MotionGility: How An Animation Company Is Helping Global Startups & Enterprises Navigate Brand Success

Komal Chaturvedi

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Published: June 10th, 2023

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Komal Chaturvedi

Founder, MotionGility

Founders

100

Employees

MotionGility

motiongility.com

from North Wales, PA, USA

started October 2015

Founders

100

Employees

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Hello! Who are you and what business did you start?

Hello! I’m Komal Chaturvedi - Co-Founder & CEO of MotionGility. We are an Animated Explainer Video Production company that creates explainer videos for startups, MNCs, and global enterprises.

We create and market explainer videos for our client partners and aim to play an instrumental role in helping them attain their marketing and branding goals.

Our target audience includes medium & large-scale startups, enterprises, and MNCs.

Also, we are placed under the top 5 companies on The Manifest’s list of Top Motion Graphic Studios of 2023.

Currently, we are generating an average of 35 to 40 leads per month with an MoM growth of 12% - 18%.

Talking about the monthly growth of the website, we’re currently witnessing an average of 15% to 22% of growth in users.

Considering our current efforts and all factors involved, we’re expecting to grow our website’s traffic growth by 30% in the coming months.

What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?

I started MotionGility with my childhood friend Himanshu Chaturvedi who not only happens to be the Founder & Director of the company but also my better half.

Himanshu holds a Diploma in Animation as well as a Degree in Education from Cambridge University. Whereas, I hold a Bachelor of Engineering degree in Computer Science.

Initially, he was working with an animation studio where he badly wanted to channel his inner creativity and create something worthy for the market.

One day, due to a lack of space for creativity and with the burden of monotonous work, he quit his job. During this time, I was already working for an MNC and was also aspiring to start my own company and resort to entrepreneurship. As a result, I joined hands and we began our entrepreneurial journey.

However, while on our journey, we encountered a ton of obstacles. Right from lack of funds to manpower, it was difficult for us to sustain ourselves. It was here that I decided to return to my job and began to work parallelly on our startup.

Talking about how we chanced upon this idea for creating explainer videos for clients is a story based on experiential learning.

As Himanshu started working in the video production field, he began to realize a few problems small & medium-scale business owners used to face in terms of spreading the word about their products.

He soon understood that while the big guns have enough to spend on marketing & advertising, small businesses do not have the accessibility to produce quality and effective marketing instruments for growing their business.

He wanted to address this gap and provide these business owners with an opportunity in the form of explainer videos to help them grow.

At this moment, the idea of creating explainer videos popped into Himanshu’s mind. He had well-familiarized himself with the nitty-gritty of motion graphics and how animation can change a brand’s presence on the internet.

Take us through the process of building the first version of your product.

Our flagship product or service, if we term it precisely, is animated explainer videos.

For quick context, they are a marketing instrument used by brands for a variety of purposes such as launching new products, demonstrating the functionality of their software, web platform, or app, and also during the stages of the marketing funnel.

If we talk about the process of creating explainer videos, it starts with a brief call with our respective clients as we sit down and discuss their requirements, agenda, and the key outcome they wish to derive from the video.

As soon as we are done with the brainstorming and researching stage, our scriptwriters begin to write a compelling script keeping in mind the brand tone, key message, and the desired action that we want viewers to take after watching the video.

Afterward, we share the script with our client for approval, and on its receipt, we begin the storyboarding stage where our visualizers and artists start creating digital sketches or video blueprints.

This allows us to visualize the complete video in one shot as it leaves more room for creativity. As we get the storyboard approved, the scenes are sent for illustration where our artists work on creating relevant characters, icons, background scenes, and all those elements that are needed to bring the product’s message to life.

The completion of the Illustration marks the beginning of the Voiceover stage where our voiceover artist takes over the script and breaths energy into the video.

The last stage is the most exciting. This is where all those characters, icons, and graphic elements are brought into motion. Here, the animation artists transform still images into motion graphics by adding an aesthetic appeal to the video.

Describe the process of launching the business.

Before we launched our website, we had already worked for a couple of clients where we delivered logos, short animated clips, GIFs, etc.

By establishing our active presence on freelancing websites such as Fiverr, Upwork, Freelancer, etc., we were able to bid for projects and win clients.

Initially, it was tough to build trust and credibility since we didn’t possess a full-fledged portfolio or even a website, we used to convince them by showcasing our work in the quickest and easiest manner possible.

We believed in ourselves and our work. And I feel this is what has brought us and MotionGility to what it is today.

As we gradually began to generate more clients through word-of-mouth, we realized the need for possessing a full-fledged service website to showcase our work online to the world.

This led us into creating our official website where you can discover everything about us, right from our services, resources, clientele, etc.

To establish our digital presence, we designed our website on WordPress.

We chose WordPress due to the variety of features it comes with such as security, customization, universality, etc.

Also, our primary intention while creating the website was to provide all the necessary details in one shot and in a crisp and engaging manner.

Whether it's our agenda, our portfolio, or the benefits explainer videos offer businesses, our website is a digital salesman that has everything one needs.

If you ask me the story behind how we came up with MotionGility’s Logo, well it’s an amalgamation of 2 strong forces that drive us today.

So quite obviously, the “motion’ in MotionGility stands for Motion Graphics since we’re India’s leading Motion Graphics Studio.

And “gility” comes from the word “Agility”. In many situations, we’ve been quick at decision-making and have improvised our current plans in tough conditions, thus providing us an edge over the market.

Regarding the branding part, from Day 1 we’ve been working on the motto of delivering the most supreme quality of work to our clients. Quite greatly we’re proud of forming this principle for ourselves.

In regards to the same, we’ve been equally vocal about the quality of our work and the workspace culture we provide to our team on the Internet.

So much so, MotionGility today has become synonymous with Exceptional Animated Explainer Videos.

Talking about financing the business, we are extremely proud to have completely bootstrapped our business without indulging in any funding activities.

Now that we stand strong after the successful completion of 7+ years in the motion graphics & animation industry, we have tons of lessons to share with our aspiring entrepreneurs.

Please do not get influenced by the outer world and get tricked into believing that entrepreneurship will help you get rid of your 9-5 pains.

To say the least, I would say that we bank on the delivery of quality video services by extending the element of customization to our esteemed clients.

We believe this characteristic alongside on-time deliveries has helped us stay at the top of the bracket of the world’s top animated explainer video production companies.

Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?

Since day 1, our sheer focus has been on supplying quality deliverables to our clients.

Despite dozens of obstacles that we faced in terms of talent, funds, premises, equipment, etc., we have never compromised on the quality parameters of our explainer videos.

If I were to give a piece of advice to budding entrepreneurs and professionals, it would be to document their journey and get ready a stack of all their work to share with their prospects.

This same habit has worked wonders for us. Right from our early days, we have ensured to prepare a detailed portfolio which has helped us win some big guns in the likes of ADNOC, HDFC, Nissan, AssetMark, and many more.

On top of that, we keep a constant check on our website and social channels where we keep sharing our work on a regular basis. Our rigorous efforts of outreach activities have landed us links from websites and platforms such as Jeff Bullas, Clutch, The Manifest, DesignRush, etc.

As far as growing traffic on the website is concerned, our efforts take shape in the form of a variety of SEO-related activities that help us generate traffic from our target locations.

To connect with the industry, we regularly publish blogs, research guides, and E-books on our website.

Our primary strategy behind writing these in-depth and well-researched blogs and guides is to help decision-makers understand and market their product in a result-oriented manner.

Mostly, blogs and guides have fetched us numerous leads either through the CTAs placed or through exit-intent forms.

Talking about our outreach activities, we conduct thorough research and take the help of tools such as Ahrefs, SEMRush, etc. These tools help us in finding out details about the websites, platforms, and sometimes the resource persons with whom we connect via mail.

Contacting direct individuals at organizations and optimizing subject lines and email messages have led us in achieving an impressive 70% email open rate.

From retaining the customer's perspective, providing our customers with desired results has helped us unlock the Word-of-Mouth marketing element that keeps us busy all year round delivering appealing animated videos to varied requirements.

How are you doing today and what does the future look like?

As we march forward in our vision to become the world’s best explainer video company, we look forward to expanding our reach across oceans with an already established presence in the United States & Canada.

MotionGility now provides animated video production services in India, Australia, UAE, Europe, etc., and we are also on the verge of launching our dedicated digital marketing services to serve clients better.

This will allow us to provide end-to-end solutions from video production to video marketing, thus helping clients by providing them with a concrete marketing & distribution plan to fuel their content marketing efforts.

To execute this in the desired manner, we are currently focusing on strengthening our relationships with global startups, MSMEs, and MNCs for better facilitation and networking.

Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?

Well, I would say that while building this organization, we had our fair share of learnings and failures during the initial days.

While we continue to learn every day, I believe that we kind of neglected the importance and role micro and macro management play in the process of building a company.

As and when we moved ahead, we rigorously prepared and defined set processes and operational measures to run and facilitate better administration at all levels of the organization.

Talking about the good decisions or factors that existed with us were regarding strong leadership which I believe we had in the face of Himanshu and the underlying spirit to become the best version of ourselves every day.

This not only helped us build our company from scratch but also bolstered our efforts into establishing ourselves as one of the top service providers of our domain in the world.

As a result of our timely decisions related to marketing, expansion, and production quality upgradation, we successfully cracked long-term partnerships and even collaborations with industry leaders.

At last, not to forget, we’ve been stressing about building a solid team from Day 1 and yet after 7 years today, it still continues to be one of our key mottos.

If I talk about our hiring approach, we generally lookout for like-minded and passion-driven candidates on job-hunting platforms like LinkedIn.

However, we also consider the applications received from Naukri.com, Indeed, and other job marketplaces.

When we interview candidates, we mostly look at their mindset and their will to work harder for the company's goals. Apart from skills, we lay equal emphasis on their character and the way they would probably carry themselves at our workplace.

These parameters have led us into creating a talented and goal-driven workforce that is committed to delivering exemplary results to our esteemed clients.

What platform/tools do you use for your business?

In our day-to-day operations, we make use of Slack for all our internal communication tasks and activities.

Apart from it, we’ve been using Hubspot’s CRM tool for better facilitation and data management & tracking with our clients and stakeholders.

For our social media operations related to scheduling and dashboard management, we use Buffer, Meta Suite, and Asana respectively.

And lastly, to streamline our external communications or precisely, email management solutions, we use LemList.

What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?

Well, it’s tough to remember all the books that I’ve read over these many years but I do remember a quite few of them:

The 2-minute Revolution: The Art of Growing Business by Sangeeta Talwar.
Zero to One by Peter Thiel - This book taught me the importance of having a fresh perspective and how as a startup, founders can foster new initiatives about how ideas can be shaped.

I feel it’s true because as a new startup, you have the liberty to visualize your vision and how you want your company to look and be after certain years down the line.

Crushing It by Garyvee.

Well, this extraordinary book needs no introduction. Garyvee being Garyvee talks largely about how one can leverage tons of opportunities through his/her personal brand and literally Crush It!

Certainly, there are a ton of takeaways but my favorite one is about the level at which the audience generated through a personal brand can be monetized in a profitable manner.

Interesting, right?

Regarding Podcasts, I’d suggest a few that have helped me broaden my perspective on growing and scaling business:

The Barbershop with Shantanu by Shantanu Deshpande.

I’d personally recommend this to every budding entrepreneur who wishes to expand his/her knowledge base and access ground-zero insights from industry veterans.

I have missed out on a few of his episodes. Although from the ones I’ve listened to, they have been insanely valuable and full of productive learnings as well as takeaways.

Entrepreneurs on Fire by John Lee Dumas.
The 10-minute Entrepreneur by Sean Castrina.

I vividly remember one of the episodes where it was all about what great entrepreneurs never do.

Again, I loved it because it taught me a lot about how I can shape myself as a successful entrepreneur.

Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?

I won’t be wrong if I say that today, entrepreneurship has become symbolical to a fashion statement with thousands adopting it without analyzing the risks it comes along.

I’ve personally seen a lot of individuals leaving their jobs and jumping into entrepreneurship without proper planning, direction, and strategy.

To all the young minds reading this, please do not get influenced by the outer world and get tricked into believing that entrepreneurship will help you get rid of your 9-5 pains.

In fact, you’ll have to work 24/7 once you become an entrepreneur. Sounds funny, but is true!

So only if in case you have a concrete plan, an idea to execute, a small yet effective group of individuals, and most importantly, the skill to assess the risk and the mindset of risk-taking appetite, only then resort to entrepreneurship.

Because this could be the most exciting as well as a frightening roller-coaster ride of your life!

Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?

As we look forward to expanding our presence, we are constantly on the lookout for talented minds who are willing to work with visionary organizations.

Currently, we are open to hiring Illustrators, Storyboard artists, Motion Designers, Business Development Executives, and Animators.

We invite applications from interested individuals and would be happy to receive their applications at [email protected].