CrazyLeaf Editorial Today we got to sit down and interview the folks at Showbox. Showbox allows you to amazing videos right in your browser They shot up the ranks at Product Hunt earlier this year. Showbox allows anybody to create studio-quality video content.
1. What is the elevator pitch for Showbox?
Today, digital publishers and brands must produce high-quality video content at scale without compromising on brand integrity. Showbox’s video production cloud platform enables this by revolutionizing the production of studio quality short-form video, making storytelling a simple, safe, scalable and cost effective process that can be managed in-house. Using Showbox, brands and publishers alike can instantly begin scaling branded video creation, influencer marketing campaigns, and fan engagement activities.
2. How did you come up with the idea for Showbox?
Showbox’s founders, Effi Atad and Tomer Afek, are both seasoned film executives and entrepreneurs. Working in the filmmaking industry for years, Effi had a vision of democratizing the movie creation process, using a simple online solution. Updating this vision to the current market need, Showbox was created to enable brands and creators to produce high-quality, short form video at scale in a matter of minutes, and with no production experience or special equipment required.
3. How long have you been working on building Showbox?
We’ve been working on Showbox for the last 3 years
4. Where is your team based?
Our HQ is based in Tel-Aviv, Israel, with representatives in the US and the UK.
5. Who do you see as your target audience?
We have recognized our main target market as brands. Within brands, the marketing and content creation teams are typically looking to scale their video creation abilities while on a budget, so Showbox is a relevant fit- enabling them to create branded video easily, using their communities, influencers, or even on their own.
6. Did you expect the reception you got on Product Hunt?
No 🙂 We we’re hoping to get noticed but did not expect to top the daily and weekly charts, excited to have gotten the community’s seal of approval after all the hard work.
7. What was technically the most challenging part of developing Showbox?
Overall it’s been quite a hard task at hand! There’s a LOT of technology behind the scenes at Showbox, ranging from dealing with huge video files in the cloud, to automating the creative process of filmmaking, and to using machine learning to separate a person from their background (without using a green-screen!), and more…
So combining all these different technologies, each on its own being quite complex, while making the experience seamless and enjoyable, has been quite challenging. But if I have to pin-point one single challenge, I must say the virtual background removal. We’ve spent countless hours on building this system that knows how to scan a room and recognize what’s in the room so that we can remove the background and place the person inside any virtual environment, all without a green-screen.
When you see that in action it’s quite spectacular 🙂
8. How long did it take to build the MVP for the product?
It took about 11 months to build a first working version. Like I mentioned above, there is quite a lot of technology in Showbox so it did take a while, and I can now admit that even after 11 months the first version was quite crappy 🙂
9. What technologies did you use to build your product?
That would be quite a long list. So to keep it short, we are basically an open source shop, the major components are built on node.js, MongoDB, Linux, etc…
10.Building a community isn’t easy, what are you doing to get people to buy into the idea?
As a a toolbox for marketers, we strongly feel that everything we do that is under the marketing umbrella, should use our own solution. Besides streamlining our own marketing efforts, this strategy helps us demonstrate our solution in the most comprehensive, yet easy to understand way. For example, check out our own product showreel, created using the Showbox platform.
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