Viewst is happy to announce that the Company was included into 40 the most promising startups among 1000 Station F residents in 2021. The companies featured in the group have all been hand-picked, based on their growth traction, first achievements and projects for the next months to ensure they are truly the rising stars. 

Station F unveiled the list of its top 40 companies of 2021 during a full online demo day, livestreamed on November 18 for investors, journalists and members of the ecosystem.

On the back of this event, Viewst has received an interest from a bunch of investors from France and the United States. The startup is currently raising its seed round. You can find more info about Viewst traction here.

About Viewst

Viewst is a platform that bridges the gap between creative and media teams in the digital ad space. It enables designers and marketing managers to collaborate in real time, scale ads versioning, streamline approvals and go live faster.   

Viewst launched the service back in 2020 and expanded into 109 countries with more than 10k active users since then. Initially, the company targeted SMBs to help them with their marketing efforts. Now it is shifting to Enterprises. The team joined the Havas Acceleration Program at STATION F this fall. It has already started pilots with more than 20 agencies and brands in France, Netherlands, and the USA since then.

“We selected startups that provided concrete answers on data, content and media topics.”- Romain Reveillère, Head of Havas Startup Accelerator, about the new recruits of Station F. Indeed, after a call for applications launched in June, this incubator unveiled the 6 young shoots of the Pilot Booster program.

As a reminder, Station F connects startups with Group agencies to initiate a pilot project (for 6 to 9 months) on the basis of various issues. How to build your media segmentation? Which content performs the best? How to retain the most effective Insight? How to identify in real time the broadcast of a TV commercial? What are the keys to optimizing remote creative content (interactive emailing, website content, production at scale, etc.)? How to identify “eco-responsible” suppliers?

Promotion 2021-2022: the 6 new startups of the Havas Startup Accelerator, at Station F

“Startups with revolutionary ideas are fascinating, but often they are above ground. What is innovative in our approach is that we sought to recruit companies that responded to real market issues.” – Romain Reveillère, Head of Havas Startup Accelerator

And the famous “nuggets” are as follows:

DM SQUARED

DM SQUARED presents an AI-based SaaS solution for competitive and creative intelligence, optimization and efficiency measurement of digital brand content. This young growth will be supported by the Havas Paris agency.

RUMBLE STUDIO

This platform allows marketing teams to record and publish audio content easily and inexpensively. His partner? Havas Health & You.

TACTIX

It is a research platform offered to consumers in the form of an app. The latter are invited to instantly capture video, audio, photo sequences … and to give their opinion as they live their experience of the brand, a product or a shop. This startup will work with two agencies: Rosa Paris and W.

VIEWST

This workspace allows you to create, collaborate and distribute advertisements on a large scale. Viewst also offers design and marketing teams the opportunity to increase the volume and variety of advertising content. It is teaming up with Havas Digital Factory.

WOMAN THE TOP

This digital platform, aimed at women entrepreneurs and top managers, via the informelles.media site, is made up of 3 pillars: informing, shearing, supporting. A tool that is both community-based and service-based, the news of which is updated daily, to enable them to access fundraising and the professionals who will help them develop their business. His partner? Havas International.

KINETIX x HAVAS GROUP

KINETIX generates 3D animated content at scale using AI. Its algorithm extracts motion from any video and transforms it into 3D animation without sensors and with a simple cell phone camera. Its partner is none other than Havas Group.

The original source here 

Viewst was included in G2 Fall2021 Report in the category Display Ad Design as a high performer. G2 reviewers rated software sellers’ ability to satisfy their needs as shown in the tables below.

Viewst has been named a High Performer product based on having high customer Satisfaction scores and a low Market Presence compared to the rest of the category. 100% of users rated it 4 or 5 stars, 100% of users believe it is headed in the right direction, and users said they would be likely to recommend Viewst at a rate of 92%.

G2 is one of the biggest platforms for user reviews. It allows the latter to compare the best business software and services based on user ratings and social data.

See our listing and share your honest review here

Since digital media has exploded and creative teams have not been able to keep up, Viewst has built the most simple editor for media teams to edit their own banner ads and a workspace to collaborate with the creative team. Viewst is transforming how media teams look and work with their banner ads.  

Feed generation – the feature that helps ad campaigns go live faster

Viewst has released feed generation, enabling marketers to turn their CSV files into hundreds of ads with different stories, colors all staying on brand. From any html5 banner, Viewst will create tons of other banners just like it. Feed generation will speed up ad production. 

This feature provides three great opportunities: simplification of work, reduction of ad production time, and facilitating increased variability, thereby allowing greater earnings.Built to automate A/B testing and retargeting campaigns in such spheres as e-commerce, retail, FMCG, etc.

Watch our tutorial video about how this function works.

Viewst was included in G2 Summer2021 Report in the category Display Ad Design as a high performer. G2 reviewers rated software sellers’ ability to satisfy their needs as shown in the tables below.

Viewst has been named a High Performer product based on having high customer Satisfaction scores and a low Market Presence compared to the rest of the category. 100% of users rated it 4 or 5 stars, 100% of users believe it is headed in the right direction, and users said they would be likely to recommend Viewst at a rate of 91%.

G2 is one of the biggest platforms for user reviews. It allows the latter to compare the best business software and services based on user ratings and social data.

See our listing and share your honest review here.

Viewst announces the launch of a new killer feature: variable content generation

The advertising market has been growing and developing rapidly in recent years. It is constantly adapting to consumer wishes for personalisation changes, and to every target audience in terms of colours, products, photos, calls to action, language etc.

As a result there are a multitude of software solutions to create ads of different formats. The challenge lies in automating a greater quantity of and better-quality ads in less time. 

Variable content generation – the new big thing in ad production

Viewst has just shipped a new killer feature for variable content generation. 

It is easy to use, and it lets you multiply headlines, text and language, images, headlines, and call-to-action buttons to create and test new ad combinations in just a few clicks.

This feature provides three great opportunities: simplification of work, reduction of ad production time, and facilitating increased variability, thereby allowing greater earnings.

This feature is extremely important for e-commerce ads, A/B testing, and ad localisation.

“The digital advertising market is growing daily. To say the right words to your customer and to create catchy ads you need to design them quickly and have great variability to reach the mind of each buyer. Variable content generation makes this possible for every marketer and designer, and this is our contribution to the ad market’s development”, said Victoria Duben, Founder/ CEO Viewst.

 
Watch our tutorial video about how this function works.

To AppSumo or not to AppSumo? That is the question.
It’s probably what Shakespeare would ask if he were a 21st-century SaaS entrepreneur.
Is there a certain answer? No. Every product is unique.
But let’s try to address one aspect at a time

Why AppSumo?

AppSumo is a world-renowned platform for entrepreneurs that consistently offers lifetime deals (LTDs) for online services and digital products. AppSumo’s most potent feature that makes the platform so popular is its customer base, which exceeds 1 million, and AppSumo performs super segmentation based on subscribers’ engagement and website behaviour. AppSumo has many affiliate websites and partners that help to reach about 50 million people. This makes a partnership with the platform very promising. 

Key success factors of the AppSumo campaign

A successful campaign needs what are superficially just a few simple things: a product, an organised support team, and marketing. And of course, good preparatory work (read how Viewst has done its homework and launched the campaign here – What it’s like to run a campaign on AppSumo. Viewst: 1st month on air).

Goals of the campaign

The AppSumo campaign goal couldn’t be revenue growth alone as all AppSumo products offer the biggest discount possible.  

Viewst had several goals: 

1. user feedback
2. greater brand awareness
3. load testing of the builder
4. new ideas for further development and, of course,
5. higher revenue.

The team achieved them all. Viewst really needed a push for the product and AppSumo provided it. We talked to a big number of customers, enhanced our custdev, understood our clients’ real pain points and requests, fixed all bugs, and boosted revenue.

Results in numbers 

• 1,473 sales and 43 upgrades
• $76K+ revenue
• 85 questions, 50 reviews on the deal page
• 41 mentions in Mass Media and social networks
• a rise in subscribers on all our own social pages
• $37K+ sale amount with our referral link and 393 other product sales via reff link

The last three days of the campaign were particularly hot in terms of the number of requests and sales. 

What else could be done

What would we do differently next time?

Generally, Viewst performed well, but there are some things that we would definitely do in other ways:

• adjust all analytics to a consistent format in order to get the most out of the data for better upsells
• ship different tiers from the beginning to allow Sumo-lings maximum choice
• run some advertising campaigns on Google
• run only a one-month campaign with more aggressive promotions

Conclusion

There are different views as to whether to use AppSumo at all. There are also several questions that should be answered before making the right decision.

Do you want to test your product on a large number of users from different countries? Do you want to raise your product’s brand awareness? Do you want a kind of crash-test for your team? Do you want to get new ideas for product development? Are you ready for non-stop work and getting lots of complaints and bug reports? If your answers are “yes”, AppSumo is for you. 

Is ad production automation advertising’s new black for agencies and brands?

 Advertising has advanced tremendously, and especially over the past three-to-five years. Brands as well as advertising agencies continuously try to adapt to the new fast-developing ad reality, diverse audiences, and rapidly changing trends. 

In the past decade alone, we have seen major changes in advertising and software automation.

From PPC and social media to AI and machine learning, advertisers, agencies, C-Level executives, and clients are today searching for and applying the best automation technology to their campaigns.

But before we get into evolution, let us begin with the basics.

What does advertising automation mean?

Just as it sounds, it is the process of automating different areas of one’s digital advertising efforts with various software and tools.

First and foremost, it frees up one’s time to focus on other important areas. According to Business.com, software automation can save 30% of advertisers’ time. Moreover, it optimises campaigns for higher CTR and lower CPC.

Automation helps to increase lead generation, customer segmentation, customer lifecycles, analytics processes, etc. This is especially essential if a business begins to grow and scale, and manual operations become unmanageable and ineffective without specific software solutions. When this happens, automation is key. 

Automation software tools are proving their ability to enhance the overall ad experience and future of the digital advertising industry.

Why is ad production automation so necessary? What does it do?

If you produce advertising or are a business that needs advertising to scale up your sales, you know that ad production is key to staying competitive.

With manually intensive processes, there are many potential holdups in ad production that influence the entire ad campaign.

Marketers have never needed more content than right now and are struggling to meet these demands with manual production:

• Performance teams need to refresh the campaign creative frequently to drive performance
• New product launches put pressure on delivering new creative assets
• Media plans require tons of sizes and format variations
• Every day new social media networks appear to be a marketing channel 

Automation has changed the way that media is bought and handled; now it’s time for the creative to experience the same shift. 

Companies and brands need to keep up by producing more and more creatives than ever before to match customer interests and expectations.

It can be really challenging, and time- and money-consuming. From expensive content scaling, slow creative processes, misunderstandings between marketer and designer, and inconsistent designs, marketers can’t just turn to old-fashioned creative production anymore. The answer is automation.

Why haven’t marketers adopted automation yet? A lack of awareness that such software tools exist. Creative automation really is the “new black” and quite different from the traditional brief-idea-production-launch process many marketers have become accustomed to.

How should it be used?

Automating content production at scale is an exciting option, especially its promise of reducing manual involvement. But, it’s important to remember that ad automation doesn’t eliminate human involvement entirely – and shouldn’t.

Following the campaign development process and design stages, which are heavily reliant on people, comes the production stage. This is where ad production automation comes into play. In the production phase, ad automation supports content production and delivery processes. For instance, if the same asset needs to be made available in local languages, you and your colleagues are able to easily and quickly create and edit and then auto-generate all the required versions in a variety of sizes for your social channels, ad networks, etc.

However, not everything in the ad production phase needs to be automated. The approval requires human involvement. It needs to be clear to the entire team where quality checks are needed – a definite distinction between the creator and the approver – to ensure the content output remains on-message and on-brand. Just like its role in creativity, human gut instinct and brilliance are incomparable – something machines will never quite match. 

When multiple people, from internal design, copywriting, and marketing teams to external agencies, work on a great number of tasks, collaboration is paramount. Thanks to brand templates and guidelines, ad production automation welcomes a more collaborative environment as well.

How do start-ups usually celebrate their anniversaries and great results? Yep, parties!

The Viewst team, however, has decided to mark its first anniversary in a completely different way altogether: starting a 60-day AppSumo campaign.
A bit odd you might think. Perhaps, but Viewst is nurtured by people who are inspired by and in love with it, and a fresh new project phase is far more exciting than a party.

Here’s what it’s like to be on the #1 digital marketplace for entrepreneurs.

Deal
Viewst is offering a really insane lifetime deal that is a quarter of the price of a year of our Pro+ plan.

The different tiers are based on our customers’ needs to ensure their purchases offer the best value possible.

Preparation for launch
Preparation for the AppSumo launch lasted three months, with essentially the entire Viewst team involved.

And there was lots to do: tech issues and integrations, site load testing, releases of all bug fixes, marketing material designs, a new batch of templates, copywriting for all releases, blogs, posts, etc.

We also decided to create our own landing page for the deal to make it easier for customers to make the right decision for them and answer all frequently asked questions.

Another equally important part of the preparation was to develop an organisational plan for the whole team for at least the first week of the campaign. It was essential to split the team into parts so that support was available 24/7. The team was divided into groups of two-to-three people who worked for 8 hours each the whole first week of the campaign.
The week before the launch was devoted to double-checking so that we were well-prepared and avoided any force majeures. 

Preparation is one of the most important parts of the job, but that was just the start of the show.

The launch Wow Day: first day of the campaign 

When the “start” button was clicked the crazy week under the aegis of AppSumo began. The first three days were the most intense with dozens of questions on the deal page and tons more in the support chat.
Moreover, some bugs appeared but the tech team fixed them very quickly. 

The first 24 hours were non-stop with the results to prove it. We had 170 purchases with only 5% requesting refunds, 34 reviews, and 41 questions.

Marketing
All campaigns run a dual marketing drive.
The AppSumo team posts on their social media – that have a huge following, by the way – and run ads. There is a second, more powerful instrument – mailing. The first newsletter announcing the new product on board is sent out for every newcomer; however, bundle email newsletters for AppSumo audiences are available depending on the quantity of sales and reviews.
Viewst was included in two mailings. And that was a good sales push, of course.

AppSumo hosted a webinar with Victoria Duben, Founder/CEO to show how to create a banner from scratch and answer all questions about the deal.

Further marketing is where the Viewst team came in.
Typically Sumolings can spread info about their deal whenever they want to.

So, our initial steps were to post the announcement on all our social networks and send a newsletter to our customer database.

However, the first trick was to offer double video limits for the first 20 honest reviews on our deal page. This was an effective marketing decision as we received these 20 customers in half a day.

The next marketing push was via Facebook groups. For our LTD offers we chose three groups with the highest number of subscribers, and agreed with the admins to have our own post there. This is an example of the group and how it all works. The push worked well, with sales increases on some days. 

The next but not the last marketing trick was to release two more Tiers with extended limits. We initially started with one Tier, but in a month we were with three Tiers for different customer audiences. Those who need Viewst for creating banners for social networks and so on can affordably buy Tier1. Those from marketing agencies who need Viewst for their clients and consequently need full automation, collaboration, more videos and so on, and afterwards bulk generation, can buy Tier2 or Tier3. The price for the latter is also affordable and reasonable. 

Introducing new Tiers prompted the next big sales boost.
We then repeated all our previous standard marketing approaches – posts on social networks, a newsletter to early AppSumo customers with special incentives for them and to the rest of our database, updates on Facebook groups and so on.

Monthly results
It’s too early to draw conclusions, but nevertheless we got tons of reviews and advice for further development. As of today the results in numbers are:
– 935 sales
– $45+ revenue
– 46 reviews on the deal page
– 33 mentions in Mass Media and social networks
– a rise in subscribers on all our own social pages
– $22K sale amount with our referral link

The show must go on. We shall see the final results in 60 days at the end of May.

Viewst. The first steps on the stairway to the unicorn heaven.

2020 was a year of the global crazy ride for all businesses in the world. Some companies have been transformed, some have disappeared and some have strived to survive. But Viewst has made it to be their first startup year whatever.

What is Viewst all about?

Viewst is a woman-led startup. It was founded by Victoria Duben. She has been with Investment Banking for 9 years as an international funds sales, trader and portfolio manager. Then she decided to switch to her own startup. In 2017 Victoria founded Profit Button (a new kind of rich media banners), the project has grown to 8 countries on 3 continents for 2 years. In 2019 she founded Viewst startup.

Viewst is a marketing automation tool to create banners for all kinds of ad networks in minutes using numerous templates, animation tools, and free assets, etc. It is a one-stop-shop to automate ads production, collaborate and manage costs.

Viewst was built to help marketers, marketing agencies and designers as well to make the whole ads production process 10x faster and 10x cheaper while maintaining a professional level of performance.

The first version was launched in April 2020. During a year the team shipped some of the killing features namely: smart resize to create different sizes from one master banner, team access to collaborate, background removal and lots of other essential improvements.

What are the outcomes of the first operating year?

All funds were invested in product development but the outcomes are incredible taking into account almost the zero marketing budget.

Key results of the first year:
– 5000+ created projects on the platform
– $45K+ in sales in April 2021
– organic MAU1583 in March 2021
– 26% retention
– 20 earned foreeign media publications
– Product of the Day on Product Hunt in December 2020
– 2 months AppSumo campaign with more than 730 customers in the first month
– pilot projects with international brands and marketing agencies

Plans for 2021
Viewst ambitious team strives for improving its achievements in the upcoming year.

Key objectives for 2021: 

• 100K registrations
• 25K MAU
• $1M ARR
• 40-45% rolling retention

“We believe that introducing automation and collaboration into the creative sphere is the most important element relating to ad success while the latter is the most required revenue driver for today’s  businesses. Viewst team has reached the point where we got inquiries from the top VC’s and are ready to boost the growth this year,”- said Victoria Duben, Founder/ CEO Viewst.