Hey, for those that are here, I’m messing with Headway 3 – a Simplifilm Client – and WP-Types.com, also a Simplifilm client.
This might look “Junky” for a while as I get things configured right.
I’m fine with that – I’m just seeing what goes where.
I’ll still be blogging and stuff, but there will be some weirdness here.
As we start to seriously think about what Simplifilm is becoming, we’re writing a process thing. Inspired by “the Lean Startup” we have an entire service business to build.
Loops.
We want to deploy something – get it out there.
An example would be the new “welcome” message. Let’s deploy something.
“Welcome To Simplifilm: These are the steps to make your video”.
The next thing we do is to improve it. To make it more like us, to convey the meaning and the imputed values that we also stand for.
“Thanks for picking a Simplifilm. This is going to be a fun process, but there are some tricky parts. Here’s what we are hoping for…”
Then we confirm that we’re actually improving the right thing. We see what customers do, what they react to and measure what we can measure.
There are a few ideas that I have about improving Simplifilm.
First – that I’m always going to find the best clients I can. That has meant – even when in August – we were booked out 7 months…that we were looking for new clients. Because we knew eventually we’d need them, and some times the sales cycle is a week. Other times the sales cycle is 3 months.
Still more often, people think they have a deadline, but what they really need is a nearly magical video.
I was looking for clients then – when we had plenty to do – and now, I have probably nearly 6 figures that I can harvest from that. More connections than I need. The fact that I was looking for clients – even when we couldn’t help – means that I’m first in line with a lot of great people and companies.
And my competition, bless their hearts, aren’t.
It recently occurred to me that there were more things that we could – and should be doing. For example: we should always be recruiting talent. Even when we don’t have projects. Even when we don’t have something to start on.
We got extraordinarily lucky when we got our first great finds, and we (I) didn’t know how hard it would be to find people at the level we are after.
So here are things we’ll always do – every week…
I have a good idea.
I have an idea so good that someone’s going to take it to market, get it right, and make billions. It seems to me to be the next logical extention of the second wave digital revolution kicked off by Facebook and its ilk.
I have poked around to get it going, get it funded.
Then it occurs to me: this is the resistance. This distraction is just to keep me from making Simplifilm into a fantastic company.
The details don’t matter. Someone said to me the other day:
“Had this ever happened to you, you’d feel differently about it.”
She went on to say that her experience was unique and horrible, and had I lived it I would agree with her, and my experience was invalid because I hadn’t lived through an identical event. I was told I had no empathy and I was patronized and insulted.
For having a different opinion.
The wound was brought up as a method to control my opinion, and to excuse her behavior. This could have been anyone about most anything. We like to become victims. People that have been wounded as a means of exerting control over others. Because I’m wounded, you need to make considerations/pay reparations/walk on eggshells.
Madening.
We’re not meant to control other people. We’re meant to work together in peace and harmony. This means that our poor experiences can’t be used as excuses to indulge in the darker thoughts and behaviors we all have. Encroaching on someone else is about the worst way to live
An arbitrary event that happened to you (that sucked) isn’t licenses to control the mind or actions of someone else. Weaponizing you wounds dehumanizes yourself, first and others later. Indulging the delusion that you are somehow unique and special…and excused from the productive work that you were meant for because something happens…is beneath the character that we have, the spark of the divine that is innate in all of us.
This is surely not the last time this happens to me. I just have to figure out a better response in the future. Being drawn into the insanity isn’t something that I care to permit myself to do again.
Social media experts are everywhere.
And, for the most part, they are people with failed sales careers trying to catch on in an industry that doesn’t really have accountability.
You might be the lone social media expert that is providing good and fiduciary service. I doubt it.
I see people follow me “I’m a social media expert.” Their twitter handle says…hopefully. Really?
Being a business oriented social media expert is more than setting up twitter and hooking up your autospam RSS feed to automatically propagate your pabulum to the masses.
It’s listening and connecting. It’s closing.
If you don’t have relationships that you can get business from, you don’t have business relationships.
It’s making actual sales to humans you met on the social channels. People that have had their careers abandon them that have struck out to become a “Social Media Expert” are (largely) pandering smug idiots with nothing to good to give.
They are taking money from real businesses to defer the implosion of their careers. The economy is different, we’re in a permanent recession. There aren’t cushy jobs that you can just show up at, have a bunch of meetings and win. They are all toast now. Just blathgering on Social Media has no value.
The best people – the experts – close stuff. That’s the point of Social Media (and yes, you have to build relationships to do it. But look, if you’re not CLOSING STUFF, you don’t HAVE RELATIONSHIPS.)
If I went around telling people I was a Telephone expert, and that I should be paid an assload of money, I’d be laughed off the face of the earth.
Social media is just that. It’s a way of talking. It’s self explanatory. Yes, you might want to have a marcom person help you get congruent.
It’s going to be true for years to come. I am an expert at getting people on the phone and making a good deal.
I am good at listening to people on Twitter and pitching when it’s time.
I can close people because it’s in their best interests.
I can’t trick anyone or “get reach” I can just pick my targets, call people up and close. It seems that the actual act of selling is too vulgar for most social media experts.
There are many points of friction, opportunities for success or failure in our business.
We’re remaking Simplifilm to be the best it can be and what we’re considering is the way that the most important people that we know actually interact with our business.
This isn’t theory it’s what actually happens. Chances are, it can all be better.
Our goal is to be competent, friendly, and organized. Planned out, as if we have done everything we can to think on behalf of our customers. We want to learm the nicest, best way to do something and do that.
Here is a partial list of things that we are addressing – not yet fully organized.
We want them to say “hey cool” or “nifty” after every single touchpoint as they interact with us. This is the goal.
General:
Pre-sale:
Before we sell, we set the tone and expectations. Are we doing this well?
Right after the sale:
Just so we know. Had an amazing time in NYC.
I don’t yet “know” the city, but as far as the vaunted cost of living – I’m not intimidated. I wouldn’t own a car. I would move there in a second. The food – you can eat for under $100 a week, and less if you buy groceries. Seems that rent would be $900ish to share a place in brooklyn. $1300/month.
To come up from nothing – it’s one of the “easiest” places on earth to do that. So many people are there needing stuff that making it is a matter of hustle.
I didn’t want to stay far from Manhattan when I went, but I’m OK with that now- I think it’s fine. I was not confident of my ability to take the subway late at night, but it seems that it runs. And so I can stay in brooklyn, wherever.
My last post was me saying that it’s time to double down on operations at Simplifilm. Our energy has gone into the product itself. We have a barely -coherent website and set of marketing materials.
We’ve been successful because we’ve focused on the product, but we need to ship our beautiful products in a beautiful box.
I’m not going to slide back into my frustrated nihilism. It’s time to make a Grown Up’s business.
Meaning this: so far, it’s been only about our work. We have done amazing work. We don’t have much of an amplifier just yet. The amplifier is me. I’m hustling one-to-one and picking the right targets in the space. That’s not scalable. I want to get bigger and stay as good as we are.
We have some incoherence and confusion – you can’t see the process to order on our site. You don’t get much of an indication of what pricing is. You can just see that we do good work, and that’s sort of enough.
That will be fixed. I need leverage beyond my schtick as a one-man boiler room.
I’ve got to build a business. We’ve succeeded because we’ve focused on product quality, but we don’t carry our own message very well yet. I’m just starting to think of some ideas to go along with it but here’s what’s on my mind:
1.) Everything that we put out is first class, and the best in the world.
This means that even the contracts we create have to be elegantly worded and visually appealing. We need to have a put together website that carries our message.
The way we present scripts, the way that we present footage. The way we submit proposals. The way that we close files. Everything has to be the best in the world.
We need to solicit feedback from our customers and have them tell us what they want (and ignore the nonsense).
We need to kill a lot of anti-marketing.
We need to focus on pages that people will use.
Our process has to be consistent. It has to be amazing.
We will send out mementos and things that serve to pad our lead as well as be useful.
Apple doesn’t have a huge product line. Apple doesn’t ship junk. Check this out:
That is where I see us going. To be better than our competitors, and to make them irrelevant.
2.) We need to execute our social object ideas.
Our intention is to memorialize all the work that we do with our clients. We want to create something that’s an artifact beyond the digital bits and bytes. We are a premium brand and we need to reinforce that. We need to do a social object so great that they think it’s a gift, and they think it’s better than the money we spent on it.
We have to find something social execute and share with every client at every price point.
The video process is between 2-7 weeks of regular contact, fairly intense dialogue, and collaboration.
Leaving that to a “hey, thanks, appreciate you,” isn’t reverent. Doesn’t respect what we’re doing.
3.) We need to define our design philosophy more explicitly and concretely.
Unlike our competitors, we make the product the star. Other animation explainer shops are completely fixated on being clever and animating goofy cartoon characters. It’s like they didn’t get to make Family Guy so they inflict their mediocrity on their clients.
We have always out-converted the animations we replace. Always. This is partly because we don’t have an anime fetish to satisfy–we have been charged with the sacred task to carry the message for a fast growing set of first class products.
We have to create stories that convert. I look at so much other work and I see that it can only have been created to amuse the creators. [pullquote]Our competitors are negligently indifferent towards the products that they serve, satisfying their cartoon fetish instead of revering the products that they make.[/pullquote] That sort of indifference for the products that they get to work with makes me angry.
How this translates I don’t exactly know yet, but we’ll find our way to the expression of a style that matters.
We like, generally, what Common Craft does as a style, but we’d never imitate them.
4.) We need a content strategy that makes great sense.
We have ideas that we want to test and prove. We want to have a content strategy that reinforces them internally and externally.
I know that we’re going to be doing some type of Screnflow tutorials to champion ideas and aps. We have other things we want to say about conversion and what works.
Marketing people know very, very little about what creates actions – they have some sense of brand consistency, but they are often magnificently incorrect about what produces actions. They have preferences and their objective is to be made happy in lieu of what’s effective for the brands they serve. We have to teach them.
Other animation studios will benefit as well, so be it. I’m a little bit crazy seeing what they create and the self indulgent nonsense they put out that spits in the face of Ogilvy, Caples, etc.
We have to prove our ideas, and it’s tricky because companies resist testing, but it might be something we insist on.
5.) We need to determine what channels are going to be open and what’s going to be closed.
I don’t exactly know how to put this. We get asked by resellers to resell our stuff. It has gone poorly. We want to work with and discount accredited ad agencies, and even qualified resellers.
Hustlers that don’t close cost us time. We want to open a channel that is “take it or leave it” and that explains our process and the rules so we can have other people help us.
It seems that if we created some rules we might be able to make this happen.
6.) We need to accumulate options in every area.
We want to get options together for writers, animators and even project managers and salespeople. I am a closer and the more I can be spent selling this stuff, the more we make.
We need to always, habitually and deliberately:
This means we need to create a robust set of practices that one dude can’t break.
7.) We need to plan improvement in every area:
I was at a coffee shop that had ancient Mac Addict magazines from 1999-2002 or so.
The improvement that Apple has had in every area is instructive and inspiring. The old stuff was a kludge, and they found their way to the iconic, symbolic products we enjoy.
Look at the chintzy plastic iBooks and look at the Airs and Pros we enjoy today.
We need to be thinking constantly about improving things. I want to go to the top of the heap, not just in explainer videos but in commercial storytelling.
We need to know that in 10 years we’ll be around, making art and stories, and doing it in a better way than we are today. Our tools will get better. Evernote’s CEO wants to be a 100 year company. That’s inspiring. I want that, too.
This requires time, thought and attention. We don’t have enough of any of it, but this is what we do to make a difference. We can get this done over the course of 2012, and replace the old stuff with the good stuff.
Simplifilm is the most successful venture I’ve taken part in.
That is to say in one year, it is throwing off enough income to pay 2 people, to grow at a steady clip and to make money. All of this is happening even though:
There are a few people I draft. That is, I follow what they do closely to the point of stalking.
I do this using a variety of tools, mostly RSS. Following comments feeds on a WordPress blog is easy. Following twitter is easy. Setting alerts is easy.
I don’t feel the need to comment that often. I learn a lot. I follow 9 men and 3 women. All of ‘em are folks I admire. A couple may have figured it out, but I don’t say anything explicitly.
I am guessing that everyone I’m following is going to have massive success. Many have.
It’s my obsession. And it’s fun.
