How-to know how
Backed by venture capital,
WatchDoit.com aims to instruct the world with Web videos
By Gabriel Dillard, Fresno Business Journal, May 16, 2008
Ever wonder how to field strip a Glock 9mm handgun, saddle a horse or vaporize a pimple overnight? Clovis-based WatchDoit.com has you covered.
What started as an idea born at a backyard cookout has evolved into what is, most likely, the San Joaquin Valley’s biggest how-to Web site, said Brendan Kane, president of WatchDoit, Inc. After two months online, the site has amassed 400 registered users, more than 850 videos and 9,000 hits each week. Now it’s asking the business community to hop on board its bandwidth to feature its own promotional content.
“We want to be the Yellow Pages online,” Kane said.
An undisclosed infusion of venture capital from the Clovis-based Bulldog Capital Partners was the spark that vaulted WatchDoit.com onto the World Wide Web. It started as one of a number of new business ideas cooked up by Tim Stearns and Mike Summers with the Lyles Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at Fresno State.
“I think it was over a barbecue,” Kane said.
Kane, 27, was a student assistant at the Lyles Center working on his Masters of Business Administration degree. He became the lead of a team of students who massaged the concept and pitched it to the Bulldog Capital Partners. Kane was in the process of finishing his graduate degree in October 2007 when he received word that WatchDoit, Inc. had received funding. For the time being, he chose to leave the academic world for the real world.
“I was asked to drop everything,” Kane said. “This was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up.”
Other so-called Web 2.0 sites, such as MySpace and Facebook, attract millions of users interested in community interaction and social networking. WatchDoit.com took that concept and extended it into the fast-growing how-to arena. Steve Heinrichs, managing partner of the Bulldog Fund, said the concept’s appeal was that it could be hatched and grown in this area.
“From our fund’s point of view, we look for potential in a business that can be started in the San Joaquin Valley and grow there and not somehow feel the need to go to some other location,” Heinrichs said.
The concept isn’t new — the Internet is brimming with Web sites stocked with instructional articles and videos. Leader of the pack, eHow.com, has a library of more than 100,000 articles and videos teaching Web surfers how to kiss on a date or win at Monopoly every time.
Kane said his site, with its 3-minute-and-under videos, has a focus that encourages local users to submit their own helpful videos. That attracts an audience accessible to advertisers who can offer practical advice in their field of expertise while promoting their business.
Larger Web sites such as eHow.com are repositories for content. WatchDoit.com aims for something different.
“Most of them are just information silos,” Kane said. “We are mixing the traditional with the non-traditional.”
So far the Web site features videos and profiles for the some of the site’s most prolific contributors. Sometime this summer it will roll out more social networking features and is now offering a one-month free trial offer for businesses to feature their own videos and other promotional vehicles on their site.
Stephanie Reilly, another student participant at the Lyles Center, has shot videos to feature her custom clothing and jewelry business called POParazzi. The series will include how to shop on a college budget and how to keep up with the latest summer fashions. Reilly wants to tap into the site’s young demographic.
“It hits that generation that loves social networking. It’s very visual,” Reilly said. “It’s a great way to connect on a personal basis.”
The videos range from the silly to the practical. Users can see how to change a car’s air filter, but one of the most viewed videos is a young guy teaching a bird how to talk in his best “Napoleon Dynamite” impression. It has been viewed more than 1,600 times.
While the revenue model is based on advertising, this collection of video also has value, said Stearns with the Lyles Center. These are the sort of assets a larger company could deem desirable to acquire.
“The key to this is building a library of videos,” Stearns said. “It’s different for a lot of Web sites that count as assets people who come to their site every day. Eyeballs are not assets.”
Learn from video
Clovis-based WatchDoit.com hopes how-to Web site pays off
By Jeff St. John / The Fresno Bee
03/19/08
Want to know how to pop a wheelie or crochet a scarf? Ever yearned to share your knowledge of how to do the Hokey Pokey -- or how to disarm an attacker using nothing but packing tape -- with the rest of the world? If so, then the people at WatchDoit.com want to hear from you -- and, if you've got a video camera, they want to see what you've got to offer.
"As we're talking, I'm uploading video," Brendan Kane, the 27-year-old president of Clovis-based WatchDoit Inc., said this week from his office. "There's no time to waste."
With WatchDoit.com's official launch last week, Kane and his small staff -- marketing assistant Yulia Chavez and videographers Troy Russ and John Gelbraith -- have been busy combing through the hundreds of video submissions they've both shot and received since the company got started last fall.
Of all those submissions, about 150 are now available on the site, teaching everything from how to replace your car's air filter to how to make a champagne cocktail -- oh, and lots and lots of skateboarding videos, most of them recorded at the skate park at Letterman Park in Clovis.
Most of the videos were shot and performed by California State University, Fresno, students, Kane said -- an important part of his business plan.
After all, instructional video sites like eHow.com, or the how-to sections of Internet giants like YouTube and Google, have built audiences that give them a big head start on the Clovis startup.
But Kane envisions WatchDoit.com as a combination of a how-to site and a social networking site like MySpace.com or Bebo.com -- both of which have been bought up for hundreds of millions of dollars by media giants hungry for their online audiences.
"I think we have a lot of talent in Fresno," Kane said. "This provides a venue for it."
Now it remains to be seen whether starting with a core community of young people, armed with video cameras and sharing their talents both serious and silly, will lead to the growing community that WatchDoit will need to thrive.
Bulldog Capital Partners thinks it will. The Clovis-based venture capital group has invested an undisclosed amount to fund the company's startup costs, including video production and Web site development, after being introduced to the company through Fresno State's Lyles Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, where Kane was a graduate student.
"We've made a bet that we're very excited about," said Steve Heinrichs, Bulldog's managing partner. "These kinds of sites are very exciting, the whole arena of getting the attention of younger people and putting them in a social environment."
Cassidy Smith, an 18-year-old mass communications and journalism student at Fresno State, shares the buzz. She's shot about 50 videos for WatchDoit.com, including a series of video interviews with Fresno State students asking them what they wanted out of such a Web site.
"What they like the most about it is that it's peers making these videos, people they can relate to," she said. "Kids coming out and doing Tae Kwon Do kicks, riding a unicycle, juggling -- it's amazing."
With the site's success dependent upon how many advertising dollars it can draw, Kane also plans to offer additional features to boost that revenue.
For example, the company's programmers are in the process of building customized pages for businesses interested in creating a unique presence on the site, with the option of using instructional videos as a form of advertising, he said.
Stephanie Reilly, a 19-year-old Fresno State freshman, wasn't thinking of advertising potential when she shot several how-to fashion videos for the site.
But if the videos lead to a "fashion buzz" among the site's visitors, that could help draw attention to Poparazzi, the vintage bottle-cap jewelry business she started at the Lyles Center seven months ago and hopes to expand to include a line of clothing and accessories.
"I think it's a really great deal for businesses to hone in on a niche market of people interested in this Web 2.0 community," she said, using the buzzword for Web sites that incorporate community interactivity.
Matt Sconce, the 26-year-old "Ninja Guy" who can be found sharing techniques for disarming attackers and withstanding pain at WatchDoit.com, also wouldn't mind any attention he gets from his videos.
A martial artist since the second grade, Sconce is also a filmmaker opening a production company in Fresno, and he said he understands how video clips can propagate themselves across the Internet and create new audiences.
It will all depend, he said, on how WatchDoit.com's community grows.
"As long as the content keeps coming -- and the more recognition it gets, the more content will come," he said.
The reporter can be reached at jeffstjohn@fresnobee.com or (559) 441-6637.
Original Source : http://www.fresnobee.com/business/story/474275.html
WatchDoIt.com now online; provides a local online community designed to entertain, instruct and connect people.
(Fresno, CA) – Fresno’s next foray into the world of Web 2.0 is
http://www.watchdoit.com/, an online community poised to start a “how-to revolution.” Watchdoit is a place where people can learn new things by watching entertaining, instructional video clips while also sharing their comments, feedback and much more.
Merging original user-created content with the best how-to video clips on the internet, WatchDoIt, Inc. is creating an online place for people to learn anything – from mastering magic tricks to cooking Mexican pizza to building a skateboard, even learning about how martial arts pros have mastered their techniques.
“The uniqueness of WatchDoIt is that we go beyond traditional instructional video clips, which tend to be very dry,” said Watchdoit President Brendan Kane, “We incorporate entertainment and the ‘cool factor’ into our content, giving people reasons to return again and again. The site has been characterized as ‘edgy,’ and we think that says it all.”
All three minutes or less, WatchDoIt’s videos include step-by-step instruction presented in a visual way. Clips can be linked or embedded into existing social networking systems (MySpace, FaceBook, etc.). The site’s online community is created via posting, rating, commenting and sharing of video clips. Other community components include content provider profiles, video contests, a Hall of Fame, and a unique “feedback fridge.”
WatchDoIt is actively recruiting content for the site, and encourages anyone with video capability to film things they think people would like to learn how to do. “We are offering people the opportunity to become internet ‘stars’ and we hope they take advantage of it,” said Kane.
WatchDoIt also has its own crews that can come out to events or activities to film site content for free. “Not only are we looking for and offering content about things people might genuinely want to do themselves,” added Kane, “we are also offering content featuring things people just want to know how to do, or how something works. It’s all about the curiosity factor.”
Getting Local Businesses Online
Another unique aspect of Watchdoit is its appeal to local businesses that don’t have an interactive place on the Web. By partnering with WatchDoIt, these businesses can have a page where potential customers can view video clips, produced by WatchDoIt, of how-to things related to their products and services. (“How to make sushi” for example, if you’re a local Japanese restaurant.) This interactive component also leads to search engine optimization, something often difficult and too expensive for small business to achieve.
“While some businesses have a Web site, they are usually simple electronic brochures with mostly static information. We provide an exciting, dynamic way for local businesses to reach targeted customers and keep them engaged with new content,” said Kane. “We offer a customized page on the site with videos that we produce, generating viral marketing and a community around that business.”