AI Killed The Startup Video Star

3 hours ago 3

It once cost a fortune to produce a strong video for a startup company.

Now that we live in the age of generative AI, when anyone can put out something that looks polished, video debuts are all but expected for entrepreneurs trying to make a splash. The phenomenon is not unlike how musical acts were expected to release a video on MTV back in the 1990s.

It was par for the course. Otherwise you might as well be invisible.

Years after MTV came and went as a cultural touchstone, there’s an irony to our present moment. Sophisticated generative AI tools like OpenAI’s Sora and Google DeepMind’s Veo can now pump out polished cinematic fare at a fraction of the previous cost and time. Yet startups are paying a pretty penny for traditional, human-made video, as The New York Times reports.

What Happens When Everyone Can Make A Great Video

Should we peek behind the curtain to ask why content is still king, the answer is both simple and surprising. "We're entering an era where AI has made content cheap, but belief expensive," Christopher Louie told me in an interview. Louie should know. He is the founder of Brndmkrs, a storytelling studio that has helped AI startups craft launch campaigns.

After coming up as a filmmaker who wrote, produced and directed XOXO for Netflix, he pivoted to directing startup videos to impact hearts and minds.

Cue Health exemplifies the approach. The short video he directed for the home diagnostics company helped close its seed round. Product explainers, partnership stories, and investor materials followed, coalescing into a roadshow video that supported Cue’s 2021 Nasdaq debut at a valuation of roughly $2.3 billion. (Cue later cratered, shutting down in 2024 after the pandemic testing market collapsed, a reminder that story can open doors but cannot substitute for a durable business.)

“In that Cue Health growth trajectory I learned that a video could do what another feature never could,” Louie says. “It could make the company easier to believe in, therefore easier to fundraise, easier to hire, easier to scale and easier to change the world.”

From Product-Market Fit To Story-Market Fit

The world has changed in just a few years, especially since ChatGPT’s 2022 arrival triggered the mass adoption of artificial intelligence. Before anyone with a generative tool could produce a high-quality video, Product-Market Fit was the brass ring. (The term describes that sweet spot where a product solves a customer problem well enough to create real demand.)

To this point, startup videos made before 2022 largely sought to demonstrate utility, proving the company was the preferred solution provider. Now that AI can whip up endless video on demand, the emphasis is shifting from commodity to storytelling.

Something similar is already underway across the white-collar world, among bankers, insurance agents, and mortgage brokers. When every professional has access to the same tools and offerings, what makes one provider more appealing is the belief they can cultivate. Consider the lawyer who wins over a wary prospective client. She does it less by naming the law school she attended than by telling a story that makes the client believe she will fight for them.

Louie describes this latter approach as Story-Market-Fit.

It is the strategy of building a narrative compelling enough that investors remember it and believe in it. “You do this not just by making a ‘launch vid,’ which practically anyone can roll out, but by developing the story that emotionally affects audiences,” Louie says. “Facts earn you the right to be believed, but they do not close the deal. Nobody gets moved to conviction by a feature list. But sequence the facts the right way, put them inside a human story, add beautiful imagery, perfect timing, awe-inspiring music, tension, and a picture of a future worth wanting, and belief follows.”

Why Human Storytelling Is More In Demand Than Ever

Lester Chen, Creator Lead at a16z Speedrun, the flagship startup accelerator run by Andreessen Horowitz, sees the same dynamic at play. Before leading the gaming vertical at YouTube, he worked at Machinima, one of the first YouTube-native studios, as a creator himself.

As he told me via interview, “It has been incredible to witness how video and visual storytelling has evolved alongside the boom of AI startups in the last year. It’s no longer a question of whether a launch video can achieve extreme outlier outcomes relative to production costs. The question now is how to sustain and build this story across video formats long after the product launch and the fundraise announcement. That's where founders can really separate from the pack and why creatives and storytellers have become one of the more in-demand roles.”

That in-demand quality Chen describes can often come down to taste, a subject of growing importance in marketing technology, as my interview for Forbes with digital marketing pioneer Neil Patel suggests. Patel’s point is that as more marketers gain access to the same intelligent tools, the real competitive advantage belongs to whoever brings critical thinking and discernment, human abilities AI cannot replicate.

Knowing that Story-Market Fit is mission-critical for startups trying to stand out amid so much video saturation, Louie offers four tips for breaking through with your video content.

Tip 1: Don’t Start with the Video. Start With the Belief.

Ask yourself one question: what do you want your audience to believe? Not what do we want to say, and not what features do we need to show.

Tip 2: Find the Emotional Center.

This is filmmaking 101, and it crosses over into brand 101. Seek out the heart, the vibe, the pain, the promise. Those intangibles become the rubric for every creative decision that follows.

Tip 3: Use Filmmaking to Make the Belief Felt.

A story stuck in a Final Draft document is inert. It could be repurposed as great copy for a website, but it won’t scale belief. You have to make it physical. You have to make it visible. You have to decide what people see first, what they feel next, where the tension builds, where the proof lands and what future they are left wanting.

Tip 4: Build the System, Not Just the Launch

Done right, the launch creates source material for the next year of storytelling. The founder interview becomes social content. The thesis becomes the investor narrative. The product moments become website assets. The customer pain becomes sales messaging. The strongest scenes become ads, case studies, explainers and recruiting clips. That’s the difference between a video and a story system.

Keep Your Own Judgment

Here’s the final tip: do not outsource your thinking to artificial intelligence. As recent plotlines on TV shows like Hacks and The Comeback demonstrate, a fear is roiling Hollywood that AI will usurp not just screenwriters’ jobs but showrunners’ too. This comes back to Patel’s emphasis on taste. Just because AI is a valuable generative tool does not mean creators should abdicate their judgment to it.

Now that video has become a commodity, the real edge belongs to startups that embrace Story-Market Fit. That’s because audiences don’t simply want to know why one product beats another. They want to connect with a brand. More than a century after the birth of Hollywood and years after MTV’s heyday, the tools have changed but the human impulse has not.

We all just want to feel something.

Read Entire Article