Meet Vikram
Hi, I’m Vikram Chalana, Founder & CEO of Pictory. I’ve been in the technology and AI space for about three decades now. I am an engineer turned entrepreneur. I grew my last company from four people in the garage to 350 people globally.
One of the things I realized as we were building that company was that the content that people wanted to consume was shifting. People wanted more videos. They were not reading as much anymore.
The other thing I realized is that, in our company of 350 people, we had only one person capable of making videos. Everybody would be lining up in front of her office to edit or get a video made, and I saw that as a process that was broken.
I was also frustrated with my own efforts at creating videos. I picked up tools like Camtasia and Adobe Premier and I had a really hard time figuring those out – the learning curve is very steep.
So, as I was exiting my previous company, I realized that there is an opportunity to build a product around making video creation and video editing easy. We saw early things coming out with the AI transformer models. So, we said, “Okay, we should leverage that, and we should do what Canva was doing but do it for videos.”
What makes Pictory stand out from other AI video generators?
One thing we realized is that people have a lot of content in other formats:
- PowerPoints
- documents
- blogs
- long videos like webinars
The challenge is often not about creating new content, but it’s about repurposing existing content. That’s been our design principle. That’s one of the key things that helps us stand out in the market: we’re focused on repurposing content, taking your other content and converting that to short-form videos.
AI video generation is a very busy market; there are many players in the model space. Our key design principle was that we decided that we’re not going to be a model company; we want to leverage the best of the breed models that are in the market. We wanted to provide a really good experience, a very easy-to-use experience for our end users that would leverage different best-of-breed models, for everything, whether it’s:
- voice overs
- text summarization
- video generation
We wanted to give all the AI models in one place in a very easy-to-use framework, and that’s what we built; that’s what helps us stand out.
We help repurpose content to create engaging videos using the best state-of-the-art AI models; that’s our big differentiation.
What types of content can users create: shorts, ads, or long-form videos?
Our most common type of content that customers generate is short-form videos. The average video length is about two minutes, but our platform also lets people generate 10 to 15 minute long YouTube videos or 30 second long ads. It can generate all kinds of videos, but we’re focused on short-form videos.
How customizable are the generated videos? Can users edit scenes, voiceovers, or visuals after generation?
We offer a fully customizable storyboard editor. After the videos are generated, customers can edit scenes, they can change the voiceovers, they can change the visuals in a very easy-to-use user interface.
How has the product evolved since launch? And what’s your long-term vision for Pictory?
Our product has evolved tremendously since our launch 6 years ago. The AI model’s landscape has dramatically changed. We’ve incorporated a lot of newer AI models since we started about six years ago. We continue monitoring the landscape of new AI models that we can include in our product.
We’ve added a lot more different types of journeys, like PowerPoint to video, Audio to video, as examples. We are going to continue to add different kinds of video workflows – prompt-based motion graphics, code-generated videos, automatic polishing of raw screen recordings, etc..
We’ve created APIs to allow automation and bulk-video creation. We are now working on an agentic framework that will let you create many variants from one video. Whether different languages, for different audiences, with different content, etc.
We’ve also built an interactive consumption layer and launched a product which automatically inserts quizzes and chapters in videos and makes the videos a lot more interactive. We will continue towards making videos real-time and more interactive in the future.
We’re also working towards a closed loop system where we can first analyze and predict performance of a video, then we can make suggestions on how you can improve the video, finally, we can help publish the video track performance and suggest variants that work better in the real world.
What’s the biggest technical limitation of AI video today? And how does Pictory address it?
Some of the biggest technical limitations of AI today are:
- The speed of generative images and videos – it’s slow.
- The cost – it’s pretty expensive to generate every scene using generative AI.
- The prompts are not directly adhered to and you might have to try many iterations.
The way Pictory is addressing all of those is to try and do as much as it can using stock libraries first. If you use stock videos or code-generated videos, it’s much more efficient and cheaper than generative diffusion models. Also, we are trying to optimize the prompts for our users so that they don’t have to fiddle around with the prompts.
What advice would you give to founders building AI-powered SaaS products?
AI is entering all aspects of the business, so it’s enabling founders to build new companies much faster and enabling you to build new products that weren’t possible before.
- First advice is that everybody should be using AI in all aspects of their business, whether it’s to build the product, whether it’s for customer service, whether it’s for selling. Use it for all aspects of the business.
- Second advice is don’t just build because it’s easy to build; build because it solves a real problem for someone in the world.
What trends are shaping the creator economy right now?
Creators have lots of choices of tools that they can use, and that’s one big trend facing the creator economy right now. Lots of choices, and it’s a blessing and a curse.
The second thing is there’s a lot of monetization pressure because there’s a lot of new creators that come live every day. Just like SaaS businesses are feeling competitive pressure, creators are also feeling a lot of competitive pressure – again because it is becoming so easy to create content.
What challenges exist in making AI-generated videos feel “human”?
Yes, you can use AI for the entire workflow to figure out the script to tell the story, to even generate the videos that tell the story. The real challenge is how to make your story more engaging, how to offer your unique point of view & perspective and your creativity. AI should be used as a tool and not as a replacement for your perspective and your creativity.
Did you enjoy our interview? Do you have anything to say to our community?
Yes, these are a great set of questions and I enjoyed answering them.
The only thing I would add for your community is that a lot of potential founders out there are scared and not wanting to do something because they are afraid that it will be replaced very quickly. While the possibility is there, the possibility of your product becoming a success is also high, so you have to take a chance. Especially if you are solving a real problem for lots of people. So, to repeat the Nike slogan – just do it.
