2022 in Review – Challenges, Opportunities, and a Bit of Everything

Little detours, experiments with features, finding new use cases, exploring new markets, and investor meetings — a lot can happen in a year in a startup environment. It was the same scenario at Hippo Video.

Like every other growing startup, Hippo Video has entered the year 2022 amid the looming shadows of a predicted market slowdown that turned out to be the showdown of an economic downturn. 

While we are positive about our performance and what we have achieved in 2022, it was anything but not a smooth ride. 

A Challenging But Positive 2022

During the end of 2021, we started striding carefully, analyzed every challenge, put our foot down to face it, and grabbed every opportunity at the mere sight of it. 

2022 was also the year when the new horizons were explored, new use cases were tested, and the feature portfolio was expanded. 

The new logos in our customer portfolio that include Fortune 500 companies has shown our enterprise readiness.

Videos – The Game changer for GTM Teams

Hippo Video has succeeded in making businesses believe in the power of videos in their sales, marketing, and support functions. 

The ease of use of our features has helped the sales, support, marketing, and communication teams realize the value they get from videos.

We have observed GTM teams doubling their pipeline while keeping the exact headcount and marketing budget—this is the innate quality or sign of a mission-critical software product transition.

And we’ve seen Hippo Video become that by convincing people that videos are the only way to instill trust, authenticity, and, most importantly, the “human” factor in an otherwise robotic and tone-deaf environment between sellers and buyers.

The wave of video adoption for different use cases was fuelled by the post-pandemic environment but sustained by the true value it can add.

However, customer-facing teams struggled to scale video creation, personalization, and distribution as they were time-consuming and took a lot of effort and resources. It led to a video scalability challenge.

The Scalability Challenge

We have observed sales teams being selective in their video creation efforts and restricting their video outreach to only a few touch points and high-end deals, despite the evident results driven by videos. 

It was understandable, considering the time and effort involved in making sales videos. Only if there was a way around it. There is! 

Video Scalability Driven by AI and Automation

Hippo Video has made video creation at scale easier than typing an email by introducing features like Video Workflows, Humanize AI, AI Editor, Teleprompter, Customized Sales Pages, and Video Interactive Elements in 2022. 

These features have solved video scalability issues and adoption challenges faced by sales teams. 

Not to mention significantly reducing the time and effort required to create hyper-personalized videos. To put it into perspective, create 100s of hyper-personalized videos in the time it takes to create 1. 

• Create Videos at Scale – Pre-built video flows to help you reuse pre-made videos in your library, contextualize and send at scale for each use case and touch-points.

• Send Hyper-personalized Videos at Scale – AI-powered video creation to help teams create 100s of hyper-personalized videos at scale.

• Interactive Video Elements – With the ease of including interactive elements like CTAs, meeting links, and forms, sales teams can increase their meetings by 2X.

• Increased Video Adoption – By making the platform feature-loaded and easy to use, Hippo Video has succeeded in enabling users to create videos that enhance viewer engagement.

That’s how we went on to become the Momentum Leader, Category Leader, and High Performer in Winter, Summer, and Fall reports released by G2.

Taking the Road Less Traveled

The year 2022 turned out to be a litmus test for startups of many categories, and I feel it’s a good thing that happened. 

It revealed the ground reality of the market that just experienced a digital revolution triggered by the pandemic. 

The past two years have transformed video for business platforms from a nice-to-have product to a mission-critical product that drives enormous value. And, I am glad Hippo Video is leading the transition. 

The year 2022 has also revealed that the bling of trends is temporary and only the product that shows real value, increases user adoption and solves scalability can stand the test of time. 

Hippo Video has addressed these challenges helping the sales, support, and marketing teams of Mid-market and Enterprise companies from the Fortune 500s. 

The Future Ahead

Amid the scare of economic downturn and halted funding, 2023 will be even more challenging. But we believe every challenge is an opportunity in disguise if you are prepared enough. We are!  

With new aspirations in mind and increased motivation, we, as a team, are welcoming the new year with new goals and dreams.

And I wish you all a very happy and prosperous new year!