Running a small business is hard work, and marketing it to get more customers is even harder. The cost of advertising and press activity can be prohibitive, and it takes time and effort to find the best option for small budgets. Now a new company has come up with something that might make a difference.

Videolean is a new commercial service which provides DIY off the shelf marketing videos for startups and small companies who want to market their products and services in more dynamic ways. Instead of hiring expensive video production companies, anybody can log on to their account, select a template they want to use, and get to work customizing the text and images in the video as they need.

The options on offer range from rudimentary changes to a single image and two lines of text per segment, to more sophisticated options. The fact that the service is still billed as ‘beta’ suggests that the development team is working hard to bring the product up to speed, but for now it’s definitely a little sparse in terms of templates and tweaking options.

That said, it’s clear that the concept is really solid, and the implementation so far is very good. The simple wizard format which leads you through the theme selection and customization is easy to understand, and you can have something up and running in a matter of moments if you’re in a hurry. Great for emergency messages which need a video explanation as well as a standard web page.

There’s currently no free plan (have we hit the end of the freemium web app ride?) but prices are reasonable, and start at around $15 for a simple video template which you can change at will. We’re not sure whether you get to keep the template in your account for ever, for further use, or whether it’s more of a one-use system, which really needs to be better explained on the sit.

Apart from this lack of in-depth information for would-be users, we can see real potential for this type of service in the long term. We reported on DIY television ad makers a few years back, and were similarly impressed, although the business model was a little different back then. Definitely one to watch.