FierceOnlineVideo Leaders - Seth Kenvin, CEO Market7

On the heels of an announcement that Google is using his company's collaboration tool for internal online video creation, FierceOnlineVideo caught up with Market7 CEO Seth Kenvin to discuss his company's progress in 2009 and goals for the future. 

FierceOV: Seth, what are some highlights for you of 2009 so far for Market7? 

Kenvin: Market 7 has advanced in a couple of different dimensions. In terms of customer base, Google is our first announced customer that is doing a substantial amount of internal video production, as they are producing a couple of dozen projects a month. But we're also having a lot of success winning business with other companies that are a little more sporadic about their video production, like independent video contractors, boutique agencies, major ad agencies, multinational conglomerates. We're also having success with media entities, and we have one Hollywood project that we hope to announce before too long. 

FierceOV: What are the benefits of using Market7's SaaS collaboration module for video creation? 

Kenvin: Any time people come together to create video, they can use Market7 to collaborate. We help people who work in video production see how much time went into a product, any overages or underages, where they made or lost money, etcetera. These are fundamental things these video professionals want to understand. Often these producers have multiple projects going at all times, and one is starting while one is winding down, so Market7 helps them see which resources are consuming time.

FierceOV: What are the biggest challenges you face as you try to grow Market7's business? 

Kenvin: We're a young company, and it's a tough time in general. A lot of the clients we're trying to get business from are scaling back budgets, so we have to do a good job explaining how if you're working with our stuff, you're going to produce video more efficiently and there will be a return on your investment.

While it's tough being a young company during a recession in some ways, it's also helpful, in the sense that we have no excessive infrastructure to keep up. We're staying resourceful and we have a lot of diversity in our customer base. The challenge is how we get our message out to all of those parties, because we haven't identified one space that's going to be a "rocket engine." We need to determine which ones can we scale and how, and try to keep in front of all of them. It's kind of what you start a company for, it's hard, but it's cool that so many different people seem to get utility out of our software. 

FierceOV: How does your sales mix break down between inbound and outbound leads? What does your average customer look like? 

Kenvin: We have a SaaS model and pricing scales as you increase activity. Some of our customers can be kind of sizable, up to four digits monthly, but we get a lot more modest customers. We need to get more inbound leads, because a lot of our success has been outbound to this point because we're young and it's been experimental, but we'll get there before too long.  

It's been beneficial that our sales have mostly been direct to this point, and we've only had exposure to a couple of dozen customers, so we've been able to assess their needs and work out some kinks. Now it's time to focus on scaling up. It's been a beta-like process to this point, but everyone that's been using Market7 has been paying for it. 

FierceOV: Where would you like to see the company a year from now?

Kenvin: In terms of our positioning, from a tactical prospective, we've demonstrated we can get customers in different niches. But the question remains of how we can build businesses in there different areas, like enterprise, advertising agencies, and professional media. Right now, we have representative customers, but I'd like to see us build and show that we're scaling in all three. We're also maybe half way to what we think is a comprehensive way people for collaborate around video, and we're working to get the product to the point that you don't need anything else. I'd like to be able to say in a year that the Market7 platform is all you need to be very efficient in producing video.