Marketing is a high stakes game of chess – for every startup. And in this case – video would be the queen. Why the queen, you ask? Because it’s powerful, but only effective when moved with intent.
With this blog, we are gathering our wealth of experience over the past 7 years, when we helped over 500+ companies in SaaS, AI and Tech navigate the video battlefield – with more than 1000+ assets of different scale and scope delivered.
Based on that, we are sharing our top 5 challenges that startups usually face in their video marketing, including real examples, tips from the pros (that would be us) – and of course – battle tested fixes.
1. “We Don’t Know What to Say” → Message Before Motion
Founders would love to say everything, all at once – but as opposed to a movie, you normally don’t have the luxury of having that much attention from potential customers.
The final result is not a 5 minute video – but a much more manageable, 90 second video that saw a 39 percent boost in time on page – within just weeks of being posted and used.
Instead of “spraying and praying” the customer’s pain points, try to identify the pain point that your potential customers wake up in cold sweat in the middle of the night, and start thinking about implementing it as a foundation of your video.
2. “We’ll Do It In-House” → The Burnout Trap
Startups often try to save budget by looking to do the video in-house. Sometimes, that falls on the shoulders of design, marketing or even dev teams – which usually don’t have neither pedigree nor time to create an effective video.
Then, when that didn’t work – they started working with freelancers. They burned through a couple of people, and a bunch of cash, and manpower spent on babysitting them.
In 1 month, thousands spent – and thousands more spent in sheer time that it took for the internal teams to handle the back and forths, and other details that are normally handled by video production companies.
Now, they were back at square one – talking about creating that video with us.
Here’s a mindset shift: cheaper options are ALWAYS more expensive. But if the price you pay is not upfront, or clearly outlined, it’s less obvious and more insidious. Imagine a CMO, director of marketing spending 20 hours of calls just to explain an idea, 20 hours on edits, 20 hours on feedback, and 20 hours being frustrated that their feedback is not understood.
That’s all of the hours that are taken away from actually spending on strategy and revenue generating activities.
Moreover – most likely a process like that won’t yield a great video – so you are also missing out on investors, and potential customers that won’t be engaged by a poorly made video.
All of this is a cost for DIYing or creating a video with an inexperienced and cheap freelancer.
3. “Let’s Just Make One Video” → One and Done = One Too Few
Startups often think that a well placed, single video can solve all of their marketing challenges – but it’s not correct, and here’s why.
But while doing discovery, and having deeper conversations with them – we figured out that they are looking to plug all of the marketing holes with just a single video – which frankly wouldn’t work for them.
Actually – the more videos assets you create, the cheaper the assets become, and more impact you have throughout the funnel. Of course, a single video won’t do magic things and single handedly resolve all of your marketing issues – but when you start layering and stacking up all of those percentages and incremental improvements – you now have a 3-4x improvement across the board.
That’s why with giants like Slack, Click Up, Grammarly – we see hundreds of videos within their funnels, all strategized and created for their unique and individual layers.
But hey – we know that marketing spend is tough these days, that’s why we offer effective and on budget solutions – not every video has to be niche defining, but it should be solid.
4. “Our Product Is Too Complex” → Complexity is Your Advantage
Founders worry that their products are too complex to show in the video.
When we were creating an explainer video for AgentGo – we were looking to create an emotion, a feeling of overwhelm that long, technical set ups and intricacies of FB ads creates for real estate agents. This was then replicated in an extremely punchy and relevant video – that served to both engage, and then educate users about the product.
Use metaphors – both visual and narrative – to explain complexities. Instead of “AI based machine learning pipeline” – you can help your users and just say “a smart assistant that learns on the job”.
Always remember: at the end of the day, you are using your marketing to influence real people.
5. “We Don’t Have Budget for This” → Think ROI, Not Cost
Startups often look at videos and see them as “nice to have” – not as a revenue tool. That’s a strange mindset – because they don’t seem to think so about having a functioning website or a landing page.
We understand where this comes from – and we often try to change the perspective. People thought the same about having a website – after all, why create some strange, fringe online thing if all people do nowadays is just read newspapers and watch TV…
Of course, most of them are most likely out of business now…
Video is the logical continuation, an extension and the next step in the online presence evolution. Boosting your SEO, improving conversions – and generally giving your prospects something to do on your website.
A great question to ask for your marketing efforts: what’s the cost of not being understood? Is it as small as people bouncing, having a confused customer – or as fatal to a business as missing a deal, and a competitor getting their hands on the customer?
Is that a risk you are willing to take?
Which Video Type Actually Solves Which Challenge
One question we hear often after walking through these challenges: “OK — so where do we start?” With explainers, demos, testimonials, and ads all on the table, the options can feel paralyzing. The short answer is that the challenge you’re facing should dictate the format you choose.
- If your problem is message clarity (Challenge 1): An explainer video is the right starting point. Its entire purpose is distilling a complex value proposition into something a first-time viewer understands in under two minutes.
- If your problem is internal bandwidth (Challenge 2): One professionally produced explainer or product overview that you commission once and reuse everywhere will always deliver more than the cumulative hours your dev or design team sinks into a screen recording that nobody watches twice.
- If your problem is funnel coverage (Challenge 3): Think in sequences — an explainer for awareness, a walkthrough or demo video for consideration, and a testimonial or case study video for conversion. These don’t need to be built at once. They need to be planned as a system.
- If your problem is product complexity (Challenge 4): Animated explainer videos give you creative freedom that a screen recording never can — metaphor, visual storytelling, and controlled pacing all working together to make the complex feel obvious.
- If your problem is budget justification (Challenge 5): Start with one strategic hero video, then build a cutdown pack from it. One 90-second explainer becomes a LinkedIn ad, a YouTube pre-roll, a sales email GIF, and a pitch deck opener. You’re not buying a single video — you’re buying a content system.
- If your problem is distribution (Challenge 6): Prioritize formats that are natively reusable — short-form cuts, captioned versions, and platform-specific adaptations built into the original brief.
Where to Start When Every Challenge Feels Relevant
Reading through six challenges when you’re a founding team of five can feel like a lot. Most startups are dealing with more than one of these simultaneously, which is exactly why the instinct to “just figure it out later” is so tempting.
The founders we see move fastest share one habit: they resist solving everything at once. Instead, they ask a single honest question — where is the biggest gap between what we need to communicate and what our current marketing actually communicates?
That gap is where your first video lives. Fix that one thing. Build from there.
It’s good to start with a system – but you can also start small. Use a modular video approach – like starting with a strategic explainer. Then, you can expand into the demo video, or just use cutdowns from the video across your funnel.
The added benefit is you can also share these assets across your marketing and sales teams – and plug them into every deck, pitch, ad test and email funnels for improved efficiency.
So if you are a startup – that’s looking to go from “We need a video” to having a scalable system – you can reach out and start that conversation with us!
