Doing a video effects app – the Asian way

Is there such a thing as doing a startup the ‘Asian way’? If you’re Ali Kurtze, the Singapore-based founder of startup Basilo Labs which just launched its video effects app Snapclip, it’s a resounding yes.

Doing a startup in Asia – and we’re using that term broadly, while excluding the market-specific quirks of places like China and India – brings constraints. The venture capital industry is tiny, and investors are revenue-first rather than growth-oriented. This means founders are forced to think about their revenue models early, instead of entering the VC circus with a minimum viable product and playing investors off one another.

Snapclip, therefore, has to become a totally different beast from western competitors like Replay, Flipagram, Magisto, and Animoto.

Instead of catering only to consumers, the app is designed as a marketing vehicle for brands. In essence, it will make money from selling premium video effects as well as branded content.

With the football World Cup coming, users could conceivably create a video of themselves supporting their favorite team, replete with Brazil-themed effects and their names on a jersey.

Brands could find such marketing method novel since they can now get consumers in places previously thought uncrackable.

“This is advertising for generation chat,” says Kurtze, a former web developer. “The problem with chat apps now is that they are doors without a knob. Brands can’t advertise on chat, and users don’t want to see ads.”

By creating branded content that consumers will actually want to use, Kurtze hopes to lessen the divide between advertisers and users. It’s kinda like how chat apps Line and WeChat are selling branded stickers to fans who will actually pay for them.

Meanwhile, on the consumer side of the equation, Snapclip provides professional-quality video effects with little effort; users just need to splice and cut footage to their desired length.

There’s also a third element to this business: creatives can create their own effects using Photoshop and AfterEffects, then sell them through Snapclip.

Snapclip has a few not-so-obvious advantages against similar products: the app saves bandwidth by limiting videos to 12 seconds, and that’s godsend for mobile users on postpaid plans with a data cap.

Snapclip also does all the effects rendering in-app, while other services do it in the cloud. That saves a lot of data when uploading and downloading the video.

Finally, Kurtze claims his in-house design team can push themes out from concept to finished product within the same day – a boon for advertisers who want to roll things out fast.

Early bird in Indonesia