Rashika Jain, Co-Founder at Video Factory

Great Companies: How did you get your idea or concept for the business?

Rashika Jain : I always knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur but I wasn't sure what I wanted to do. The start-up world was very exciting to me, so once I left my corporate job in the quest to find my calling, I started meeting up with a lot of start-ups, attending start-up events and workshops across the country, reading start-up stories, blogs, and so on. For almost 6 months, I had at least 100 different business ideas for my own start-up venture, all noted down in an “Idea Book”. It was very important to me that my venture makes money from the very start. And so while having an idea was interesting, converting it into reality and making money from it wasn’t so easy, so I kept researching. During my interaction with start-ups, one thing that I noticed extensively was how startup founders struggled to communicate their startup ideas. Some were too passionate and kept on talking, some went too deep into the technical aspects so a layman couldn't really understand, while others simply lacked the gift of gab. They were all doing great stuff and knew their work, but a good chunk of these smart founders couldn’t articulate their ideas in a crisp manner and were losing opportunities because of this. I knew that’s the gap I wanted to fill.

This gave rise to Video Factory, a video production company that helped businesses explain their ideas in a crisp, interesting, and simplified manner and enhance the effectiveness of their communication through videos.

We started as a 3 member team, delivering simple animated explainer videos to startups. We got a great initial response and realised there was and is a great demand for videos. And today, we are a team of 25+ members across Kolkata and Bangalore, creating explainer videos, training & e-learning videos, corporate videos, promotional & branding videos, content marketing videos, and more. We have delivered over 1000 videos to 500+ businesses, in 11+ vernacular languages, across 15+ countries. Working with brands like the World Health Organisation, United Nations, Tata group, Ola, Uber, Berger Paints, Times Of India, Bajaj Finserv, GE Healthcare, and many more, has helped us learn at an exponential rate & helped them meet their communication objectives.

Great Companies: What are the various Services provided by Video Factory?

Rashika Jain: We are video specialists providing both animated and live-shoot videos. Our content-driven and result-oriented videos help brands optimise their conversions and visibility.

Hence our services include, but are not limited to: Marketing or Branding Videos - Explainer videos, Promotional & Branding videos, Presentation videos, Product videos, Corporate videos, & Content Marketing videos. Training & E-learning Videos - Mobile-app Tour videos, Orientation videos, Onboarding videos, Technical Skills & Development videos, Warehouse-based & Manufacturing videos, and Soft-skills Development videos.

We create our videos in different styles, such as; Animation - 2D Animation, 3D Animation, Whiteboard Animation, Motion Graphics, and more

Live-shoot

Great Companies: What makes Video Factory different from hundreds of other Video Production Firms?

Rashika Jain: We don’t think we are different from any company that is trying to do their best to meet the needs of the clients. There are lots of companies that are doing very good work and we aspire to do the same. In our quest to serve and do the best for our clients, we are trying to learn every day.

We focus more on the content and do a lot of research on it, instead of just focusing on the design. We don’t promote a brand, we believe in delivering a content-driven and result-oriented video by creating a unique & intriguing story that resonates with a brand’s identity.

Since 2018, we are the only video production company substantially creating training and e-learning videos, especially in the Indian market, and we pride ourselves as a company that masters learning & development content. We have made our internal processes very swift and set them in a very standardized format which makes our client experience really good and also reduces the time in which we deliver our services. We have designed our content and streamlined our processes in such a way that we deliver our service in half the time of the industry’s standards, which helps us reduce our time and effort, thereby reducing costs and passing the benefit to our clients.

Great Companies: What are the struggles and challenges you face?

Rashika Jain: We started creating training & e-learning videos in 2018, but with the sudden influx of the Covid-19 pandemic, the entire world shifted to a ‘Digital’ mode of being, that’s when we played our masterstroke & turned the tables around by getting learning & development content in vogue. We were already on the path to becoming the best training & e-learning video production company in India & Covid-19 acted as an accelerator for us. We can proudly say that with our hard work & innovation behind training & e-learning videos, we managed to turn even the harshest of adversity into an opportunity for ourselves & have successfully worked with UNDP, JSI, WHO, in supporting them with the overhaul of their training from being rigidly offline to training their ASHA/ANM online & communicating vital social reforms schemes digitally through videos. We have even worked closely with both National & International development sectors over the years and voiced the efficacy of several state-initiated novel endeavours like - Vidhwa Pension, State Treatment Fund Pension, Old age Pension, Economic Self-reliance through rural Self-Help Groups, Ration card entitlement, Micro-financing for women alcohol sellers, besides communicating several important messages on farmer training, safe abortion, childbirth, and achieving zero malnutrition.

Another constant challenge that we face is the need for a bigger workforce. We are in a really good space and are doing great work, which is why it’s a struggle to keep up with the demands of the industry because we require more and more people to create the service from start to end and we can’t compromise on the quality. So, hiring and growing the team to meet the demand is a challenge. Since quality is our top-most priority, we have streamlined our processes in such a way that there’s a simpler, easier method to do any work at a given level. So, we can’ just hire anybody, we have to hire the right people and train them in the right way so that they can effectively deliver the promise of our brand.

Great Companies: How do you plan to grow in the future? What does 5 years down the line look like for Video Factory?

Rashika Jain: We want to be the leading training & e-learning video production company in India that helps businesses meet their communication objectives. We have already created videos in more than 11 vernacular languages, all of which have been received very well with the targeted audience, and we want to develop our vernacular language capability even further because we understand that that is the future. And frankly, if you are doing things at the grassroot level and are reaching out to the masses, then companies will need to have content in vernacular languages, and we want to build our capability to be able to assist them in doing so. We are already working with 15-20% of clients outside India; German, Spanish, and Arabic companies. We want to grow our base because our business is such that it doesn’t have any geographical boundaries, so we want to reach out to more people abroad.

Our fundamental goal, something that we have envisioned from the starting, is that we literally want to be a factory. We want to create videos in bulk, daily, while having a set standard for the quality, just like in a factory. We want to churn out videos like a factory, automate our processes, get technology infused into our systems in a way that a lot of the manual work can be automated, while keeping the design, creativity, and the human element intact.

“We go and grow as long as you grow along that infinite ladder of success” - this is the message that we give to our clients and the principle upon which we envision success. When we talk of ourselves as harbingers of new possibilities, we look forward to building one of the best video production teams in the country, working with all kinds of brands, creating the most compelling videos, reiterating remarkable socio-economic impacts, and blooming the knowledge engine in this factory to be the most robust video growth solutions provider in the millenniums to come. This is the future we are working for and we know we will make this possible!

Great Companies: If you had one piece of advice to someone just starting out, what would it be?

Rashika Jain: Find a problem and solve it, even if it’s for a small percentage of people, and do it genuinely. It doesn’t matter whether you are the first-mover or not, what matters is that if you are solving the problem in the right way, with quality product/service, you will succeed. And most importantly, keep your focus on! Many times what happens is we try to do too many things, especially in the initial stage of the business, which is not needed.

What is needed is a lot of focus on the core product and service only. Once that clicks, then you should start focusing on branding, marketing, and the other aspects of your business. In the initial stage you should only be focused on delivering the service, don’t even be bothered about making a fancy office, or spending a lot of money on branding and marketing, or doing a lot of things from day one. Just focus on earning, focus on delivering your core value and getting those initial few clients, because once you start getting results and start earning, it gives you the confidence to do more and you feel you have earned the right to do other things. Then you can grow your team, hire more people, focus on branding, and make a cool office, but initially your focus should only be your core delivery and you have to perfect it. It doesn’t matter whether you are first mover or the last mover, if your product and quality is good and if you have reached out to the market in a very focused and right manner, there are very little chances of you not succeeding. So, first, just let your work speak for itself.