Why New Startups Start With a Trust Problem, and How Video Solves It

The trust deficit is real, and measurable

Consumers hesitate in front of companies they do not recognize. Before buying, they want some assurance that the business is legitimate, that the product works, and that the people behind it are credible. Decades of consumer research point the same direction: trust reduces the sense of risk in a purchase, and perceived risk is what stops people from buying.

A peer-reviewed study published in Scientific Reports in 2025 put numbers to the mechanism. Looking at how video content shapes buying behavior on social platforms, the researchers found that video which is useful, easy to understand, and engaging measurably raises consumer trust, and that trust is what drives purchase intention. Video does not push people to buy. It earns their trust, and trust moves them to act (Luo et al., 2025).

For a startup, that chain is everything. Trust is the missing link between someone being interested and someone becoming a customer, and a new company has the least of it precisely when it needs the most.

Why video closes the gap faster than text

A page of text asks a skeptical visitor to do a lot of work. Read, infer, and decide whether to believe you. Video does that work for them. In the time it takes to watch, a viewer sees the people behind the company, the product doing what it claims, and the reason any of it exists. Belief forms faster when it is shown rather than argued.

The same research identified three qualities that consistently raise trust: usefulness, clarity, and engagement. A well-made video carries all three at once. Instead of asking a customer to wade through pages of explanation, it demonstrates the value in a minute or two, which is roughly the attention a new company can expect to get before a visitor moves on.

The founder is the asset

The single strongest piece of trust a startup owns is its founder. People want to know who built the company, why it exists, and whether the person behind it is worth believing. A founder story film answers all of that in a way a logo and a landing page cannot.

This is consistently some of the highest-performing work we make at Horizon Studios, and the reason is simple. People trust people, not brand marks. Seeing a founder talk about the problem they could not stop thinking about does more for credibility than any list of features. It turns an unknown company into a specific human being with a reason to be trusted.

Product video answers the question text leaves open

For companies selling something complex, software, AI tools, healthcare technology, fintech, the trust problem is also a comprehension problem. If a customer cannot picture how the product works, they cannot trust that it will work for them.

Research in Electronic Commerce Research found that product presentation videos make it easier for people to form a mental image of a product, and that this ease of imagining becomes a strong driver of both attitude and intent to buy (Orús, Gurrea & Flavián, 2017). The harder a product is to grasp from words alone, the more a short demonstration does. A ninety-second product film can resolve in one viewing what several pages of copy leave murky.

Being found in the age of AI search

There is a newer reason this matters, and most founders have not adjusted to it yet.

More than 5.79 billion people now use social media, close to seven in ten people on Earth, and they spend hours a day inside video-first feeds. At the same time, the way people discover companies is shifting. Search no longer means ten blue links. It increasingly means an answer assembled by an AI tool like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, or Perplexity, which surface and cite sources they read as authoritative and well established.

In both worlds, the same thing wins: a company that presents itself as credible, clear, and substantial. A strong video presence signals exactly that, to the humans deciding whether to trust you and to the algorithms and AI systems deciding whether to surface you. A company that communicates poorly, or barely communicates at all, risks being passed over in both. Invisibility is its own kind of failure, and it is easier to fall into than ever.

What this looks like in practice

For Speakology AI, we produced a brand film during their raise. After it went out, their investor reply rate rose by 86 percent, and the round closed at 120 percent above the original ask.

For Flowy AI, an AI sign language recognition platform, we built the launch around a real human moment rather than a feature tour. The film drew more than 350,000 views across social platforms and helped bring over 45,000 demos and new customers onto the platform, with no paid spend behind it.

Fuse AI used their film in investor outreach as part of a successful $3 million seed raise. The brand film we made for the Horological Society of New York premiered at their 160th Anniversary Gala, an event that raised $1.2 million. And when Auxos launched with our film, the founders saw the response they were after, with a strong wave of engagement and a steady run of demos booked off the back of it.

These are companies that closed the trust gap quickly, and the video was part of how they did it.

How Horizon Studios helps

We make brand films and cinematic video for technology companies, built on the same qualities the research keeps identifying as the foundations of trust: clarity, usefulness, and a story worth paying attention to. That includes founder story films, product films, customer and testimonial pieces, brand films, and investor and fundraising video.

The aim on every project is the same. Help a company become clear and credible enough that the right people understand it, believe it, and act, faster than its newness would otherwise allow.

A great product still has to earn trust before it can win. For a startup starting from zero, video is one of the fastest ways to earn it.

If you are thinking about how video could help your company build credibility ahead of a launch or a raise, we are based in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Get in touch.

Frequently asked questions

Why is video important for startups specifically? New companies begin with a trust deficit against established competitors. Video helps close it quickly by showing the people, the product, and the purpose behind a company in a format people actually engage with.

Do founder videos really work? They tend to be among the most effective assets a startup can make, because they put a credible human face on an unfamiliar company, and people extend trust to people more readily than to brands.

Does video actually influence buying decisions? Research published in Scientific Reports found that clear, useful, engaging video raises consumer trust, and that trust directly increases purchase intention (Luo et al., 2025).

What video should a startup make first? For most early-stage companies, a founder story film or a product film delivers the most value, since both build credibility and make the company easier to understand.

References

1. Luo, C., Mohd Hasan, N. A., Ahmad, A. M. Z., & Lei, G. (2025). Influence of short video content on consumers' purchase intentions on social media platforms with trust as a mediator. Scientific Reports, 15, 16605. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-94994-z

2. Orús, C., Gurrea, R., & Flavián, C. (2017). Facilitating imaginations through online product presentation videos: effects on imagery fluency, product attitude and purchase intention. Electronic Commerce Research, 17(4), 661–700. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10660-016-9250-7

3. DataReportal, We Are Social & Meltwater. (2026). Digital 2026: Global Overview Report. https://datareportal.com/global-digital-overview