Brett Lindenberg Podcast Transcript
Brett Lindenberg joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Welcome to Coruzant Technologies, Home of The Digital Executive Podcast.
Brian Thomas: Welcome to The Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Brett Lindenberg. In 2017, Brett founded Mindstamp in a Palo Alto, California basement, not too far from the legendary garage where Hewlett Packard began placing Silicon Valley at the epicenter of technology innovation.
A former Amazon software engineer Brett knew his future was an entrepreneurship. Mindstamp was originally designed as a social media video tool that allowed friends to add additional content like notes and images to videos, they were sharing between themselves. The idea came from Brett’s desire to feel closer to friends and family in his home state of Florida.
Well, good afternoon, Brett. Welcome to the show!
Bret Lindenberg: Thank you very much, Brian. Happy to be here!
Brian Thomas: Absolutely love doing this. Appreciate it. Hailing out of Kansas City here, and I don’t have to go too far today just to Florida, but do appreciate you making the time jumping on and engaging in a conversation today.
So, Brett, jumping into the first question, Mindstamp began in a similar entrepreneurial spirit as major companies, like Hewlett Packard, starting from a basement in Palo Alto. Could you share more about those early days and how they shaped your vision for Mindstamp?
Bret Lindenberg: Yeah, that’s right. Mindstamp did start in the basement.
In fact, it was right down the street from the Hewlett Packard garage. So, after college, I turned down a full-time job from Amazon because I knew I wanted to kind of pursue entrepreneurship. And I had a cousin who’s now my co-founder, who was gracious enough to let me crash in his basement for a couple of months while I got my stamp off the ground.
And he happened to live out Palo Alto at the time. So, when I moved out across the country there, I was still sharing a lot of videos with my friends back home specifically live music videos. And I got really sick of sending the, you know, video link and then sending a couple of follow up messages saying, Hey, check out one minute, check out three minutes and 30 seconds.
Isn’t that crazy? It just felt inefficient to me. And I thought that there had to be a better way to kind of watch videos with friends, but asynchronously, right? And so that’s how Mindstamp was born. We started pursuing this social vision of videos with friends. And the earliest kind of feature of it was just adding comments into the video at specific time stamps that would pop up when your friends watched it.
So, it’s kind of like you’re watching together, right? My comments, my thoughts are engaged with the video while you’re watching it. It was a little bit hard to get some traction with that, but we started to notice that Mindstamp started to be used by some video production agencies. They’d use that for client feedback.
So, while they’re producing a video, instead of sending the video file draft over and then having a Google Doc where the I could come in and say, Hey, at 30 seconds, let’s make this a color a little bit different. They can now just start doing this directly in the video. Just type over the video while they’re watching.
Eventually, one of them asked, Hey, can we request specific feedback at this time rather than just relying on them to provide it on their own will? And that was kind of the first transition to interactivity and interactive video that we experienced. And since then, we are a pretty customer driven company.
We generally listen to what people on our platform are trying to achieve, what their goals are, and we try to help them achieve it. And it’s been about six years now that we’ve been building down that path and have grown to be serving, you know, thousands of companies and millions of viewers around the world with interactive video.
Brian Thomas: That’s amazing. And I love the story and the fact that you were just down the street from, you know, Hewlett Packard it’s just, It’s kind of a cliche moment there, but that is really, really cool. I love the story and the fact that you’ve brought a lot of efficiency and innovation to this market, because obviously videos can be really long and, and trying to tell people to find something in it.
It’s like a needle in a haystack sometime. So, I appreciate that. And Brett, you’ve emphasized the role of interactive videos and sales, marketing, education, and training. Can you discuss how interactive features enhance these areas and perhaps share a success story where Mindstamp dramatically improves a client engagement or results?
Bret Lindenberg: Sure. So video is super popular throughout all these industries and pretty much every industry we see video growing every day. And at Mindstamp, we kind of try to measure success in terms of video engagement with three questions. One, did the viewer see the content? Two, did they understand the content?
Did they understand what the meaning was? And three, did they take the action that you want after seeing the content? So, you can see how those goals are all pretty different across sales, marketing, education, and training with the first two really focused on, you know, kind of brand affinity and potentially a buy action at the end or a further engagement.
Whereas education and training are more so you know, really focused on number one and two, did they see it and did they understand it? And kind of, did they have any questions with it? So, with sales and marketing, obviously, any company’s goal is to get more awareness and get more leads. And Mindstamp does that in two ways.
One, we offer built in lead capture into the video. Right. Rather than just putting the video on YouTube and hoping that they find your company and submit a form later or contact you, you can go ahead and gate that content or collect their information, their name, their email, any sort of preferences they have while they’re watching the video.
So, people are much more willing to give their information when they feel that they’re engaged with the content when they’re actively participating. And that’s what Mindstamp helps them achieve. We give them call to action buttons, hotspots that they can click off, buy a product to visit the website.
Request a demo, anything that lets them take that next step is really going to shine in the sales and marketing category, whereas education and training, right? We have questions. We have interactive questions in the video. We’ve all taken we’ve all, you know, watched a 60-minute video and then taken a 10-question quiz at the very end.
Very few of us actually watch that video, right? We turn it on, we go make some coffee, we go grab a bite to eat, then we come back and do our best. Mindstamp kind of prevents that. We let you add those questions in throughout the video. So, when that information is fresh, we’re going to quiz you on it. We’re going to make sure that you understand it.
And if you don’t, we have a dynamic kind of learning path that we can provide to you if you don’t. So, if you got the question wrong, we can move you back to two minutes in the video, have you review that section again. If you get it right, we can maybe skip the next three minutes, because you already understand this concept and you don’t need more.
So, we’re Personalized learning path and kind of two-way engagement when it comes to education and training really elevates their, the viewers level engagement and their sense of ownership over the material and therefore they’re learning and understanding. So, we’ve got clients far and wide doing some things as basic as, you know, HR training that they want to replace with a live, a live instructor with an interactive video.
All the way over to we had a really cool client. This is kind of unrelated to those, but we are publishing a research paper over in Ireland because University of Dublin had a surgical research team that really wanted to understand how people how surgeons around the world. Would respond to specific cases specifically where they would make their cuts when they’re doing surgery and, you know, my stamp has a drawing tool feature.
So, we can, you can ask a question and have them draw on the video and response, you know, circle something, highlight something, point to something that’s out of place. But this team surveyed a couple of 1000 surgeons around the world. Where they’d have short video clips of, you know, the surgery and progress and say, Hey, where would you make this next incision?
They collected thousands of responses all around the world, and then we’re able to overlay them into a visualization and see, you know, just the degree of very variance and concentration of where these people would make these cuts. And from there, they publish that research and continue to do more research based on that to better understand why surgeons are thinking this way.
So interactive video allows for, you know, kind of asynchronous engagement around the world and data collection and the actions that you want,
Brian Thomas: right, but I appreciate you highlighting that. Obviously, interactive video really raises that level of engagement. You know, comprehension and better collaboration.
I love the video example that you shared with the drawing in the video and asking questions, that sort of thing. I think that’s important and Brett mind stamp is known for its innovative use of video interactions in AI. Can you elaborate on some of the unique features that mind stamp offers and how these are advancing the interactive video technology landscape?
Bret Lindenberg: Yeah, absolutely. So, AI is obviously all the rage right now. And we’ve always been kind of paying attention and looking for ways we can creatively layer in AI into interactive video, right? AI in its current state is fundamentally interactive. It’s a chat-based interface, right? Where you say something or you ask something or you do something and you get a response.
So, it fits in really nicely with interactive video. Specifically, we have two kind of AI focused features right now that we’re excited about, mostly in the education and training front. Which is one we call Genie AI. That’s our AI assistant, and it turns any of your videos into a mini chat GPT. So essentially you can have it have a chat GPT for your video.
That’s only trained on your video content. That’s the transcript and any other information you might provide that might not be in the transcript. So, you can imagine the learning and training education context. Imagine if you could ask a question to your video about the lecture content. You know, say, Hey, what are the top three ideas from this?
Where do they mention this concept? Can you help me understand this concept that we just mentioned? And you’ll get it a response back along with timestamps in the video. So immediately you’ve got this learning tool where you can, you know, instead of searching around the video or trying to find it on the seek bar, you can just ask the video exactly what’s going on or what’s being discussed and how you should think about it and then immediately navigate to that.
So, from the learner side, that’s super powerful. We’ve been seeing a lot of people really love that. And from the admin side, we have a AI quiz builder. So similar to that, based on the transcript, if you want to take a video and turn it into a quiz, instead of, you know, going through deciding your own questions, spacing them out appropriately, we have a one click AI solution that says, Hey, give me 5, 10 questions on this video, space them out evenly, all with correct answers and, you know, correctness checking and boom, you’re done.
That’s it. Just one click, that video now has 10, 5 questions, however many you choose on it, along with correctness, and it is a living, breathing quiz that will actually verify if people understand this. So, that saves, you know, educators up to an hour at a time per quiz, if they’re, you know, having to create the content, having to proof it, etc.
Now they can just do a one click one click interaction to turn this into a quiz. A great video quiz, so powerful on both the student side, the learner side as well as the educator side in terms of asking questions of the video and then adding questions to the video.
Brian Thomas: That’s amazing and again with the power of AI, we’re seeing all kinds of possibilities.
Especially in your platform. And I think that’s so awesome that we can do so much to a video. It’s like having video editing software at your fingertips, but able to do really that magic wand and create that magic for whether it’s a learner or a creator. So, I appreciate that. And Brett, last question of the day, how do you see interactive video evolving in the next few years?
And what role do you envision Mindstamp playing in this evolution?
Bret Lindenberg: Yeah, definitely. I think that, you know, video is only going to get more interactive. You’re already seeing it across all these different platforms like TikTok and Instagram, where they have these live shoppable videos. That’s something that we do as well, shoppable video.
But you can imagine there’s just such attention spans are so much shorter. They’re shorter than they’ve ever been, and people are looking for, you know, it really takes a lot to get people to stick and continue to watch your content. Interactive video is a great way to do that, you know, both by making them a part of the experience where they can control, do video branching, explore the content on their own and keep them engaged.
As well as on the data side, right? We want to automate more items. We want to know who’s watching. We want to serve them the correct follow up message after they watch, if they added something to their card, or if they click the button, we want to add that to our CRM and continue our marketing like that.
So interactive video, both benefits, you know, the watcher as well as the creator of it, and I think that in the future. Videos going to be more and more interactive. You’re going to see more interactive entertainment experiences, kind of like the Netflix band or snatch. Choose your own adventure. More and more companies are going to do that.
So generally, I think that more and more videos are going to become interactive. Interactivity is going to carry on to more different use cases across more different industries. And at Mindstamp, you know, we’re trying to provide the best product in the world that helps people reach their goals as quickly as possible.
So, we’re just continuing to innovate, continuing to refine and perfect our technology. You know, I think we have some of the best front end video technology in the world. We have control over every pixel of that screen. And we’re just going to keep on building and keep on listening to our customers and seeing what we can do to help them achieve their goals.
Brian Thomas: That’s awesome. You’ve come a long way just with your current platform, but I see the pot. The possibilities are endless with what you can do interactive. And, you know, I can see this doing. With live feed, maybe in the future or something. It’s just, just amazing. So, I appreciate that. And Brett, it was such a pleasure having you on today and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
Bret Lindenberg: Thank you very much, Brian. It was a pleasure to be here and I appreciate you having me.
Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Brett Lindenberg Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s podcast page.
