VideoBomb

VideoBomb is a AR marketing tech startup based in Nashville, TN that's backed by Google Music, Sony Music, and famous country music artist Luke Bryan. The platform leverages a combination of computer vision and AR technologies to create "AR activations" upon scanning various physical objects.

Around Summer 2019, VideoBomb made a major pivot into the AR space as a company and finished raising a major round of seed funding. They needed the right development team to get it's iOS MVP off the ground as quickly as possible. VideoBomb's CEO, Chad, reached out to Aloa to seek our help to match them with a capable software development team and to get the product off the ground in an efficient manner.

VideoBomb came across 3 major challenges throughout the course of the engagement. First, VideoBomb had no solidified scope or any existing wireframes/designs. Chad is a non-technical founder without a CTO or Head of Product on his team. Before development could begin, Chad needed a fully drawn out scope document with user roles, user flow, features, and user stories. On top of that, he needed a fully designed flow and UI of the entire application.

Second, AR was still a fairly new technology at the time. The combination of AR + computer vision was a completely novel technology that had never been developed or used on a commercial scale. Thus, finding a development team that had experience in both AR, computer vision, and could do it well was a huge challenge.

Lastly, AR by nature is extremely nuanced and extremely tricky to get right. Even the slightest mistake or bug could make AR objects look wonky or cheaply designed. During the user acceptance testing (UAT) phase, relaying the descriptive bugs/feedback information in detail to the development team was another challenge, especially since the team was based in India.

Chad collaborated with his Aloa Strategist, who took Chad's vision for the application and draw up a full scope document for the development team to follow. The development team came back with a detailed estimation of the entire project, and with Chad's approval, began the analysis and design phase of VideoBomb's iOS AR MVP.

Prior to sending the scope document to a firm for review and estimation, VideoBomb's Aloa Strategist did a thorough search of the Aloa Partner Network to find the Aloa Partner that was the best fit for VideoBomb in terms of talent, budget, and timeline. In the end, the Aloa Strategist matched VideoBomb to Aloa's top partner in it's India network, based in Delhi.

Finally, as VideoBomb's MVP development was wrapping up, there were lots of issues that needed to be ironed out before the app was submitted to the App Store for it's release. VideoBomb's COO / Head of Product, Mike, heavily leveraged the Aloa Manage platform to relay his feedback and the bugs he found efficiently to VideoBomb's development team.

Four months after the project kickoff, VideoBomb successfully wrapped up development of it's MVP and started pushing the product in the market through various AR activation offers. In October 2019, they presented their product in a startup pitch competition hosted by AARP and placed 2nd out of hundreds of startups who pitched nationally.

During winter and spring of 2020, COVID-19 hit but that didn't stop the VideoBomb team from innovating and pressing forward with their product. By summer of 2020, they were able to secure a long-term activation partnership with Berkshire Hathaway and collected their first check to become a post-revenue startup.

Moreover, they gained the interest of Gil Amelio (former CEO of Apple) who came on to VideoBomb's Board of Directors and led a $3 million Series A round of funding for VideoBomb.

As of today, the Aloa - VideoBomb relationship is still going strong. VideoBomb's Head of Product, Mike, has established a very close relationship with VideoBomb's Aloa Partner and is constantly iterating on VideoBomb product through the Aloa platform.