Shauli Zacks
Published on: May 9, 2024
In a recent SafetyDetectives interview, we explore the background and motivations of Sébastien Night, founder of OneTake AI. Sébastien, previously the founder of the Free Entrepreneur Movement, has now turned his focus to solving challenges in video production with his new venture. OneTake AI is designed to simplify the video editing process for entrepreneurs and content creators by leveraging artificial intelligence. The company aims to fill significant gaps in the current market by providing tools that reduce the complexity of video production. Here, Sébastien explains how OneTake AI integrates these technologies to enhance user experience and broaden accessibility to professional-quality video editing.
Can you discuss your background and what motivated you to start OneTake AI?
Can you discuss your background and what motivated you to start OneTake AI? My name is Sébastien Night, and I’m the founder of OneTake AI. Prior to this, I founded the Free Entrepreneur Movement, which attracted close to 300,000 entrepreneurs in 41 countries.
The inspiration for this software company came from our experiences coaching entrepreneurs on launching and growing their businesses. We observed that video production, whether for promotion or as a product like an online course, was a significant technical challenge for many.
We have three questions we always ask before launching any product, and I applied these to OneTake AI:
- How do we want people to act differently? It’s not just about providing information; it’s about facilitating a change in behavior. We realized we needed to help people produce more content and marketing videos without doing the recording or editing for them.
- What unique angle or solution are we bringing to the market? The traditional approach wasn’t cutting it. Our angle was enhancing video quality with animated text and better audio, making professional videos possible even with poor initial quality.
- Where is our ideal audience already gathered? We started with a bang by leveraging our existing user base, mostly French-speaking entrepreneurs and reaching out to partners, influencers, public speakers, and online coaches that I’ve helped personally who promoted us to their audiences.
What was the main gap or challenge in the video editing market that OneTake AI aims to fill?
Initially, we thought people would be interested in our neuroscience-based method, “neuro videos.” However, I like to use a metaphor about the Caribbean, where I’m from: opening a green juice bar there wouldn’t work because the demand just isn’t there. Similarly, we realized that selling advanced science-based video editing was less appealing than simply offering one-click video editing. The turning point came when a friend expressed his desire for even simpler functionality—he didn’t want to spend 45 minutes; he wanted to just upload his video and be done. This feedback was crucial, and we pivoted to meet that need.
How does OneTake AI leverage artificial intelligence to revolutionize video editing, and what sets it apart from traditional editing tools?
Traditional editing tools involve a daunting interface packed with timelines and layers. It’s heavy and difficult to use. When AI arrived over the last five years, the big software companies started to add more buttons with AI features that you had to trigger and configure yourself to make it work.
We didn’t want more buttons, just one button which we call the “Magic Button.” For example, usually, if you want to add a music soundtrack, you need to find music you like and add it on the timeline, then set the volume, loop it throughout the video, and more. Our Magic Button uses AI to analyze the video and the content, compose the music for it, add it for you, and set the right volume level for your video. This is our vision of using AI because then we can make things more powerful without making them more complex.
How does OneTake AI support content creators in optimizing their videos for different social media platforms?
Initially, we designed our software specifically for creating online course videos, which we locked within a proprietary player to prevent piracy. This, however, limited users when they wanted to export videos to platforms like YouTube. Based on user feedback from our live sessions with customers, we realized the importance of versatility. Now, users can export videos in various formats suitable for multiple platforms, such as horizontal for YouTube, square for Instagram, and vertical for TikTok. We also assist with creating video descriptions and scripts tailored for different platforms.
What are the challenges in making AI understand the context and nuances of video for different cultures and audiences?
It has been easier for me than for most of my colleagues, and still more complicated than I thought it would be. I had an edge when I started OneTake AI, which is that I speak several languages. From the beginning, I said I want the software to be available in French, Spanish, English, and Portuguese. After that, we added Italian, which I don’t speak as well, and Japanese, a language I don’t speak at all.
In the beginning, it was an advantage because I could speak to our customers in their language. We could check that the output and see that it matched what people wanted. In 2023, when we launched in Japan, that’s when the whole thing exploded, because we had no idea how to tell if the translation of the titles of the videos were right, if the animations were correct. We were getting reports of issues that we as Westerners could not understand.
The second challenge was just getting the AI to work more on videos with different languages. That was a big challenge. Japanese was the hardest to implement, but once we figured it out, we were able to add 100 additional languages. So by now, almost any language can be edited by OneTake AI.
How do you see the role of human video editors evolving with tools like OneTake AI becoming more prevalent?
It’s a great question because we do a lot of work with video editors. I ran an analysis of our membership to see who’s making the most videos. What we found is that our customers that create the most videos work as video editors or at an agency.
We saw three main trends:
- People use the AI to do the grunt work, so that they can do the final adjustments where they bring the most value. We have people that use our tool to do the sound mastering, remove the silences, add the transitions, things like that. Then they bring that human touch to make the video go from 95% to 100% complete, which is a high value. They save 95% of their time, but the value delivered to their end customer is still the same.
- Agencies that create websites for their customers have an additional skill they can add to their portfolio by using us to create the videos that they sell for their service.
- People are able to tell more stories because our style videos allow for more presentation style, so it gives them the time to create and tell more stories in the content.
