When Dollar Shave Club released their viral video a few weeks ago the internet exploded. It was cheap to make and was memorable. Brothers Scott and Greg Martin took notice and went to work coming up with a cleaver idea to market their startup Snazzy Room and try to hire some developers. SnazzyRoom recently won Startup Weekend in Sillcon Beach (aka LA), and continue to build some nice momentum with this video.
SnazzyRoom's goal is to bring the real world shopping experience online. It will allow you to shop across the web, visually drag and drop items into a cart, and simplify your online buying experience. While they launched at Startup Weekend they are working on getting the product right and don't plan to launch for 5-6 months.
They have already been accepted into an accelerator in Los Angeles but haven't decided to accept or not. Nice to have options. Scott and Greg also let me in on the 'new' name for the LA tech scene (which apparently is not so new) when they called it "Silicon Beach." After asking if that was south of Santa Monica, they told me that it was the entire LA area. Another blog post will follow.
This video was produced in a single day and editing took a couple of days. "We wanted to do something different because of how difficult it is to find great talent." They were able to go from idea to live video is less than two weeks. I was immediately impressed by the cleverness of the team to put this together. It's a small amount of work, but they'll stand out and I hope they hire 10-people out of this. For the budgetary constrains it's very well done.
The most difficult shot? After six takes of the upside down keg stand scene, Greg experienced some dizziness, or what the film industry in LA calls "mind cramps." The helicopter towards the end of the video was also surprisingly difficult to get right. "People have asked us if it was CG and we keep saying that any CG would have totally busted the budget."
They've already had several quality responses including this gem from Canada:
"Are you guys sponsoring Canadians? I actually have a pretty good business up here but after seeing your video I would be willing to learn RoR, move to Cali, and get a Tattoo of that mini helicopter on my chest."