Story of the woman who transformed Vimeo from a failing company into a Billion-Dollar SaaS company

"Look where others are not focusing," says Vimeo CEO Anjali Sud. Aiming to make Vimeo a pioneer in the entertainment industry similar to Netflix, Anjali has worked day and night to take the company where it is today.

Vimeo transitioned itself from a media company that invested in content to a technology company that invests in creators. With this transition, the company’s growth has accelerated faster than before. And today, it has over 80 million members who are uploading and sharing incredible stories every millisecond from around the world.   

With a vision to "build, learn and impact", Anjali Sud changed the entire business of Vimeo in her first 90 days as a CEO. Let's look at what marketing strategies did she adopt for this transition.

Redefining vision and values

As the market of content progressed, the fight for original content increased. Vimeo, a viewing platform purely based on content, found it difficult to survive. It entered into various content wars where the market price of original content increased from millions to billions overnight.

It was then when Anjali decided to bring back Vimeo to its basics. She chose to switch to a different business model - turning Vimeo into a software-as-a-service or SaaS - where instead of monetizing the audience, it offered paid subscription plans for creators to access advanced tools on the platform, thus increasing the lifetime value of their creations. By undertaking this critical exercise to stick to a single goal and process the changes, Anjali Sud redefined Vimeo’s vision and values that were right for the company in the long term.

Own the shortcomings to fix them

Being self-aware and vulnerable as a leader is a sign of strength for Anjali Sud. She believes the same for the businesses - the more self-aware businesses are about their shortcomings, the better they can solve that.

This was illustrated by Vimeo itself when live streaming was the demanding feature among the creator community and Vimeo lacked the expertise to build the live streaming product for its community. 

Accepting this shortcoming and looking at an alternative solution, helped Vimeo acquire a Livestream company that launched the live video product. This combination of Vimeo and Livestream proved to be a powerful solution in the market for professional live streaming.

Lead with mission and focus

Vimeo's mission is to empower creators to tell exceptional stories and target individuals and small-to-medium size businesses for video creation, distribution and monetization of their content. But with the rapid transformation in industries and dynamic environment, it is easy for any company to get distracted by its competitor's moves. 

What kept Vimeo sustaining and winning were some harsh decisions taken by Anjali Sud, for instance, non-display of advertisements even after 14 years of its existence. The primary aim of the company is to simplify user experience by helping businesses or professionals or organizations to create its video content and distribute it while keeping costs down.

Turn competitor into partner

Vimeo took a distinct approach to competition. YouTube has been the number one competitor as it provides a great place for creators to find an audience on the internet. So, Vimeo helps its creator community to find the target audience on and off the platform by launching social distribution tools that allow its users to natively publish their videos with one click to different platforms like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter etc. 

With this approach, Vimeo turned competitors into partners and distributors. This is an extremely powerful way to deal with the competitors without making its creator community concerned about traffic, viewing hours, and other metrics on a different platform and can continue to use the Vimeo platform as a portfolio of professional work, to share with potential clients.

Conclusion

With all of these marketing tactics, Vimeo is committed to putting creators first in the era of content wars and overload advertisements on different platforms. It is really exciting that technology platforms like Vimeo are enabling everyone to be a part of the creator community in the form of future filmmaker, animator, artist, actor, entrepreneur, videographer, graphic designer to run their TV studio or launch a Netflix product to build their own video business. 

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