Hi HN - Hassaan, Quinn & Rishabh here and we're the founders of Tavus (https://tavus.io/). We generate personalized videos that realistically imitate your gestures and voice. See a short demo at https://video.tavus.io/video?id=2302 and play with it at https://tavus.io/playground/.
Companies like Loom and Vidyard have proven the value of personalized videos for sales, onboarding, marketing, and more. The problem is the time it takes to create a video for each prospect. We make it scalable by generating thousands of personalized videos of you in the time it would take to record one. Our users get the benefits of personalized videos, like large increases in open and reply rates, without having to invest all that time.
We struggled with LinkedIn outreach and email marketing at every company we all worked at. It took too many emails and felt spammy. The best responses we got were from emails that we wrote specifically for clients we were particularly interested in. We then tried our hand at video marketing, with generic videos sent to each lead over LinkedIn, which ultimately performed much better than any traditional campaigns we ran.
What if we personalized the videos like we personalize emails at scale? We decided to test that, and the results were incredible. People loved the fact that we sent natural videos with our own voices and faces, and we achieved massive increases in demos booked (250% spike). The sales industry is seeing this shift towards more individualized video content as well; companies like Loom are growing rapidly and seeing validating results such as 4x meetings booked. We also found that these videos perform well outside of sales and marketing, specifically in recruiting, onboarding, and customer success.
To get started with Tavus, users train an AI model with their voice and face, by submitting a 15 minute video recording. Next they set up a base video template(s) that includes the pitch that they will be giving in the video, along with the associated branded landing page and video background. Once that is set up, videos can be generated at the click of a button. One-off videos can be generated in the Tavus portal, or a CSV can be uploaded to process videos in bulk. Videos can also be generated programmatically through the Tavus API. Each video is automatically personalized in the userâs voice for each unique prospect, and can even automatically generate unique backgrounds, such as a prospects LinkedIn profile or website.
People donât notice imperfections if the content is interesting to them, and unless you are specifically looking for artifacts, Tavus videos are practically indiscernible from a manually recorded video. Therefore our focus is not on generating the most advanced voice-cloning or lip syncingâplenty of great researchers can do that way better than we ever could. Instead it is to provide many immersive personalization options that cater to the customers' leads. A recruiting company can use video outreach very differently than a sales company, and so on. Our core effort is supporting each of those use cases in depth.
Also, people donât trust videos that have professional green-screen backgrounds, perfect lighting and a voice actor recording for you. They want to see you, see that you are real, they want to hear your voice. In our experience, slight imperfections in your video can actually lead to better outcomes as long as you get the content right, as they make for a more engaging experience. The point is not to fool people into thinking that a recording is fully ânaturalâ but to provide them an immersive experience that is personally relevant to them.
Our revenue is generated from a subscription model. These subscriptions typically include things like video strategy consulting, branded landing pages, and a quota of videos that can be generated per month,
We would love to get your feedback on Tavus, and in particular, hear any ideas you have! Weâre super excited about this product, and weâve got a lot of work ahead of us :) Thank you!
11 minutes ago by Tammylopectin
Interesting discussion re: the ethics of everything. From my perspective, if a company is using this to reach more people and get them to listen, at the end of the day, the onus is on the company for having a valuable product for the customer, and the methodology of getting there is less important. I actually am thinking of it from the perspective of the sales person or recruiter... saving them time, so they can work on their own personal goals.
an hour ago by ryanianian
This is about as manipulative as it gets. What's the angle other than "haha we tricked you into thinking we were actually personally invested in this pitch"?
Right in your description you say:
> [People] want to see you, see that you are real, they want to hear your voice.
Yet that's exactly what this product takes away.
18 minutes ago by hassaanr
Totally understand this perspective. The end goal is to provide more immersive product experiences beyond just sales. Use cases that wouldnât be able to have a personal touch at all because of the scalability issue of making individual videos.
Sales unfortunately does have unsavory aspects to it that we at HN especially dislike
17 minutes ago by cma
Are maketing fliers allowed to use fonts that look scuffy--like from an old typesetting machine--even if they were put together on a computer?
Maketing materials are always in an arm race, a new trend comes out that takes a lot of work and becomes a quality/investment signal, then people figure out how to automate it and it suddenly looks passe.
an hour ago by pierre
You are leaking all the generated video thanks to consecutive ids. However it allowed me to browse through what was generated and it make for a stronger sales pitch / give a better idea of how this can be used. The internet marketing for law firm video pitch work well, and if you could customise the content of the video (like dashboard url) they will be even more powerful.
What is less clear from your website, is are you just handling the generation of the video, or their distribution also? Is there any integration with ad platform? Could I just send you an excel spreadsheet with video variable and a target email in the column?
35 minutes ago by hassaanr
Weâll be moving to unique IDs this week, good catch :)
The background content is customizable and dynamic per video, you can pass in a different URL for each video.
Currently we are only handling the generation of the video- not distribution just yet.
2 hours ago by jasonlfunk
This is really interesting. I think people find personal videos more engaging because they /know/ they aren't spam. If this technology becomes mainstream, I imagine that people will start to think about these types of videos in the same way.
an hour ago by undefined
37 minutes ago by pclark
It's amazing how well prospects respond to receiving a personal video â but time and time again senders complain about the production cost â Tavus solves this! Fascinating product and not terribly surprised HN seems unimpressed about this sort of thing ;)
2 hours ago by nmca
This idea features in Greg Egan's novel "Distress" as one of the dystopian elements.
It's a great novel; but this idea is pretty horrifying.
2 hours ago by faeyanpiraat
This is just a sleazy marketing tactic, no matter how you sugar coat it.
Do we really need more manipulation in the world?
9 minutes ago by hassaanr
Sales/marketing can definitely seem unsavory at times. Our thought is that these videos arenât much different than a personalized email through MailChimp- they just provide a new format that is more personable and consumable.
There are also use cases that were working on with tele-health companies, allowing providers to send updates that build trust with patients that they otherwise wouldnât have time for given the scale.
There are a lot of use cases to build more immersive experiences!
2 hours ago by verdverm
Stuff like this should have a warning label, "generated by a machine" or something similar
an hour ago by derpfake
I hate fake personalised content, whether itâs text or video is immaterial. The same is true of many of the people I work with⌠that said, these sort of products mostly stay within the sales world where gaming people is entirely acceptable and arguably encouraged. Therefore, while I hate this and Iâm sure many others here will too, I recognise its genius and expect to see it become very successful because the execution is great. Good luck (but stay away from my inbox!)
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