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01/18/17 | Founders

Changing the Way We Experience Video

Women 2.0 Interviews Susan Danziger, Founder of Ziggeo, the Cloud-Based Embeddable Video Recorder / Player.

W2: What inspired you to start Ziggeo?

A few years ago, we were building a recruitment platform that let candidates record videos for employers to view. We figured the video feature would be easy to add — we’d just use an existing off-the-shelf, embeddable video recorder/player API. Turns out that video API technology didn’t exist. We couldn’t believe it. So we had to build our own. It took us months and months — and the technology is super complicated. We figured if we had this problem, others must have it as well. That was our “aha” moment. We launched Ziggeo’s video API  that others could use — and closed our original recruitment platform to focus on being a pure technology business. 

W2: What type of customers do you serve?  

Recruitment platforms of course love our technology, given our background. However, any platform, website or app looking to embed a video recorder or video player can use our technology. They might use them to integrate video messages, video profiles or video reviews/testimonials (for e.g. e-commerce sites). Other examples include brands that want to capture video stories from their communities; educational platforms looking to capture student videos or crowdfunding sites like Crowdrise looking to use video as an engagement tool.  

W2: Tell us a little about how your product works.

We have an API and SDKs for iOS and Android that let you insert a video recorder and/or a video player right into your website or app. You can easily record videos from your audience or community and then either keep the videos private or curate them and make them public. We have some neat tools like being able to add Instagram-like filters, so your videos become cartoons, or you can brand the videos with your logo before launching. The videos are also searchable via images or words used.  

W2: What’s the best productivity hack you’ve found? 

Susan with a friend.

Susan with a friend.

I follow what I call the “Magic Number 30”.  Each day I make 30 points of contact with folks outside our company — maybe to customers, potential customers, partners, even old friends or folks in my network. I write each contact down in a notebook — numbered 1 to 30— and I don’t go to sleep without reaching that magic number. Sometimes I have to force myself to stay awake (26, 27, 28, 29, 30). Those contacts let me stay in touch with customers, keep up my contacts and force me to reach out to others (which has led to lots of new opportunities). 30 contacts a day really add up: it’s 150 each week (I only do this weekdays) and 600 a month. I’ve used this hack throughout my career, whether for job-hunting, client development or customer outreach.  

W2: What’s next for you and your company and where do you need support?  

We’re continuing to innovate on both the technology and product front to ensure that we remain the leaders of video APIs. On the personal front, I continue to support female founders and work to ensure that female founders are in the spotlight as much as possible. Re: needing support, we’re planning Video Hack Day for March 11th in NYC and would love help spreading the word. We want to get lots of female hackers out there. It’s free to sign up

Susan Danziger is the founder/CEO of Ziggeo, a video API named “best API for video recording and playback” by API World 2016. She was named a Woman of Influence 2016 and won the 2016 SmartCEO Brava Award. She previously founded Video Hack Day, and DailyLit. Susan speaks four languages (English, German, French and Italian) and loves to travel the world. She is based in NYC.

Twitter: @susandanziger Blog: susandanziger.com

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