goals.

In the next five years, I want to lay the foundation to make Rocketium an enduring business by scaling myself and my team - attracting and retaining top industry talent, delivering products that use cutting-edge technology, solving new business-critical problems, building an ecosystem of partners, growing the business through mergers and acquisitions, and establishing our thought leadership. Many of these include personal goals but purely personal goals are - creating a brand through my ideas and work, developing a community of entrepreneurs, working with government bodies on innovation and entrepreneurship, and building my knowledge of public policy.