Swish: Video Marketing App for Small Businesses

A big thanks to the awesome Swish video app marketing team for sitting down with Startups #nofilter for this interview. Swish is a fledgling video editor and creation app which seems to be taking over the video marketing world with a nifty app: super simple to use but uber professional videos for any business. Download the app here.

Swish is the latest product from the Lightricks team. Lightricks was originally founded by Nir Pochter, Itai Tsiddon, Yaron Inger, Zeev Farbman & Amit Goldstein back in 2013, and have released a slew of successful apps such as Facetune, Enlight Photofox, and more! And a big thanks to Zur Tene, Product Manager of Swish, for taking the time to sit for this interview:

1. Tell us the idea behind Swish, and how the idea came about.

At Lightricks, we have several apps that make visual design more accessible (such as Facetune and Pixaloop), and we saw that a lot of SMBs were using them to create marketing assets.

We figured that if people were already using our existing tools for this purpose, we could make a huge impact if we specifically designed tools to meet the needs of SMBs and entrepreneurs. We know that quality video ads have amazing ROI on social media, but traditionally, they’re expensive to create. We found that many SMBs were hiring video editors with really high price tags, and we realized that we could make it a lot easier. That’s how we got to Swish!

2. Why the name Swish?

We wanted our name to reflect the ease, speed, and simplicity that Swish offers to people who want to create video ads, and we think that the word Swish does exactly that.

3. We noticed there are many video editing apps currently on the market, what makes Swish that much better?

Most other video apps are general; they’re catering to anyone and everyone. When building Swish, we had the business needs of SMBs, entrepreneurs, startups, and freelancers in mind. You can see this focus in the features that exist, the ease with which you can make big changes to your template, and also the templates that you can choose from, which are designed to be effective for social media advertising. A regular video editing app leaves all of those details to the user, and it’s really difficult for someone without a rich marketing or design background to create effective ads. We’re doing that part for you.

Within the tiny minority of apps that are targeting businesses for you, we pride ourselves on a highly simplified user experience with superior results, and an extensive library of templates that reflects the diversity of small businesses today.

4. Is it worth paying money for a video editing app when there are free apps available?

Downloading Swish is free, and exporting our templates with a premium membership is very low-cost. We’re really confident that the user experience, simplicity, and templates designed to get real ROI in the form of customers – are worth the minimal cost.

5. Especially for a small business owner who is bootstrapping their company?

I’d say, even more so! A small business who is bootstrapping their company doesn’t have the luxury of waiting forever for unoptimized video ads to bring customers. Swish allows them to create high quality video ads, already optimized to bring customers, within just a few minutes.

6. What are you most excited about for Swish’s future? Any interesting updates on the horizon?

We’re cooking up a lot of different features that allow even more customization of video ads, while preserving the super simple and intuitive user experience. Also, we’re increasing the amount and scope of our video templates each day and I’m thrilled by how comprehensive it is already!