According to Mary Meeker from Silicon Valley VC firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, video accounted for 64 percent of consumer Internet traffic and 55 percent of mobile traffic in 2014. One might reason that Powtoon’s growth parallels that of internet video. ‘We raised initial funds from Kima Ventures, and then the next round of investment we never used,’ Spitalnik says. Now with 50 people globally Powtoon is a profitable, almost entirely bootstrapped company. Nancy Duarte on the importance of storytelling. ‘A manager is constantly trying to persuade, contrasting where their team is today versus where they want them to be.’ Perhaps then it’s no surprise that Powtoon’s client list now includes Fortune 500 companies such as Starbucks, Cisco and Pfizer.
‘Even if you’re a middle manager delivering financials to your department in slides, you’re telling a story,’ insists Duarte.
#Powtoon animation figure professional
Not only have these free webinars garnered the attention of thousands of people, but viewers attend for professional reasons. Part of the way that Powtoon helps its customers to tell their stories is through weekly webinars, during which marketing team members Ari Sherbill and Nirel Matsil delve into what makes for good storytelling by examining public speeches, successful ad campaigns, and effective Powtooning. With a simple scriptwriting guide, Powtooners draft their narrative before they delve into the visuals and soundtrack, which is important because as TED Presentation expert, Nancy Duarte, explains, ‘The way ideas are most effectively conveyed is through story.’ And you can’t tell a story through graphics alone. In their many tutorials (in multiple languages), Powtoon encourages its users to first write down their story. It took six months to develop the first version, which he insisted ‘had to be as simple and as familiar as Powerpoint.’ ‘We had so much yelling from our neighbours, we put up a temporary wall to block out the noise,’ Spitalnik recalls. Before the days of WeWork and Mindworks, coworking spaces operated more along the lines of tenement buildings landlords packed as many small businesses into a fluorescent lit room with plastic chairs and poor acoustics. Spitalnik, Zaturansky, Chief Animator Oren Mashkovski, and Chief Developer Sven Hoffmann began working on a beta product in a shared office space, a fraction of the size of their current premises opposite the Tel Aviv Cinematheque. So rather than churn out videos like a production company, Powtoon would offer a suite creative tools to bring what the company calls ‘awesomeness to presentations.’
But it’s not because people lack creativity that presentations are uninspired. ‘We naturally let our guard down when watching cartoons and our minds accept the messages they convey with far less criticism or defensive attitudes.’ The suspension of disbelief inherent in cartoons is the ‘special sauce’ missing from boring presentations, he reasons. ‘Ever since childhood, we’ve been conditioned to love cartoons, and associate them with fun harmless entertainment, rather than business or sales language,’ says Spitalnik.
#Powtoon animation figure series
Remember Schoolhouse Rock!? The Saturday morning cartoon series taught children about maths, science, and grammar. ‘So the idea sat on my imaginary this-product-will-surely-exist-soon shelf.’ When old time friend Zaturansky said that he wanted to start an animation studio to undercut expensive production companies, the imaginary product came to life: cartoons could communicate. But Spitalnik did not have the time or expertise to work on such a project.
For early stage startups that need initial traction, those costs are simply too high.Īt the time, Spitalnik thought of building a program so that the companies he was advising could make short video clips in the same way that they made Powerpoint presentations for investors. There are also time costs: most professional videos take between two to three months to complete.
Videos like this one were precisely the reason that Ilya Spitalnik and Daniel Zaturansky teamed up to create Powtoon three years ago.Īt the time, Spitalnik was consulting for startups and realised that ‘there was no way we could explain the product in a 90 sec clip without spending upwards of $10,000.’ That figure refers to the cost of video production, which for explainer videos, runs somewhere between $5,000 – $10,000 per minute.
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