Let’s face it. Video presentations are not exactly how in person presentations are. When you are presenting to someone in person, you can not only speak & show the slides but also let the audience gauze your confidence. A good presenter often leaves an indelible mark on the listeners not only through excellent slide work but also through his confidence and body language.
But with video meetings you had to choose one of the other, until now. Presenting to you Pizazz, which enables you to your presentation in a virtual background in three easy steps. We recently had the opportunity to talk with the founder about his venture. Here are the excerpts.
What is the startup / product / venture about? Give us a brief description of it.
Pizazz helps you engage viewers and capture attention during video meetings, allowing everyone to focus on what matters – you!
With Pizazz you can embed your presentation in a virtual background in three easy steps – simply choose your background, upload your slides and let Pizazz do its magic.
How many co-founders are there? Please introduce them and their backgrounds.
Bar, Yonatan and Ido joined the Zell Entrepreneurship Program as individuals – Bar, a Business Management and Entrepreneurship student and former Global Operations at SkiDeal; Yonatan, who studied Computer Science, was a Python Instructor at IDC and founded Help & Tech – an organization that connects between NGOs and Computer Science students; and Ido, a Computer Science graduate, that while studying, founded a micro-mobility startup and served as reserve company commander in the IDF.
The three joined forces and started working on their venture, a voice-recognition based virtual assistant designed to help small business owners manage their customer service. The three flew to New York to onboard their first 10 customers and collect user feedback, when the Coronavirus hit the US, shutting down the SMB market and pulling the plug on their venture.
Ido, Bar and Yonatan managed to recognize the massive adoption of video meetings and understand their effect on the future of working habits. In under two weeks, the V-Labs team managed to build and launch their first product, VirtualOffice. VirtualOffice allows users to automatically create branded virtual backgrounds to use on their calls.
Without raising any external capital, Ido, Bar and Yonatan bootstrapped V-Labs to reach over 100,000 customers, and hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue. Lately, V-Labs raised their Pre-Seed Round from the Zell Program’s Venture Fund. Today, V-Labs is raising their Seed Round and launched Pizazz, which allows users to create embedded virtual presentations to engage viewers and capture attention, in three simple steps.
How did you come up with the idea? What motivated you to do this?
After launching VirtualOffice and serving over 100,000 users, we understood that customer-facing users have a problem. In every public speaking class, article or TedX talk, the single most important point is that when using a presentation, you should use it as a tool to aid your pitch.
When covid-19 broke out and video meetings took over, users were forced to pitch using the “share screen” feature in Zoom, Google Meets, MS Teams, etc. While video meetings have many amazing advantages, presenters were pushed into small, square windows and presentations took up the entire screen.
Pizazz helps users engage viewers and add that vital ability of capturing attention by embedding the presentation into a virtual background, making the presenter appear in front of the slides and directing attention to what matters most – you.
Who is your target market? Why do you think your product will appeal to them?
After speaking to hundreds of our users at VirtualOffice, we narrowed down our target market mainly to customer-facing roles in companies (sales, business development, customer success and c-level executives), education workers (teachers, tutors, etc.) and public speakers.
We know that Pizazz appeals to this market – we’ve been working with our users for the past 8 months and have tested Pizazz with them prior to launching it.
Who are your competitors? How are you different from them?
Our competitors are mainly freelance designers from Fiverr and Upwork on one side, and software companies like mmhmm and OBS on the other. Our key differentiation point is that we allow users to create their virtual presentation in three easy steps, without needing to manage a freelancer or needing to download, install and learn new software.
What are the future plans with the product/startup? Any new features you are planning on?
We currently integrate with Zoom and are working on integrations with other platforms like Teams, Skype and more. Additionally, we are working on making these backgrounds dynamic, allowing users to change the content of their slides in real time, to enable meeting agendas and notes to be shared quickly with their viewers.