Lesson learned from Explainify's amazing process
Recently, I worked with Explainify on an explainer video for Lead Cookie. It's always amazing how whenever you become a customer of another company, you pick up tips and tricks on how you can improve your own.
In this article, I share some of the things I learned from Explainify's productized process for creating an explainer video.
But before that, be sure to watch their 60-second explainer video below so that you can see the quality of the output.
As you can see, it's a pretty amazing end product. Now let's dive into the process.
Turning custom into systems
One of the most amazing things about the entire process was how Explainify managed to turn what is a highly custom and bespoke product into a predictable and understandable system.
The entire process (from beginning to end) was seamless with incredible expectations and project management. Here, I am going to dive into some of the nitty-gritty of what was so great.
Start with a questionnaire
First off, Explainify started by sending over a questionnaire that I had to fill out. This form included:
An overview of our business
A description of our target audience
A write-up of our audience's understanding of our business
Overview of pain points
Features / Benefits
Details about how our business works
Requested that we review their portfolio- then mention a few videos that we liked and explain why we liked them
List three major takeaways we want viewers to have
Describe what our call to action is
We went through and answered these questions before we ever hopped on a call with the Explainify team. The value of this really showed itself when it came to onboarding.
Onboarding is about expectations
For Lead Cookie, we have historically asked a lot of these questions live on our onboarding call. As a result, we spend an hour talking with the customers on the onboarding.
But the questionnaire with Explainify changed that. Their onboarding was different.
The first 30 minutes of the onboarding with Explainify was all about setting expectations. They shared with us what to expect and how their process worked.
They showed us timelines, what each step looked like, and made it clear what was going to be expected.
Then, the last 30 minutes of the onboarding was focused on diving deep into the details and answers from the questionnaire. Instead of starting from scratch, they used this time to clarify on questions or concerns that the questionnaire did not fully address or answer. You can really tell they spent time studying our business ahead of the call.
This meant we got really far in a short amount of time with onboarding.
Expectations were crystal clear
My favorite thing about the onboarding was about how crystal clear the expectations were. They said:
"Your video will launch on this date IF you are able to turnaround feedback within 24 hours of all deliverables we send you. Here are the dates you will receive deliverables."
This was powerful because it made it crystal clear what the timelines were and how we, as the client, could affect those timelines. If we delayed in feedback, then our video launch date was delayed. Plain and simple. There was no ambiguity. Just crystal clarity.
Along the way, if they made up time on a step, they’d give us the time back. And if they needed more time in production, then we would be given more time for review. We were never shortchanged and were always focused on meeting our objective and deadline.
Diving into the process
The onboarding made Explainify's process very clear. We knew what was coming at each stage.
To start off, we began by working on:
Scripting
Visual Style
Scripting
Through a simple Google Doc, Explainify put together a script and we provided feedback. They pushed back when we had suggestions that may have negatively impacted the overall value of the video. After a few rounds back and forth, we locked this in within a couple of days.
Design Style
During the onboarding call, Explainify gave us a handful of collages of different styles with numbers on each. We named off which styles resonated with us. Those became the foundation for their style proposals that they presented to us throughout the process.
We went back and forth on a handful of revisions and feedback until we locked these in.
With each deliverable, the Explainify team also provided a Google Doc feedback form as a simple place where all team members involved in the project could jot down their feedback. No emailing docs back and forth!
Once scripting and visual style was decided on, we began the storyboard process. We went back and forth on a few revisions of this.
Below is a sample on the finalized design style we landed on.
Next came storyboards
At this stage, the Explainify team shared with us a visual storyboard of custom drawn frames that detailed what would happen in the animation. Once again, this already met our expectations by 90% when we got it, and we simply had a few rounds of back-and-forth to dial this in.
Below is a screenshot of part of our storyboard. As you can see, the design doesn't exactly match the final product, but this gets 90% of the way there.
Picking voiceover talent
While we were working on storyboards, we also handled voiceover talent at the same time. The Explainify team presented us with five voiceover talent options, and to be honest, we didn't like any of them in the first round.
So they went back and sourced three more voiceover talent auditions and we ended up loving one of those voiceovers.
Animation
By the time we got to animation, there was very little guesswork. We ended up having 2 rounds of revisions on the final video (but I will admit that is only because my ex-video producer is quite nit picky).
The entire project went from concept to completion in less than 30 days (as a founder, I can provide much quicker feedback than most of their clients) and the team was amazing at guiding us through the entire process.
There was never any guesswork
The most amazing part of the entire process was how we knew what was going on at every step of the process. At any given point, the team informed us via email when we would receive our next deliverable AND when we would need to provide feedback to stay on our timeline.
They also organized everything in this super swanky Gannt chart. While I will admit I didn't use this throughout the project, it's still pretty cool to see how buttoned-down they had thing.
My biggest takeaways
When I look back on the whole process, here are my biggest takeaways.
Use onboarding- not just to extract client info, but to set expectations.
Give clear consequences if the client does not hold up their end of the engagement.
Always be clear about when the next deliverable is coming, and what is expected of the client. Never leave them guessing.
Even custom creative work can be systematized.
Hopefully, you picked up some nuggets from this article too. And if you want an explainer video for your company, I can't recommend Explainify enough!