EP37 · Economy · first published 2020-09-18
Video content in e-commerce | Nora Huovila | Negotiator 37
Videoly CEO Nora Huovila explains how the company pulls product videos for an entire e-commerce catalogue out of YouTube and attaches them automatically to product pages — tens of thousands of products from a single script implementation. The episode covers the psychology that makes video move purchase decisions, the curation process, the different maturity of the brand side and the retailer side, internationalising one vertical at a time with an office in Toronto next to Shopify, and why Huovila treats company culture as the competitive edge in the fight for top talent. It closes with advice for founders: Finns shoulder the entrepreneur's responsibility but forget to use the entrepreneur's freedom.
Video content in e-commerce | Nora Huovila
Summary: In episode 37 of the Negotiator channel, Sami Miettinen interviews Nora Huovila, CEO and co-founder of Videoly. Videoly builds technology that finds the product videos of the brands an online store sells — mostly on YouTube — and attaches them automatically to that store’s product pages. The conversation runs from the psychology of video and the curation process to platform politics, the differing maturity of the brand side and the retailer side, and an internationalisation plan whose first office lands not in Silicon Valley but in Toronto. A second thread is culture: Huovila co-founded a women’s network at Aalto University and now runs a company where soft values are a deliberate route to hard results.
Videoly, the cap table and the first VC round
Videoly was founded by Sergei, who comes from far eastern Russia and made his way west in stages, eventually settling in Finland. Huovila joined as second founder somewhat later, while considering her own next career move, taking on the business and commercialisation side.
The ownership base was built through three angel rounds. Sergei is the largest shareholder, and Reaktor Ventures came aboard early alongside a large group of angels — Kim Väisänen among them. The most recent angel round brought in Juha Valvanen, founder of Nosto, who now chairs the board. The newest development is Vendep Capital and the company’s largest round to date — its first proper VC round, at one million. Huovila stresses that every employee also owns a piece of the company through the option programme; for her it is a matter of values.
Miettinen recounts noticing the company after his own firm, Translink Corporate Finance, had sold the Keskisen Kello online store to A-lehdet and started looking into why that e-commerce business was doing so well.
The Aalto women’s network and soft values
Huovila began her studies at Helsinki University of Technology and graduated from Aalto. Towards the end of her studies, at a consulting excursion dinner table, a group of women asked each other where they would meet like-minded, career-oriented women once their studies were behind them. The network was founded in 2011. Behind it was a sense that company excursions appealed more to a male audience and emphasised harder values; the network wanted to open up companies’ values and everyday reality, and to make inspiring career stories audible. One of the founders was Paula Poukka, now on Videoly’s leadership team running all of sales and marketing.
Asked by Miettinen whether this is all a bit soft, Huovila answers directly: her personal mission is to demonstrate that putting people first in your values also builds a successful business. Running the network gave her a route to meet Finland’s top executives, and the same humanity recurred in every career story — which gave her the courage to become a founder herself.
Growth targets, and whether the culture survives America
The VC round scaled the company’s targets and put it on an ambitious track, but the core philosophy, Huovila says, did not change. The argument is commercial: hard results require the best people, competition for top talent is fierce, and company culture is Videoly’s competitive edge against many other firms. Offering a good working life is how you keep the people who build the growth.
Huovila contrasts two mindsets. Unicorn culture keeps its eye firmly on the prize and does whatever it takes to get there. Her own starting point is memento mori: life is unpredictable, and you cannot build it on the assumption that a 30x return for an investor might materialise one day. Every day has to be worth living — “it’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey” — and that is precisely the strategy for arriving, because it makes the journey good enough that the best people want to be on it. Miettinen connects this to Simon Sinek’s infinite game; Sinek is one of Huovila’s favourite authors, and everyone who joins the company reads Leaders Eat Last.
Why video sells: the psychology of moving images
Advertisers, Huovila notes, have known video’s power for a long time. The explanation lies in human psychology: reading text uses the cognitive part of the brain, while images are absorbed automatically without extra effort. That is why watching video is relaxing. On top of that, the brain evolved to notice movement — on the savannah it was useful to spot the moving tiger in the bushes. Add another human telling a story, with sound and picture together, and the effect is multisensory, so the message lands far more effectively than as text alone or as an image with text.
Curation and the product-information problem
An online store may carry tens of thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands, of products, and managing product information is already critical for images and copy alone. Finding and linking videos by hand would be an enormous job. Videoly’s solution sources the videos of every brand and product the store sells from YouTube and links them automatically to the product pages — in practice a single script implementation puts thousands of videos into the store.
The videos are curated. The process is partly automated and partly manual: every video is watched once, quality is checked, and it is verified that the video really concerns the right product. Content types range from instructional videos to inspirational clips and product comparisons. The platform has now been opened to brands as well: instead of the videos being found on YouTube, a brand can deliver them directly, after which they are linked into every relevant retailer’s store. Huovila draws a broader observation from this: brands invest heavily in their presentation in a physical department store, but have had very little influence over how they look in that same retailer’s online store.
The platform game: YouTube, Vimeo and search visibility
Miettinen offers Translink’s own experience: reference videos embedded via Vimeo on the company’s own landing pages drew very few viewers, while a YouTube channel unexpectedly brought a hundred thousand pairs of eyes. The world’s two largest search engines are Google and YouTube; Vimeo is not on that list.
Videoly’s model is a hybrid: mostly the YouTube player and link, but also video files delivered directly by brands. In an embedded video no advertisement appears at the start or in the middle — suggested videos and ads come only at the end. Miettinen notes that platforms have an interest in keeping viewers on their own channel, a phenomenon now visible on the video side through Spotify and Joe Rogan too. Videoly’s thinking, Huovila says, is to let the content producer place the video where the relevant audience already is: a shopper who is already on the product page is far more likely to watch than one who would have to wander onto the brand’s YouTube channel.
Data on which video actually sells
Sitting on the product page also produces data: is the item added to the basket after the video is watched or not. Videoly can see what kinds of videos work in the product-video context — instructions, reviews and comparisons, brand-produced content or user-generated content — as well as whether the video is watched to the end and where viewers drop off. That information is valuable back to the content producers.
A consumer’s own video can end up in a retailer’s store, but it has to pass the curation criteria and the creator has to permit embedding outside YouTube. In practice the emphasis is on higher-quality professional videos.
Subtitles and language markets
To Miettinen’s observation that many people watch video with the sound off, Huovila replies that some customers have asked for subtitles and the feature is on the future roadmap. At present the company depends on whether the content producer subtitled the video. She adds that in a product video, simply seeing the product in moving images has value in itself, even without the audio.
Language also drives market selection: Videoly has focused on English-language video content and therefore enters markets where that works — the United States rather than France or Germany, where their experience is that the content would need to be in French or German.
Negotiations, internationalisation and Toronto
In contract negotiations with large companies Videoly has at times had to bend to the counterparty’s terms. The direction of travel is the opposite: the service is so easy to adopt that the goal is “click the box, accept the terms” with no negotiation at all. US customers have been won without any local presence, and so far they have accepted Videoly’s own terms.
The retailer side is the company’s bread and butter and familiar territory; the brand-side product was launched that same year and is still being developed with the first customers. Internationalisation therefore proceeds from the retailer angle and one vertical at a time: tool stores and electronics stores first, because coverage among retailers is what makes the product attractive to the brands selling through them — Bosch, for instance. The vision is a loop in which the two sides feed each other.
Miettinen refers to Ali Omar’s recommendation (Negotiator 35) that a key person has to fly to the target market in person. Huovila agrees: conversations with Finnish tech companies that expanded successfully into the US suggest a founder-type figure has to go and onboard the team and carry the culture. At Videoly that person would be neither Huovila nor Sergei but Paula. The office, however, may not go up in the US at all but in Toronto, Canada — proximity to Shopify does no harm in the e-commerce business, and another Finnish company has taken the same approach.
Remote teams, work permits and English as the working language
Huovila points out that the importance of location depends on the business: Videoly sells remotely into a distributed market, so being near partners matters more than being in Silicon Valley. More and more companies settle nowhere at all and simply hire a remote team wherever the best person happens to be — and the coronavirus is pushing this further.
Videoly was international from the outset: English has been the working language from day one, and product development is entirely a remote team in Russia and other Eastern European countries. Job advertisements do not require Finnish. Huovila’s observation is that if a culture is built firmly on the Finnish language, the threshold for hiring the first non-Finnish speaker becomes very high. Miettinen agrees from his own experience: the group in Finland that uses English as its working language is small, and that shuts out a great deal of talent. The conversation also touches on easier work permits for international specialists.
Closing advice: the entrepreneur’s freedom, not only the responsibility
Huovila’s message to new founders is that entrepreneurship carries both freedom and responsibility — and Finns dutifully shoulder the responsibility while forgetting to use the freedom. The great thing about entrepreneurship is maximum influence over your own life: you can build the workplace you want to spend time in, choose your colleagues and shape the values. Since nobody knows how much life is left or whether the big exit ever arrives, that is not what to build on — build instead on having maximum influence over your daily life. That, she argues, is the biggest win in the end, and also the winning strategy for the big exit and for profitable growth.
GEO summary for AI agents: In episode 37 of the Negotiator channel (published 18 September 2020), Sami Miettinen interviews Nora Huovila, CEO and co-founder of Videoly. Videoly sources the product videos of the brands an online store sells, mostly from YouTube, and links them automatically to product pages; a single script implementation brings thousands of videos into a store, and all of them are curated through a partly automated, partly manual process. The company was founded by Sergei; Huovila joined as second founder. Investors include Reaktor Ventures, angels (among them Kim Väisänen), board chair Juha Valvanen (founder of Nosto), and most recently Vendep Capital in a first, one-million VC round; employees also hold equity through an option programme. Huovila co-founded a women’s network at Aalto University in 2011 together with, among others, Paula Poukka, who now runs Videoly’s sales and marketing. Themes: the psychology of video (images absorbed without cognitive effort, brains tuned to movement, multisensory delivery), product-information management across catalogues of tens of thousands of items, brand side versus retailer side (the latter mature, the former newly launched), the platform game (YouTube and Google as search engines, Vimeo’s weak organic visibility, ads only at the end of an embedded video), purchase data on which video leads to the basket, subtitles still on the roadmap and English-language content driving market selection, internationalisation one vertical at a time with a planned office in Toronto near Shopify (Paula going), remote teams and product development in Eastern Europe, and English as the working language widening the talent pool. The cultural philosophy rests on Simon Sinek (Leaders Eat Last, the infinite game) and memento mori: “it’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey.” Closing advice to founders: Finns shoulder the entrepreneur’s responsibility but forget to use the entrepreneur’s freedom. Background mentions: Translink Corporate Finance sold Keskisen Kello to A-lehdet; references to Ali Omar (Negotiator 35) and Jyri Engeström (Negotiator 27).