Insights
8 Videos You Need Before You Launch a Physical Product
A practical shot list for founders launching a product with a small team. What to make, what it's for, and what to skip.
Insights
A practical shot list for founders launching a product with a small team. What to make, what it's for, and what to skip.
You've got the product made, the funding in, and a team small enough to fit in one text thread. Now you need people to actually buy it.
Here's the thing nobody tells first-time founders: you don't need a launch film. You need a kit. A launch film is one asset that lives on your homepage and gets watched by your mom and your investors. A kit is eight assets that do eight different jobs across the funnel, and it's what actually sells product.
You can shoot most of this in one well-planned day.
1. The 30-second hero. Yes, you still need one. It goes on the homepage, in the deck, and in the press kit. It answers "what is this and why should I care" for someone who has never heard of you. Keep it short and resist the urge to tell your founding story here.
2. The demo. Someone using the product, in real life, doing the thing it does. This is the single highest-performing asset most product brands own and it's usually the one they underinvest in. If your product has a satisfying moment, whether that's a click, a pour, a snap, or a transformation, shoot that moment ten different ways.
3. The founder story, ninety seconds. You, on camera, explaining why this exists. Not polished. Slightly awkward is fine and often better. Early buyers are buying you as much as the product, and this is the asset that converts the people already on the fence.
4. Three to five vertical paid hooks. Different opening lines, same product. This is what you actually run on Meta and TikTok. They should feel native to the platform, not like your hero spot cropped to 9:16. Cropped hero spots are the most common wasted budget in early-stage paid media.
5. The objection video. Whatever the most common "yeah but" is, answer it directly on camera. Too expensive. Won't fit. Will it work for me. This asset does more retargeting work than anything else you'll make.
6. Unboxing and first impression. Because people search for it before they buy, and if you don't make it, the first one that exists will be made by a stranger with bad lighting.
7. Social proof, as soon as you have any. Even three real customers on camera beats a wall of five-star text reviews. Shoot these the week after your first orders ship.
8. A photo pull from the same day. Not video, but shoot it while the set is lit. You need product-on-white for retail and marketplaces, lifestyle for ads and email, and detail shots for the PDP. Getting these separately later costs you another production day.
The brand manifesto film. The animated logo sting. The two-minute factory tour. All of these feel important and none of them move a launch. Make them in year two when you have revenue to justify the indulgence.
One recommendation: plan the shoot backward from your media plan. Decide where each asset runs before you decide what to shoot, and you'll come out of one day with a launch kit instead of a beautiful film and no ads.
