[Top SaaS & Ecommerce & Israel Business Series] Mastering Video Commerce Strategies With Eitan Koter

Eitan Koter is Co-founder and Co-CEO of Vimmi, a leading video commerce SaaS company that provides multi-channel shoppable video and live shopping solutions to brands and retailers. With over two decades of experience in internet, video, and telecom startups and public companies, including leading a Nasdaq IPO, he is recognized as a thought leader in video commerce, digital marketing, social commerce, and startup bootstrapping. Eitan frequently speaks about futuristic immersive digital experiences and the convergence of media and commerce. He also hosts the Mastering eCommerce Marketing podcast, where he interviews industry leaders and shares insights on e-commerce trends and innovations.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn: 

• [04:23] Eitan Koter introduces Vimmi and its role in video commerce
• [07:32] The evolution of Vimmi from media streaming to video commerce
• [13:01] Eitan’s experience leading a Nasdaq IPO and transitioning to bootstrapping
• [17:42] How Vimmi secured enterprise clients without VC funding
• [23:40] The importance of partnerships and indirect go-to-market strategies
• [30:13] The shift toward managed services in SaaS and video commerce
• [33:04] How Vimmi leverages AI for software development and content creation
• [42:18] Why Vimmi offers a free pricing tier and how it drives customer growth
• [47:32] Mistakes people make with video and advice for brands using video

In this episode…

Many businesses struggle to stand out in the crowded digital marketplace, especially with the rapid rise of short-form video and social commerce. Creating engaging video content that captures attention and converts viewers into customers can seem overwhelming. So, how can brands leverage video to build trust, increase sales, and expand their reach without overspending on production or advertising?

Eitan Koter, a thought leader in video commerce and digital marketing, shares insights on how businesses can successfully integrate video into their sales strategy. He emphasizes the importance of authenticity, consistency, and leveraging AI-driven tools to streamline content creation. Eitan discusses how brands can make videos shoppable, distribute them across multiple platforms, and use live video to enhance customer engagement. Additionally, he highlights how bootstrapped companies can grow by focusing on strategic partnerships and leveraging SaaS solutions to improve efficiency and scale operations.

In this episode of the Inspired Insider Podcast, Dr. Jeremy Weisz interviews Eitan Koter, Co-founder and Co-CEO of Vimmi, about how brands can use video commerce to drive engagement and revenue. Eitan discusses the evolution of video marketing, the power of live shopping, and why short-form content is key to customer acquisition. He also shares strategies for bootstrapping a SaaS company, the role of AI in video creation, and how businesses can maximize partnerships to scale efficiently.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Eitan Koter on LinkedIn
• Vimmi
• Mastering E-commerce Marketing

Special Mention(s):

• Amnon Sherf on LinkedIn

Related episode(s):

• “The Intersection Between Comedy and Business with Comedian Elon Gold and CEO of Get Visible, Jason Ciment” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “[Top Israel Leader Series] Engineering the Autonomous Revolution with Rabbi Mois Navon of Mobileye” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “[Top Agency & Israel Business Series] The Art of Building Brands Across Continents: Insights With Eitan Chitayat” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “[SaaS Series] Cloning Minds With Dara Ladjevardian of Delphi” on the Inspired Insider Podcast

Quotable Moments:

• “Video is such a powerful way to create more meaningful, more emotional relationships between people and brands.”
• “We started 11 years ago, bootstrapped, never raised funds, profitable and growing — always innovating to stay ahead.”
• “AI is changing the game completely, increasing video content throughput, and transforming how brands connect with customers.”
• “Don’t spend too much time on editing — be authentic, be consistent, and put yourself out there.”
• “Short-form videos and live shopping aren’t just trends — they’re the future of e-commerce engagement and conversions.”

Action Steps:

1. Leverage video to build trust with your audience: Video creates a more personal and engaging connection with customers, increasing credibility and brand loyalty.
2. Make video content shoppable across multiple channels: Adding direct purchase options to videos reduces friction in the buying process and boosts sales.
3. Embrace AI to streamline video creation: AI tools can generate video content quickly, reducing production costs and time while maintaining high-quality output.
4. Adopt a consistent content strategy for video marketing: Posting regularly keeps your audience engaged and signals algorithms to favor your content.
5. Develop partnerships to expand reach and growth: Collaborating with technology partners, agencies, and influencers allows businesses to tap into new audiences and drive more sales.

Episode Transcript

Intro 00:00

You are listening to Inspired Insider with your host, Dr. Jeremy Weisz.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 00:22

Dr. Jeremy Weisz here founder of Inspiredinsider.com where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders. Today is no different. I have Eitan Koter. Eitan, before I formally introduce you and Vimmi, I always like to point out other episodes of the podcast people should check out, since this is part of it’s kind of a part of three series. Eitan, its e-commerce series, SaaS series, and Israel business series. Okay. And so in previous episodes, one of my favorites actually is Elon Gold and Jason Ciment. I don’t know if Elon gold. He’s an amazing comedian. He also makes fun of Israelis in a nice way with his accent. Very good accents. But it was a phenomenal episode. Check him out. He’s one of my favorite comedians. And Jason brought him on who’s an agency owner, and that was a good one.

Mois Navon of Mobileye. He talked. He’s one of the founding engineers there. If you don’t know Mobileye, the journey was ups and downs, but they were eventually acquired by Intel for $15.3 billion, which was amazing. And he talks about some of the bumps along the way. A ton of like going back to his kids and wife and be like, hey, we can’t do any extracurriculars we’re pulling you out of. There’s no more eating out, like we’re in a very lean phase. So even those companies have those phases, those. Interesting to hear his perspective on that. I have I had another Eitan Chitayat on and he talked about, you know, building brands across different continents. And he helped release Google or Gmail in Africa. It was very interesting and many, many more on inspiredinsider.com. So check those out.

This episode is brought to you by Rise25. Rise 25. We help businesses give to and connect to their dream relationships and partnerships. How do we do that? We do that by helping you run your podcast. We are an easy button for a company to launch and run a podcast. We do the strategy, the accountability, and then the full execution. So Atomic Coral solves the magic. Elves that run in the background and make it look easy for the host, so they can create amazing content and create amazing relationships, most importantly, run their business. You know, for me, the number one thing in my life is relationships, and I’m always looking at ways on how I can give to my best relationships. And I have found no better way over the past decade to profile the people and companies I most admire and share with the world what they’re working on.

So if you’ve thought about podcasting, you should. Ayton and his company have a podcast, which we’ll talk about? You have questions? You can email us [email protected], or go to rise25.com to learn more. I am excited to introduce Eitan Koter. He’s the co-founder and co-CEO of Vimmi. Vimmi is a pioneering video commerce SaaS company offering multi-channel, shoppable video and also live shopping solutions to brands and retailers. Now, he has over two decades of experience in startups and public companies, including leading a Nasdaq IPO. He’s a recognized thought leader in video, you know, commerce, social commerce, digital marketing. As I mentioned before, he’s the host of Mastering eCommerce Marketing Podcast. And I think you renamed it to. Right.

Eitan Koter 03:47

E-commerce Pulse or that’s the new name. Yeah.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 03:49

The new name.

Eitan Koter 03:50

Yeah. Ecom Pulse.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 03:52

Oh, I got it. So we have mastering e-commerce marketing podcast. They’ve had some great content and guests on there. They share insights on digital experience, media commerce with brands, retailers and innovators. Eitan, thanks for joining me.

Eitan Koter 04:06

Oh, it was a great intro. Jeremy, it’s a pleasure to be here. Looking forward.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 04:10

Me too. I’m excited. And I’m going to pull up your site here for the video people. But just talk about Vimmi and what you do and people can check it out on Vimmi. Vimmi.net.

Eitan Koter 04:23

Yeah. So Vimmi is a view e-commerce as a service company. We’re primarily a technology company with a variety of patents that helps brands companies use video to sell and promote their product on almost every channel. The main idea is to work with video, which is such a powerful marketing vehicle or channel these days, and plenty of brands and companies are using video to just to grow organically. And the benefits of video is obviously creating more meaningful, more emotional type of relationship between people. You mentioned about having great relationship between us as human beings. Eventually you want to buy for someone that you know that you trust, and video is such a powerful way to do that. Video is obviously can be introduced and posted on the company’s various social channels, and we actually enable social commerce in our platform.

So in one dashboard you can make videos shoppable both live and non-live post those videos on your own website with interactive play video players that you can actually check out from the video player itself while watching the video, but you can also share and post those videos across multiple social channels and marketplaces just to enjoy the benefit of social commerce. We know how difficult it is to just acquire new customers to your own website, so why not deploy videos and product information across different channels that people are spending their time on, and also giving them the ability to check out. Now all these different platforms are enabling various ways of making videos shoppable. Obviously, every environment, every community is different, but we implemented all those APIs into our platform and it’s in a very easy way in one click.

You can just, you know, create videos, associate them with product pages, post them on all the channels, and just enjoy the benefit of having the ability to sell across multiple channels.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 06:23

And we’ll get into for the e-commerce and retailers out there, how do you use Vimmi? How do you actually use Vimmi to increase sales? But I’m curious. Talk about the evolution of Vimmi. And we were talking before we recorded product market fit. Now you really focus on e-commerce. You know, you make it very easy for people. I mean, it’s a relationship and it’s very much easier to form a relationship with video. And you know, I know my kids, they’ll watch, you know, these videos on these social channels and they’ll want to buy the stuff. And so, like, I end up buying all this stuff in speaking of, these brands should probably use Vimmi because I had to like click.

We had to go search on Amazon or one of these other platforms, and it made it easy right there just to click on it. We could just buy it straight from the video. And a lot of people are like, this is cool, I want to do this. This particular thing was like a chocolate bar filled with like pistachio and something else. And I had to go kind of buy all this stuff elsewhere. But we’ll come to that how people use it. But talk about the evolution of Vimmi itself.

Eitan Koter 07:32

Yeah, I mean, we just celebrated last month 11, 11 years for the company. We are a bootstrap company. We never raised funds profitable and growing. And we need to do things in a very, I think, special way, just trying to analyze all the ways what’s happening in the market and how we can innovate. We started 11 years ago. There was no, you know, video, commerce or video. I mean, it was primarily used for media and entertainment type of use cases. So we worked with companies, primarily large mobile operators and large content providers who wanted to launch kind of a, you know, Netflix-like service to their consumers. So helping them launch video services, online video services that they can monetize through a variety of subscription packages.

And we still have, you know, variety of customers. It’s a substantial part of our business just helping those customers launch those services and introduce video services to their customers. But around five years ago, we saw something new that is happening specifically in China with the use of video for sales of and sales of products, primarily in a use case that is called today, live shopping those sellers. This is their entire. This is the only thing that they do. It’s their day job. So what they do, they just launch video, live video from their own studio at home, through mobile phone and just streaming to various apps and websites, and giving the ability for users to make a purchase.

Now, this is like a mega industry in China, and it started to evolve in the Western world 4 or 5 years ago. And right now it’s a substantial part of large, you know, enterprises, also mid-market and SMEs that are just using video, live video for the sales and even the promotion of their products and giving users the ability to create, to make a purchase, to communicate via chat, and to create this kind of an interactive experience that is very, very powerful. In addition, we also saw the growth of short form videos, primarily with TikTok, Instagram Reels that follows, and YouTube shorts. And we know that these short form videos are very, very powerful just creating this type of conversions. So obviously with TikTok shop and also with the ability to create conversions around Instagram, Facebook and YouTube these days gives us a lot of, for any company, a great tool to create content in a very authentic way doesn’t require too much production value or post-production editing.

Just be authentic, be consistent, and put yourself out there and differentiate yourself from the from your competition. It’s a wonderful way to just break through the noise, because also their algorithms of all the social channels are favoring video. Just want those videos to be longer forms and more exciting videos that the algorithm will just push those videos because it just keeps users in the platform for a much longer time. So we took our experience from big media and entertainment projects serving millions of users on our platforms, and we launched that video commerce business unit. And today we work with brands, with retailers, enterprises who just want to use video in a much more meaningful way. Obviously today video is evolving so much. It’s not just video creation through influencers or content creators, or by the founders or the employees themselves. It’s a lot of video that is being created by AI.

And this is a lot of, you know, this is part of our managed services type of solution and services that we provide as well, because a lot of people are afraid just to put themselves in front of the camera. It’s probably one of the biggest, you know, objections that we get. We don’t need to convince anyone that video works. And it’s a powerful marketing channel, but video is more of a complex type of process, requires some planning, content, ideas, production, and AI is just changing the game completely and just increasing throughput. You can create AI avatars of yourself today. You have those, you know, text videos.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 11:44

I had someone on.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 11:47

Delphi. I and I interviewed his video clone avatar for 20 minutes.

Eitan Koter 11:55

Amazing.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 11:56

Yeah. So it was pretty interesting.

Eitan Koter 11:58

Nice nice, nice. Yeah. And it’s going to obviously. Yeah. It’s such a big topic. Right. But we are looking at some specific video related use cases. And you have like AI influencers today with millions of followers. I mean things are moving very, very fast and evolving. But primarily we know that organic video, short form videos are working, and it’s a great place to start for any brand and eventually deploy those videos across multiple channels.

Just having this opportunity to get exposure to your products and create the right content, just to make sure that users are getting more familiar with your brand and just, you know, having this 8020 ratio of just providing value most of the time. And once people know you, they feel more comfortable about you, they trust you. They are more open to get an offer from you.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 12:54

Yeah. I’d love to hear. You know, I know why. Bootstrap.

Eitan Koter 13:01

Yeah. So it’s a good one. I mean, this is my third startup in the first one. I mean, we raised a lot of funds from VCs, right? And also, it’s a company I took to when I was 30 and I did an IPO in Nasdaq. It was like an amazing experience. We all saw that company eventually got acquired by a larger company. So what type.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 13:24

Of company was that? What did they do?

Eitan Koter 13:26

It’s a company called Scopus Video Networks. It was in the video compression thing. Remember, these are the days of.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 13:32

You always been in the video in the video space?

Eitan Koter 13:34

Yeah, always. I’m in like two decades in the video, you know where you know the song Hotel California by the Eagles, right? There is a line there that you can check out every time you like, but you can never leave, right? So it’s the same. I mean, my first CEO in Scopus told me, hey, take another couple of days. Think about it. Because if you start working for us, there is no way for you to get out. You’re going to just keep, you know, working in the video industry for your entire career.

And now I understood what he meant. I mean, it’s evolving so fast. I started in video where we help companies just move from analog to digital video. And then we help companies do the transition from digital video to internet based video, and using the public internet for streaming video. And then today, we every one of us just receiving this full HD, 4K video on any screen, and we expect it to be, you know, working smoothly. And but it’s so much technology involved that just make these things happen. And I saw that evolution. And obviously today video is like everywhere right. It’s in commerce. Video is like 82% or 83% of the worldwide Ride internet traffic, right?

According to Cisco. So it’s a very powerful way of building a relationship, creating more of a kind of emotional experience. And we are social, social creatures. And with the growth of AI and digital screens, we are looking for this human connection. And video is very powerful just to maintain this type of, let’s say, feelings, right, which are very important in business.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 15:04

So you raised money for that company. So why bootstrap this company?

Eitan Koter 15:10

Yeah.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 15:12

You’re successful after like, you know, five, six years. You could probably raise money now if you wanted to.

Eitan Koter 15:18

Yeah. So we were very lucky at the get go. So we identified an opportunity that, you know, in 2013 that more and more companies are going to use video, specifically video streaming, for a variety of use cases. So we started to develop content delivery networks monetization platform. Back end. Front end tools. And we even tested this from our own pockets. I have a co-founder. His name is Amnon Sherif. We both were still the owners and the managing partners of the company. And we manage the company day to day. And we thought that. Let’s start and see. Anyhow, if you want to raise funds even, you know, 15 years ago, you need to show some progress, right?

The slides are not enough. You have to show some validation. So some POCs you do or some product market fit like initial steps just to get the you know, VCs don’t like to invest when there is a risk, right? They need to see good traction. They’re happy to support you for growth. So what happened was that we just want. So we went for like few exhibitions in the US and in Asia. And from each exhibition, it was in the same year we won. We got introduced to enterprise size opportunities. There are like seven figures opportunities and we bid as a new company. I mean, we went to the labs. These are like B2B very long sales cycles, like six months, eight months working on pre-sales documentation, statement of works, project management.

This is the style that you know where I grew up with, you know, and we want those two accounts, right. So we said, okay, we need to raise not funds, but we need to hire a lot of people. So we did that. I mean, we came from enterprise experience. We were managing public companies. So we knew what needs to be done in terms of operation, growth, execution. So for us, it was a great experience. And we said, hey, we are ready.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 17:26

What was the product like at that point? So it’s was it — still did you tell them, hey, like we can do this, we’re going to build this out. It’s almost like raising funds from customers just paying you as opposed to raising from VCs.

Eitan Koter 17:42

I always like to I mean, to give the example of a real estate or a real estate example. If you’re a real estate in, you know, entrepreneur and you buy a piece of land, right, and you go to an architect and he drafts an amazing diagrams from you and like, you can see the whole building like. And you put a big sign and there’s nothing there. It’s just land, right? There’s nothing there. But you can see the sign and you start selling those apartments, right? So we had the core technology that we’ve developed, right. For the last 6, it was like 6 to 8 months that we only invested in R&D and developing without even having a company. And that that initial, that main engine of video management, content preparation, streaming, that core technology was very, very innovative. It’s still a patented technology that is quite unique that we maintained throughout all those years.

But the scope of projects were larger than that. So we acquired another company because we had backup from these engagements. We could go to the bank to get loans. Right. Just to maintain healthy cash flow, because we knew that these type of engagements are like multi-year engagements, minimum three years, by the way, we keep, you know, some of these accounts still today, some of our accounts, we work for like eight years, nine years, and they are happy customers and just renew their agreement with us for additional 2 or 3 years every time. And then you can maintain some kind of you can keep you can plan right. You can plan a few years forward in terms of our projected income. And these are like large enterprises like, you know, fortune 500 enterprises. And we did a good job, I think, in the way we presented ourselves and probably showcased, we were very, very fast. And this is where we believe a lot in this. I would say narrow innovation.

I can call it right. Start some for something very small. Show that you make a difference, that it’s a breakthrough. And then get customer feedback and iterate very, very fast. I mean have internal processes that are very agile and flexible, get feedback and iterate. Just provide the new features, even on a daily basis, that are actually required by those customers that you’re working with and grow your solution for these type of customers and be very, very focused in this approach instead of just spray and pray to a large category and hope that something sticks. So I believe a lot in just zero in be like a laser focused on the type of customers you want to start working with, show them something very, very small, not big small that makes a difference and then grow from there. And just implementing this land and expand type of strategy. And if it’s done right in a very focused way, you don’t need a lot of customers to make substantial growth, right?

And so we grew like 100, you know, 50%, 100% every year with a very, very small amount of customers. Because this is where we started. We started with enterprise, large customers. And obviously we had the ability to use the profits just to create more products and develop, develop, develop products that are not fully attached to a specific customer that asks for that. For these products, we always kept those developments as just licenses that we can non-exclusive license that we can work with any type of customers without any limitation whatsoever. And that this helped us, you know, launch our SaaS platform. And definitely it was what we did on the initial phase with online video platforms. And this is something that we do right now. And right now you can go to the website, you can create an account. You have a free for life account, but you can also grow, you know, with paid plans if you need more capacities and abilities.

So yeah, I mean this is we knew that we can project cash flow. And we said, okay, let’s bootstrap because we knew that VC funds and external funding is great, but it has a lot of let’s say I would say headaches. Right. And you’re not controlling the company and you have to invest all the money in like 18 or 20 months. Otherwise you’re not performing. And it’s a big risk to take. And we took a smaller, not smaller, I would say a more focused approach rather than try to win big, just grow more, more, you know, in a modest way, but do things in a high confidence and through high quality. And that’s a different style of doing things. Quality of life is much better, that’s for sure.

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