Vikram Chalana: Scaling Stories with AI | Ep 1205

0:00Welcome to Corazon Technologies, home of the Digital Executive Podcast. Do you work in emerging tech, working on something innovative, maybe an entrepreneur, apply to be a guest at www.corazon.com forward slash brand. Welcome to the Digital Executive, today's guest is Vikram Chalana. Vikram Chalana is the CEO and co-founder of Victory AI, an AI first video platform built to democratize video creation and content repurposing for everyone. Over the past five years, he has led Victory AI across product engineering and business, scaling in a fast-moving startup environment with discipline, execution and clear metrics. As of 2024, Victory's impact includes 3.2 million stories brought to life, 183,000 plus hours of video created and 1.5 million hours saved for creators worldwide.

1:04We'll get after you, Vikram, welcome to the show. Vikram Chalana Thank you, Brian, and Supply, sir. Absolutely, my friend. I appreciate it. But you were on the podcast just a couple of years ago, maybe less than that, and we had a great time, and I'm glad you're back to share some updates and just going to jump right in. I know you're in Seattle, I appreciate you making the time. I'm in Kansas City, so we got a little bit of a time difference, but again, we made the calendar's work. So, Vikram, if I could, I'm going to jump right in. You founded Victory AI to demonstrate video creation and content repurposing what core problems were creators and businesses facing that existing video tools weren't solving. I think the main issue that, and I personally faced this because I came as a business person trying to make videos, I personally faced this challenge. The learning curve for all these tools is just too steep. I tried picking up Camtasia, I tried picking up Adobe Premiere, and I gave up. Like, I'm like, too much. I'm not an expert. I do need to create videos because that's kind of

2:08where people want that message. Sticks resonates. There's more engagement with video, but it's just super hard to create. And so, people were either struggling with these tools themselves or they were outsourcing to agencies, and either one of them is very costly and time-consuming solution. And that's the problem we were trying to solve. But the other thing that idealizes that a lot of people are good at writing, and they're sitting on a lot of written content, whether in the form of blogs or white papers or PDFs. So, the goal was, can we use, can we build AI, can we use AI to help repurpose that content into a video format? And that's what we've been. Are you really buying a car online on Auto Trader right now? Really, I can get super specific with dealer listings and see cars based on my budget. You can really have it delivered. Or pick it up. I think kid is walking up the slide. Really? Auto Trader. Buy your car online, really.

3:11On a journey off for the rest, you know, 70 or six years. Wow, it's amazing. End step, but you've grown a lot since then. But I do like really the problem you're trying to solve. Like you, I love to kind of get in and generate videos or edit or pictures. And I've used those products like Adobe, etc. And they're very difficult to use. There's a steep learning curve if you've not been trained in that stuff. So, I appreciate what you're doing. And now, obviously leveraging AI, which is a big thing. So, appreciate the updates. Victory has helped generate millions of stories and saved creators over a million hours. What product decisions were critical in delivering that kind of measurable, real-world impact? Yeah. So, it's really, that's a really good question, Brian. I think as a product company, you have to have a point of view on product decisions. So, I think there's three product decisions that really stand out for us. One, again, from personal experience I noticed when I picked up

4:12Camtasia or Premiere, there was a timeline editor. I got lost in that. I had no concept of a timeline editor and when something appears. So, I'm a business person. I like PowerPoint. I like office types applications. And so, so, one of our design decisions was we wanted to give users a very easy PowerPoint-like experience as opposed to a timeline experience. And we've stuck with it. We've stuck really hard with it to not give people a timeline even though we're already video creation and video editing tool, but we do it all with a PowerPoint-ish-like experience. And we feel that makes it much less hard to use and just eases the users onboarding into the product. A second important product decision that we made is I call it the cold start problem, like when you open Word or when you open Premiere, there's nothing in there. You're like, okay,

5:16what do I do now? So, the cold start problem, we were trying to address it by always allowing you to start with something with a piece of content you already have. Whether you have a PowerPoint presentation, whether you have a Word document or a blog, we just make it easy like point to that blog or your website and say make into a video. The starting point becomes really easy. Even if you don't have it, even if all you have is an idea, you just prompt the idea and say, make me have one minute motivational video about why I should make videos today. They would start and it would give you a video in the next few minutes. So, that cold start problem was another thing that I think has a product decision was important to us and a third product decision which I am. The sun shining birds are singing and all feels right in the world. Until the season changes and suddenly you lose your motivation to get out of bed. In fact,

6:17one in five people experience some form of depression no matter the season or time of year. At the American Psychiatric Association Foundation, our vision is to build a mentally healthy nation for all because we want you to live your best life and be your best you all year round. Please visit mentallyhealthination.org to learn more. It's almost like a strategy decision. All of these are strategy decisions that you make. The third one is around we didn't want to be a AI model company. We felt like that's an expensive proposition. That's a really hard problem to go after and there's so many people doing it so well. So, we wanted to leverage the best models out there for any given task. So, that's what we've done. We use open AI where it makes sense. We use 11 labs where it makes sense. We use Google, real where it makes sense. We just bring the best models and we have a nice

7:18agent back in that picks the right model for the right time and kind of picks that decision away from the user while we can maintain the fact that we'll bring the best models out of their state of the argument where we did. That's great. Thank you. And I like to do your strategies, right? You talked about them. There's about three things I believe you talk about and obviously keeping it simple. You use that as you said that PowerPoint model, right? Keep it easy. The timeline is confusing, especially for people that don't work in video and you stuck with it. And I believe and I've tried your product. It's very nice, by the way. I talked about, again, sticking with the strategies when you open something up, it's that cold start, right? You've got kind of like the old word that had the clipy, the little clip, the paper clip there. And you've got something there to hold your hand, be a tutor, to guide you through some of those things or give you ideas, inspire you. And of course, the AI, I like what you're doing, kind of similar to open art, right? You can get a subscription open art and it has basically all the AI's put there for image or video creation,

8:24whatever it is. And I like how you really brought that together to bring the best of breed for whatever project that Andy uses working on. So that's awesome. Thank you. And jumping into the next question in the big room, growth channels can disappear overnight, especially in creator and platform driven ecosystems. How do you build resilient go-to-market systems that aren't pennied on a single platform? This is the trillion dollar question, Ryan. I embed every company to use with this challenge because once you master the channel, that channel just disappears, it's happened to us twice now or even in the short six years, because we thought we'd become really good at affiliate marketing and someone for affiliate. Blast, we thought we'd become really good at SEO. And then Google changed its game now, they're showing AI or views. So I am hyper aware of this challenge and the best answer to your

9:26question is the Bleacher Report app is your destination for sports. Right now, the MBA is heating up, March Manus is here, and MLB is almost back. Every day, there's a new headline, a new highlight, a new moment you've got to see for yourself. That's why I stay locked in with the Bleacher Report app. For me, it's about staying connected to my sports. I could follow the teams I care about, get real-time scores, breaking news, and highlights all in one place. Download the Bleacher Report app today so you never miss a moment. You bet on many channels so that if one kind of slows down, you have others that are working. We're using three active channels right now, the SEO slash AEO slash Geo. That's one big one that's all about content and making sure you have enough content both on your website, blogs, but also now I'm seeing YouTube content being referred to in AI overviews. So we are all in into YouTube.

10:30In fact, any of the listeners, if you're thinking about AEO as a channel, make sure you have a YouTube channel. Those videos are going to be a reference by Google AI overviews for sure. And by the way, just a small plug for Victory there because we have an easy way to convert your blog content into videos that you can then post on YouTube. Easily get started with a YouTube channel. So anyway, that's an ongoing journey. The second one for us has been affiliates and influencers. So we work with a lot of people, refer our product and so on. And that's an ongoing challenge. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't. And then, of course, the paid ad channel, various or all the Google search and meta and all that stuff. And recently, we've been adding the direct B2B channel outreach to business leaders directly. And so I think

11:32you have to bet in each of them. And you just have to. And then there's one final thing that I think that's so the B2B channel is probably the most repeatable. And because you're directly approaching your building lists, you're approaching people. But for SaaS products, one of the things that really works well for us as well is the vital loops. So when people make a video with victory and shared it with a victory watermark or a link, it kind of gets that word out. So that's probably the one of the most repeatable durable channels that we have. That's awesome. And thank you for sharing your experience. Some of the challenges you had, obviously growth channels can disappear overnight. And I definitely know that as well as a podcast host and the various ways. But with AEO, GEO, SEO, you got to have it all. YouTube is still huge. It's dominating. In fact, that's my fastest growing platform right now is YouTube. So I totally agree if you've just

12:33got to diversify in that stuff. And I appreciate what you're doing to ensure sustainability long term for the business. So appreciate that. And then bigger than the last question of the day, you've said AI is the amplifier, but culture is the signal. As AI becomes more powerful, how should founders think about culture leadership and long term sustainability? Yeah, I think in any technology, not just AI, technology changes, technology comes, technology goes, right? It's just culture is the thing that that really stays. And what you built in the company as a as a founder. So one important part of the culture has to be kind of being open to new technologies, adaptability, everybody. So so we make it a point to share how we are using AI. So we have like every other week, we have a session through where everybody joins and we all share our AI learnings. But just we've set up a set of

13:35values for our company. It's called Credo. And I'll go through to another, but they're just our values, but I think they can be models for other companies too. So C is for curiosity. R is for respect. E is for expeditiousness or speed. D is for data orientation. And O is for openness. Right. So so that's kind of how we live day to day, how we make decisions, how everybody operates. So all of that kind of is beyond AI or technology, right? It's above any of that. You're curious about technology, you're respectful of each other, respectful of customers, respectful of technology. You move fast, adapt things as soon as they come out. You make data-based decisions, data-oriented decisions, and you stay open both to your customers and to your tea. So that's what Credo is all about. It works for us. And I'm sure pieces of it will work for any business leader. Absolutely. I appreciate that. And what a great acronym to come up with,

14:40your really is your cultures. The Credo you live by in your company. And I think that's really smart as plan words. But to your point, a lot of leaders, especially in the tech world, may not have a lot of the EQ or those soft skills. And you highlighted how that helps you embrace that culture and build it. So that is part of your DNA. And I think that's awesome. So thank you so much for sharing that. It's something other leaders, other companies can certainly use. So appreciate that. And Vikram, as always, it was a pleasure having you on again. And I look forward to speaking with you real soon. Great. Thank you so much, Brian. It was a pleasure. It's always been a pleasure being with you. Bye for now.