Founder EASTWEST PR and Host of the SPEAK|pr Podcast

Alex Redman is the founder of ClipShare, which is a platform designed to tackle a fundamental problem which is, if you're generating long-form video content, how do you drive traffic to that content? You can generate revenue off the back of it through ads or by monetizing actual services or products, and one of the ways you can do that is by chopping up your video into little bits of clips. That's the pertinent point or the real takeaway using ClipShare. You can put a call to action on that and then distribute it far and wide across social media. 

The challenge of video editing is it's often labor-intensive and repetitive, and there's a certain nuance for each platform the content would be posted to. And so, ClipShare takes the pain out of that process and tries to automate as much of it as possible. For just a few hours, all of the content for the week can be scheduled, and it's all based off content that was already produced; it's simply being repurposed through the use of Clipshare's computer programming software. Generally, the content creator knows the piece that they've edited, no doubt for hours and hours or even days, and they will pretty much have a handle on where the good bits are, determining which bit would be best on LinkedIn, on Twitter, on Facebook, on Instagram, etc. At the moment, timestamps in a video are selected manually, but it's not difficult to do. Alex doesn't consider himself be tech-savvy, so he believes that if he can do it, so can anyone else.

The call to action is essentially found in the description box. Users are free to put whatever link they want in the description box and drive the traffic how they see fit. In their future iterations, Alex says there will be drop-down menus and more features to make it even more seamless, because generally, people are driving traffic to only a few repositories, such as to their Youtube channel or website. This tells them their users are focusing on two or three destinations that they want to drive the traffic to, so their goal is to channel it in those directions.

With monolithic industries like Adobe or iMovie plus social media management tools and editing tools like Later, Buffer, Hootsuite, etc., those are becoming large, unwieldy products that generally need quite a bit of skill set and investment in personal learning to get up to speed with some of them. For ClipShare, their premise is to serve the huge underserved part of the market where people don't have time to do that. They believe that while not everyone is an expert on video editing, one can still get 80-90% of the value by just nailing the basics, and that's what ClipShare provides. They combine the best features of a video editor and a social media management tool in terms of scheduling, and they bring those together in a really neat package. Clipshare's current software release does support branding upload, which means the company logo can be added to the video, and they've got a little ClipShare watermark. One of their next releases will hopefully include subtitling, but he says it can be challenging from a technical point of view. Nevertheless, that's what they're working on at the moment. 

Their user base is comprised of mainly YouTube content creators and Twitch streamers, since streaming has gone through the roof in the last couple months for obvious reasons. They're getting some good responses and traction on that side and also from the smaller social media managers that are looking to find an edge. One social media management firm in Manchester told Alex, "This is the tool we've been waiting for. This will allow us to bring social media management back in-house," because it allows them to restore their margins on that piece of work, since it takes so much of the labor element out of it from their side, so that's what that client found compelling. 

If you can use LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook, you can use ClipShare. That's how easy it is to use. It is pitched at the same level of intuitiveness as those platforms, if not easier, according to Alex because, again, a key premise of their tool is people just do not have time to learn these products. They have to just work. And so, part of their offering is to just stay as simple as they can in terms of the user interface. While it may seem intimidating at the start, such as with every new product or gadget that we begin to use, ClipShare has onboarding videos on their website to run you through from start to finish on what their process looks like, and he highly encourages trying it out.

In terms of pricing, they're currently running their Early Adopter Programme, which has a 50% discount across the board for every plan. There's a free plan in perpetuity that has the ClipShare watermark. That's how they monetize it from their side and give you value for free. They also have the monthly paid plan which is £9 on their Early Adopter Program. Their annual plan is simply the exact same thing but paid upfront with a 20% discount. That's equivalent to a tank of petrol in the UK, so that's really nothing. That's what they like to say anyway. But going forward, they will continue collaborating with their users to find out what the right price point is, because the sooner they can build up a revenue from the business side, the more value they can create in terms of launching earlier software iterations. 

ClipShare's user interface is in English, but in terms of the output and files being inputted, and linking those up to your YouTube channel, that can be in any language. In the future, they will be doing a more slick language rollout, but like all these things, they're still strategizing as to when the right time to do it is and which market they should go after first. They will get there eventually, but certainly, no matter where you are in the world, as long as you can speak English, you can use the product.

They're only integrated to Youtube as of the moment, but they're currently working on integrating to other platforms like Vimeo. They're trying to be considerate in terms of how they do the various platform API integrations, the reason being that over the last few months, there's been a lot of major moves in the social media market, like with the big announcement of Joe Rogan's podcast moving over to Spotify, what's happening with TikTok in the US. So, as a third party provider in this space, they've got to be careful which platforms they invest in hooking up to, because from their side, if they put a significant investment in terms of software development and then they're not allowed to access a market because Donald Trump has done something, that's a key risk. That's why at the moment, it's YouTube only or a URL link, and then the desktop file uploader. That package allows them to access majority of users. And then for areas where they're getting more requests, they'll look to prioritize those accounts. If enough people request for Vimeo, they'll bump it up their product innovation roadmap, and they'll get that linked up soon as they can.

In case you were wondering, the "share" function of ClipShare is their take on distribution. Once you've selected the clips you want to share, you click Schedule It, and then you've got a scheduling dashboard, and that tees up those clips. Then, you write your descriptions, you select the platforms you want to distribute them to, you select the time and the date, and then you simply post or schedule it.

Cover Photo from ClipShare