Any tips on designing and creating an introductory video for your startup?

Do you have a marketing budget set up to plan your investment to marketing your software? If yes, the price for the video production has to be within boundaries. Try to look at it this way: Does the spent cost result in more than twice the sales?

There are some key things that determine how successful such a video will be. It has to be:

• entertaining
• contain relevant information
• not too long

FogCreek had a pretty good and informative video on FogBugz 6.0: http://www.fogcreek.com/FogBugz/60movie/60movie.html

Since your software is bound to change after your launch from user feedback your video will become stale if it showed a lot of screenshots. I'd wait until version 1.2 for the that type of video.

Instead of doing a feature focused video think about having a short pitch featuring just you looking into the camera talking about benefits of your software. People connect to faces in the primitive reptile part of our brains.

I rarely, if ever, see the type of video you are describing. Maybe it is particular to some type of industry, but it just doesn't seem like a common approach for software.

On the other hand, many many firms build video turtorials for their software or services. No cameras and no actors are involved in these. Tools like Instant Demo or Wink allow you to "film" the operation of your software. You can add text and make the tutorials interactive. For a more professional tutorial you can add a sound track.

You can build a short tutorial for your application in just a few hours. These tutorials are easy to change as your software grows over time. A professional sound track can add $200 or more to the cost, depending on the length of your tutorial.

This is what screen recording software can handle. I've seen many small companies creating introductory videos with such programs and putting the videos at their homepages. They often create a series of how-to tutorials to show people what their products can do and how they work.

• It's much easier and money-saving compared with video ads by real people.
• The screen recorders with video / audio editing feature cost you from $99 to $799.
• Screencast has been widely used in online video marketing, so don't call into question.
• Screen recording software is very easy to learn. The only barrier is how to make your video attractive and positive. My suggestion is to speak it out in sincerity and make people trust you are doing good to them.
• Here is a how-to video made by Wondershare DemoCreator.

You can create your own screencasting video from very beginning. It's a very interesting and engaging thing to promote your website and product.

If you are comfortable with video it can be a powerful tool. Watch videos on youtube for "lighting video" and "small business video". Post your video to youtube and embed it in your website. For the best effect, get an SEO guy to help.