Dear LongTail Video Community,
I am excited to share some very exciting news – LongTail Video has just completed its first venture financing round! In total, we raised $5 million and have partnered with two fantastic investors, Greycroft Partners and Cue Ball Capital. Needless to say, this is a big milestone for our company and we cannot thank all of you enough for your support.
If you are interested in learning more about the financing, you can find the official press release here.
So now that our financing is complete, the obvious question is ‘how are we going to invest the money to grow LongTail’? Here are a couple of things you can expect to see from us:
– Building better products, faster. Since our founding, our mission has been to provide affordable, easy-to-use services so that developers, designers, marketers and business owners can navigate the complicated world of online video. In order for us to continue our execution of this mission, it is critical that we accelerate our product development efforts to meet the fast-changing online video landscape. Given this, you can expect us to make significant investments in growing our engineering, product and support teams as we strive to better serve the needs of our customers. In fact, our next major release is just weeks away so please stay tuned for the upcoming announcement.
– Expanding awareness of our products. Today, nearly 2 million sites actively use the JW Player and our other video services. Amazingly, we have spent virtually no money on sales and marketing and have instead relied primarily on word-of-mouth to help drive new customer adoption. We consider ourselves incredibly fortunate to have so many supportive customers. However, we also believe that now is the right time to begin investing in the commercial side of the business. The world of online video is still very new to many and we see a big opportunity for us to meet new users who do not already know us. Thus, we will be making investments to build sales, marketing and business development capabilities so that we can grow awareness of both our company and our products. I am sure that we will be reaching out to many of you to explore how we might be able to work more closely together on this front.
We are incredibly optimistic about the next stage of growth at LongTail Video. There are tremendous opportunities in front of us and we are excited to work with all of you as we continue to build what we believe are the best products available in online video.
Thank you again for all of your support. We look forward to hearing from you soon.
Sincerely,
Dave Otten and the LongTail Video Team