Here’s the quick breakdown of how we made a crazy launch film for Lightspeed India’s new podcast series in just two weeks.
The show is built around the investment memo we write when we partner with a founder. That is a lovely premise for a podcast. It's harder for a launch film. How do you show a document turning into a company?
(I wrote a detailed 10-step playbook of about 3,000 words from everything I learned, and you can use it for a launch film for a product, a company or an event. The full playbook is here.)
We spent the first few days on the founder journey, what happens between a founder and the investor who said yes, the questions on both sides, and the conviction that has to outlast it. We pulled apart launch films we admired and made rough prototypes of our own. Every version led back to the same place. Nobody speaks for ambition better than founders, and Lightspeed has backed an incredible set of them.
We decided to tell the film entirely in founders’ own voices.
So we went through about 100 hours of conversations and stitched about a dozen founders into one arc, each handing a single moment to the next. The story belongs to all of them, and at times it feels like founders finishing each other's sentences.
We had a little over a minute to work with, and we wanted people to leave with two things. One was a lift, the feeling of watching people who set out to build something big and did. The other was a truthful sense of what building a company asks of you.
So the film moves through these feelings. It opens on ambition, with founders talking about what is now possible, and asks whether India can build companies of that scale. Then it goes back to the beginning, with the founders' faces growing younger in a run of match cuts, to the people they were before any of it worked.
From there it follows into the long stretch when nothing seems to work, the breakthrough, and the moment the world starts to notice. It ends where all that ambition points: on the belief that we can build trillion-dollar companies out of India.
The video above walks through the whole process, from the storyboard and script to every cut on the timeline.