We caught up with the brilliant and insightful KYLE SHANNON a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi KYLE, thanks for joining us today. What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?

When YouTube came out in 2005, I had an epiphany that “short form video was going to be A THING.” I didn’t know what that meant, and didn’t know what it would look like, but 1-3 minute videos from anyone with a digital camera felt like something new.
If you are old enough to remember the early days of YouTube, most of the content on it was unwatchable. Since I have a background in storytelling (degree in acting, writer of 7 screenplays, etc.) what I recognized was that the videos were bad because they lacked basic story structure… they didn’t have a Beginning, Middle and End. People were mistaking pressing the record button for storytelling.
I thought, “What if you could create story “frameworks” and provide those to people to make it easy to create a short form video well?” If you could do it for one story type, it would make it easy for ANYONE to tell their story in a powerful way! If you played it right, you could democratize video storytelling! That is the core idea at the center of Storyvine.
in 2006 I started a company called Episodiq Studios where the basic idea was to focus on short-form video content, and “templatize” the show formats so you could scale the production. I was pitching CNN about doing political coverage this way; NASCAR about creating fan-generated driver updates; and I ended up getting hired by New Line Cinema to create entertainment content this way! I was off to the races.
I packed up my very large Mac Pro and a bunch of camera gear and flew to LA. I was in the middle of my first day of filming and I was struck with the same thought over and over again, “OH MY GOD I’VE MADE A TERRIBLE MISTAKE!” (Any Arrested Development fans out there?) I realized that so long as you are filming human beings in person, generating massive video files, and manually editing the content, there is nothing scalable about this idea. So after 18 months trying to get this company off the ground, I shut it down about a month after getting my first job.
It was painful but I definitely learned what business I did NOT want to start. I ended up working for that New Line executive for a number of years after that, but the idea of scaling video storytelling kept haunting me. Nearly 5 years later, I was thinking about the idea and had epiphany number two, “What if you could automate EVERYTHING?”
1. Provide people with storytelling training wheels in the form of prompts that tell them what to say, and let them film themselves,
2. Upload those video files into a database smart enough to know what was in each of the video clips.
3. Automate the editing of the video itself so that a final product is created within MINUTES, not days, or even weeks.
Now mind you, I had NO idea how to do this, or quite frankly if it would even work. But once I had that idea, Storyvine was essentially born, and that’s the system that we have created and built a very successful company around.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

Storyvine is a fully-automated video creation platform that makes it possible to scale video storytelling across large communities, in collaboration with a brand or organization.
The Storyvine Guided Video App makes it easy for end users to tell their story, and within minutes, videos with the polish of professional post-production are delivered. All content is managed from a Web-based dashboard enabling you to quickly create, manage, and share a library of branded videos, and leverage the raw assets that make them up.

Storyvine sits at the intersection of User Generated Content and Professional Grade Video. Think of it as Professional User Generated Video (or ProUGC Video.)

Our clients use Storyvine any time they have to tell the same kinds of things over and over again, such as customer testimonials, patient stories, employee engagement, thought leadership, training videos, and much, much more.

Can you tell us the story behind how you met your business partner?

Monique Elwell and I met through a mutual acquaintance named Jerry Michalski six or seven years before we started Storyvine. We had always hit it off and in 2011 I was working as an advisor for a business that Monique was running and it became clear to me that she had the kind of skills that I lacked.

At about the same time that I was ready to start Storyvine, the business that Monique was running was in the process of shutting down. I reached out to Monique and told her I had this idea about automating video production, and democratizing video storytelling, and that I wondered if she would be interested in starting the company with me. Her reply was that she wasn’t the idea person but she loved taking an idea and turning that into a business. That seemed like a great response.

I don’t think Monique really understood what I was talking about but she did her research and asked 25 people whether she should join Storyvine or another video analytics project. Nearly all of the people said that they would buy Storyvine and even though she still didn’t understand quite what it was it was clear to her that there was something here. She called me back a couple of days later and stated as much and said, “Why not?! Let’s go for it.”

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

In early 2014 we finally secured our first round of funding after bootstrapping for nearly 2 years. I finally got a chance to build the technology I’ve been dreaming about for so many years. We hired a team and built the first version of Storyvine, and I knew that our biggest challenge moving forward would be counting all of the cash from the waterfall of revenue that would flow once we had tech to sell.

We pitched everyone from pharmaceutical companies to large corporations all the way down to air conditioner repair companies in the local market. While people were very enthusiastic about the idea they didn’t necessarily have video strategies or have a sense of how they might use it, so the revenue that I expected never came.

Within nine months of raising funding and hiring a team it was clear we were about to run out of money. Monique and I made the choice to lay off the entire staff, cut our salaries in half and narrow our focus to a single market. That market we chose was healthcare/pharmaceutical marketing, because we had access to that market, we solved a problem that they had, and we learned that the $500 we received from the air conditioner repair company meant more to them—and was harder to collect—than the $80,000 we got from our first Pharma client.

The next 18 months were incredibly tough and we struggled & scraped to survive and to establish Storyvine as a trusted resource. My ego had taken a huge hit and every morning for most of that year and a half, I woke up not wanting to continue. But I knew that if I didn’t show up for work Storyvine would cease to exist.

So every morning, against my better judgment I would get out of bed, get in the car and drive to Monique’s house to continue our fight to survive. It was one of the toughest times of my personal and professional career but in the end we got through it and came out the other side successfully established in the category we chose and Storyvine survived.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.storyvine.com
• Instagram: @StoryvineInc https://www.instagram.com/storyvineinc/
• Facebook:@StoryvineInc https://www.facebook.com/Storyvineinc
• Linkedin: @StoryvineInc https://www.linkedin.com/company/4808628/admin/
• Twitter: @StoryvineInc https://twitter.com/StoryvineInc
• Youtube: @StoryvineInc https://www.youtube.com/c/StoryvineInc

Image Credits
Main Photo: Co-Founders Kyle Shannon & Monique Elwell, and Sr. Account Director, Lorisha Ionno (credit Kyle Shannon)