Meet Narek Safaryan founder of Renderforest, a software company that offers a free online slideshow and animated video maker. With this new tool users can create promotional slideshows, business explainer videos and logo animations.
Q: Please tell us a little bit about your company – what is Renderforest all about?
Renderforest is an all-in-one professional video creation platform that helps individuals and businesses create quality videos online for free including various slideshows, family videos, explainer and logo animations, promotional videos, kinetic typography videos, music visualizations and more. Renderforest makes broadcast quality video production available to wide range of users.
Q: Please tell us a little bit about your background and how you started your company?
The idea of the platform was born in 2013. At that time, we were only engaged in producing handcrafted animation videos. We mainly worked with startups and the practice showed that many of them didn’t have enough funds to order corporate animation videos. They had to buy them from the websites selling templates and pay money to a specialist who would turn them into corporate videos. If the budget of the startups was not sufficient to hire a specialist they could try to edit the templates on their own which is a pricey, complicated and time-consuming process. They were also services which did offer online video production, but the quality was not the one, which could be similar to pro explainer videos. The market lacked “the golden mean” which would overlap the two segments. That’s why we decided to create Renderforest early 2013.
Q: What are some of the projects you are working on right now?
We mostly work to make add more and more templates each week, we aim to grow the number to 1 template a day. Currently we’re mostly investing all the sales into company growth. We’re also trying to simplify the editor, so everyone can use it easily.
Q: Quickly describe what an average working day is like for you?
A day starts with motivation to move forward. Each next day should make renderforest better and better. We do our best to achieve that with our work.
Q: What would you say are the top 3 skills needed to be a successful entrepreneur, and why?
Never to give up. Competition for any segment can be tough, but if you come with different approach and find your unique selling point, your company will start to grow so the users and the company can benefit.
Motivation to move forward. You should plan company growth so each day it will be better than yesterday. You should add new features and make the service better each day. That will make your customers happy and keep returning.
Keeping all the customers happy. The most important thing is business is happy customers which affects on company reputation. We’re doing our best to have less and less issues each day, but when we get an unhappy customers, we do our best to satisfy their needs, offering coupons for free HD rendering, even sometimes when the customer experienced 2 bugs in single day, we did a free handcrafted video production worth of $3000. We are just trying to keep everyone happy so both parties will benefit. That’s the main success of the company growth.
Q: What are your plans for the future, how do you plan to grow this company?
We do think we need to have broader templates and stable, easy to use editor. That’s the thing we’re working on it. As of February 1 2016, we do have 130 templates in our collection, but we aim to have 1000s soon, so we can satisfy the demand of any customer.
Q: How are you funded? What is your best advice to entrepreneurs when it comes to raising funds?
Renderforest has been funded by the matching grants competition in 2015 with the support of World Bank, Government of Armenia and the EIF. Currently we’re not looking for investments yet, as company is in active growth stage.
Q: How many users or clients do you currently have, and when do you consider your company a success?
Over 100.000 video projects have been created with Renderforest. We currently have 50.000 users.
Q: What are the top 3 online tools and resources you’re currently using to grow your company?
Q: What is your favourite entrepreneurship quote?
“There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.” – Sam Walton
Q: How can our community get in touch with you?
Anyone can get in touch with us via the contact page here:
- Contact Page: https://www.renderforest.com/contact-us
- Crunchbase: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/renderforest
- AngelList Profile: https://angel.co/renderforest
