How you can create engaging webinars in less than 60 seconds
About Univid
Jonathan: Univid is a webinar platform where you can create more engaging webinars in less than 60 seconds. Essentially, we are solving a problem for marketers, usually pretty stressed out, and having things on their desks and allowing them to kind of focus on the things that matter in terms of hosting a webinar. We want to focus on the content, and engaging the audience, instead of having to spend a lot of time setting up and configuring a really complex, large system and working with that part.
Features of Univid
Jonathan: In terms of engagement, we work a lot with live reactions in a pretty fun way. We get nice direct feedback from your audience, not just having to talk into a black box, not knowing who is there, and also for the audience. That is a really nice feature because it’s pretty simple, but it creates a really nice flow, and our way of doing it has been pretty effective. And also, we have a nice way to design your sessions. In terms of graphical setup, you can drag and drop, make it look pretty, have your colors, logos, and so on. That doesn’t take a lot of time, and it is your brand across the experience, from reminders to sessions and so forth.
What is the process of creating a webinar?
Jonathan: Typically, you set up a session in the platform, then you get to customize the branding and the design that fits your liking. Maybe you add some speakers, some agenda, or text, and then it goes through the registration page and all the reminders, which you can also set up. If you work with some integrations, you can also configure that, but then you’re pretty much ready. You can choose between some features in terms of engagement, like some Q&A polls, if you want an open chat and more. You can choose the features you like and then just have some pre-call like you typically do before you go live and then go live with your guest speakers.
What are our current integrations?
Jonathan: Regarding integrations, we’re primarily working with CRM integrations. We have a native HubSpot integration, and we’re also looking into a Zapier one going forward, but right now, it’s HubSpot.
What is the pricing for Univid?
Jonathan: Typically, it’s based on the number of attendees per webinar, but we also have a freemium offer. We try to work a lot of PLG with the product in focus. You can test it out for free with up to 10 people in the session. And then you can get started at 250 euros for 300 participants. Then we have some steps up from that.
Univid featured use cases
Jonathan: The typical use case is probably lead generation or somewhere in the sales funnel. There is also a thought leadership case where you just want to educate people, where you can work with some typically call-to-action buttons, like downloading an e-book. That’s maybe your conversion in that sense. And you really want to educate and put your brand out there for the right people.
But then you also have some use cases further down the funnel where you really want to book a demo and have that as a call to action and drive more direct calls to action. Then we also see this on the customer success side because these are the first ones that are marketing related typically. Still, we also have the customer success side of things, where you typically want to educate your customers, make onboarding more effective, and so on.
How competitive is the webinar software space?
Jonathan: I would say it’s not a blue ocean market for sure, there are competitors out there. I think for us, it’s a lot about how you penetrate that and push your product out to make people see it. That’s been some things we’ve been working a lot with because we are quite confident. We have a really easy-to-use and good product, but the problem is getting it out to many people. I think we’re working a lot on positioning ourselves and making people realize how easy it is. That’s a lot also about this premium side of things that you can actually go and test it out for yourself.
Would you say marketing has been your biggest challenge?
Jonathan: I think we’re being pretty good on the product side. We’ve been super customer oriented from the start, and we actually started out in the ethics space building a product for live-streaming lectures back pre-pandemic in 2019. Then we got some attention from event firms and production companies when kind of covid hit. And we realized that this has a huge potential in terms of private companies who want to create more engaging experiences also. Then we worked with some really big brands early on. We realized that big companies want this, and this is something we should do, so we went in this direction. We worked a lot with big events, big kickoffs, and everything you could imagine digitally live streaming. Took a lot of learnings from that and brought that into the webinar space where you work yourself in the system and not just have someone configure it for you.
Building the team and raising funds
Jonathan: We raised some funds early last year, a pre-seed round of 800K euros. That helped us grow to the next level, bootstrapping from being two people. Now we’re five people full-time, and we’ve expanded the team a lot during last year, and it really built a good foundation to grow from. The last weeks have been pretty intense. It’s still a bit up and down in terms of inbound traffic, but I would say we’ve seen pretty interesting stuff. Last month has probably been our best month. That’s been really interesting in terms of things starting to kick in in terms of network effects, referrals and word of mouth, and so on.
We’ve been working on being super customer oriented from the start and really like leveraging that now. We’ve been doing it quietly, and we are doing it a lot still. It’s really listening to a lot of the customers, following up after webinars together with the customers, and really developing the product with them. That’s been kind of helping us to get really good referrals. If you host partner webinars, they suggest our product to their partners, and it suddenly becomes a snowball. And then we have been working a lot with SEO in terms of inbound, and I think that’s starting to kick in now when we host many events and webinars on the platform. It kind of becomes machinery, so it’s pretty cool to see kind of the effect of that.
What’s your main vision for Univid?
Jonathan: There are a lot of boring webinars out there, and we want to spice things up and create fun experiences and allow people to create fun experiences to essentially allow anyone to create a fun webinar where you can shoot out farm poles that look good that have your live reactions, your Q&A, and it doesn’t become a one-way communication. That’s a lot about what we want to achieve.
What is your story, Jonathan?
Jonathan: My co-founder Eric and I was classmates at the engineering university in Sweden. We worked on many different projects, did some project courses in Kenya, and realized we both had a passion for startups and hacking stuff together. I think that’s where we grew this idea from. And then We started when we were still students in 2019, graduated in 2020, worked hard bootstrapping for a few years, and brought on funding at the beginning of last year.
One thing I wish I knew relates to the growth side of things and thinking really carefully about your go to market and how you will grow stuff, but also start to work on that, not before you have your product ready. Think about it a lot before and really push that as much as the product because we have the engineering background in some sense, and we came out of the incubator at our technical university. We built a great product but thought too little about the growth. I think that’s been something we have been working a lot with since, and that’s something you should start to think about really early on.
What’s your favorite software apart from Univid?
Jonathan: It relates back to the marketing strategy we’ve been working on, and for us, using SEO software has been really useful for us. I’ve been working a lot on weekends and evenings, particularly with Semrush, which has been really helpful and something I use daily.
