Podcasts about wipster

Breaking Barriers: Women in Tourism Leadership & the Career Accelerator Episode Summary: In this episode, Michelle is joined by three incredible wahine toa who are making waves in the tourism and leadership space: Alex Dykman from Grow Tourism, and Kristen Lunman and Natalie Ferguson from PowrSuit. They discuss the challenges and opportunities for women in tourism, the gender leadership gap, and why now is the time to take action. The conversation covers the launch of the Women in Tourism Career Accelerator, a groundbreaking initiative designed to equip women with the skills, networks, and confidence to step into leadership roles within the visitor economy. They explore the barriers that have historically held women back, the power of networking, and how small, actionable steps can lead to major change in the industry. With real-world examples of businesses already leading the way, insights from experts, and practical advice for women looking to advance their careers, this episode is an essential listen for anyone passionate about diversity, leadership, and the future of tourism. What You'll Learn in This Episode: The current gender leadership gap in tourism and why it needs to change. How the Women in Tourism Career Accelerator is designed to support career progression. Why networking is key to success and how to approach it in a way that feels natural. The biggest barriers to women in leadership and how we can overcome them. Success stories from tourism businesses leading the way in diversity. How to take control of your personal brand and position yourself for leadership. Guests: Alex Dykman (Grow Tourism) – Founder of Maverick Digital & Grow Tourism, dedicated to building a stronger and more future-ready tourism industry by investing in its people. Kristen Lunman, Co-founder, Powrsuit  From a family of entrepreneurs, Kristen is attracted to challenging the status quo. Her startup journey in New Zealand started with Wipster, a video SaaS solution. Until 2021, she was the co-founder and CEO of Hatch, an investment app. More recently, she is one half of the dynamic duo behind Powrsuit, a career accelerator for women on the way up. When she does have spare time, it's spent with her family on the sidelines or on a surfboard. Natalie Ferguson, Co-founder, Powrsuit Nat caught the entrepreneurial bug at university, and at 19, embarked on her first venture. Twenty years on, she's had multiple exits, a few painful failures, and everything in between. With a knack for tackling complex problems, Nat changed the wealth-building behaviour of nearly 200,000 customers through her last startup, Hatch. Now, she's closing the gender leadership gap with Powrsuit, a career accelerator for women at every stage. Resources & Links: Women in Tourism Career Accelerator: Sign up for early bird pricing Get more Powrsuit: Every week, on our newsletter and podcast, deep dive into one self-leadership skill or challenge, complete with a 30-second action.  Listen: https://open.spotify.com/show/2sC4y2gnTFmLRbSLHd7CLh and Sign up:  https://powrsuit.com/newsletters/  Grow Tourism: https://growtourism.com/  PowerSuit Newsletter: Connect with our guests: Alex – https://www.linkedin.com/in/adykman/  Kristen – https://www.linkedin.com/in/kristen-lunman/  Natalie – https://www.linkedin.com/in/natalieferguson/  Take Action: Kristen's challenge for listeners: In your next meeting, say one thing! Whether it's a question, comment, or idea—start making your voice heard. Small actions lead to big change. Join the conversation and share your thoughts on social media using #WomenInTourism #PowerSuit #GrowTourism. Let's work together to close the leadership gap in tourism!

For 8 years, Oxygen Advisors has stood behind over 100 New Zealand startups. Amazingly, only 3% of their startup portfolio have not survived and we wanted to know why. In this episode we chat with Matt Dold the founder and Mike Mandis the Co-CEO. As the founder and Director at Oxygen Advisors, Matt has been at the forefront of empowering start-ups and high-growth businesses across New Zealand for over a decade. Matt's served as a Director, Advisor and CFO partner to many of New Zealand's most successful high growth companies such as Auror, Thematic, Archipro, Woop, Thundergrid, Conqa, Weirdly, Preno, Wipster and many more. Mike is Co-CEO at Oxygen Advisors. Over the past four years he has helped technology companies raise over $150m in capital and has supported companies scaling globally from pre-revenue to $15m+ ARR. Tune in and learn how this company has been able to help the ecosystem so much. Thank you to our sponsor in Talent Army

In this episode, we talk with Kristen Lunman. For as long as she can remember, Kristen wanted to challenge the status quo, leading her to circles of like-minded entrepreneurs. Those that seek to deliver a vision of a different world. Her superpowers tend to lean in the area of growth and leadership. Until last year, it was at Hatch and more recently a new venture called Powrsuit. Powrsuit exists to amplify the impact of women leaders to shape the future of work. Previous to Hatch and Powrstuit and Hatch, Kristen was the Chief Operating Office for Wipster. When she does have spare time, it's spent with her teens or on a surfboard in freezing cold Lyall Bay. Kristen was amazing on the podcast and talks about her superpower of "just saying yes!" Please jump in and listen or watch this podcast.

Reviewing creative work should be the easy part. Wipster streamlines review cycles so creative teams can deliver better work faster. Is Wipster the right fit for you or your team? We invited the Co-founder & CEO of Wipster to help answer this question and to discuss the future of their platform. As always please bring your questions so that we can all learn together. Previous Webcasts & Calendar: https://www.shoots.video/webcasts/ Have you already added yourself or company as a resource in our production community? https://www.shoots.video/get-listed/ Our mission is to build a community where we all thrive together by creating more win-win relationships! We also strongly believe in the power of referrals and therefore encourage you to promote the rockstars of our industry by giving them a referral. To show our support we'll be giving away a monthly 90-day Premium Listing to whoever is at the top of our homepage leaderboard which is primarily based on giving and receiving referrals.

Social media collaboration and approval software startup Planable has been growing at a rate of 25% month over month, something the company's co-founder attributes to its marketing team structure. This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Planable co-founder Vlad Calus talks about how he built the company's marketing team from the ground up using a three pronged approach focused on people, processes and tools - and why that approach is key to the companies fast growth. Vlad has written a book on building the marketing team of the future and in this interview, he summarizes in detail how Planable's team is structured; the processes they use on a daily, weekly and quarterly basis; and the software tools they've chosen to implement. This week's episode of The Inbound Success Podcast is brought to you by our sponsor, IMPACT Live,  the most immersive and high energy learning experience for marketers and business leaders. IMPACT Live takes place August 6-7, 2019 in Hartford Connecticut and is headlined by Marcus Sheridan along with special guests including world-renowned Facebook marketing expert Mari Smith and Drift CEO and Co-Founder David Cancel. Inbound Success Podcast listeners can save 10% off the price of tickets with the code "SUCCESS".  Click here to learn more or purchase tickets for IMPACT Live Some highlights from my conversation with Vlad include: Planable is a content collaboration platform for marketing, freelancers, and agencies. For the first two years of the company's history, the marketing team was trying to use growth hacks to achieve its objectives, but quickly realized that was neither sustainable nor scaleable.  When they hired a new marketing director, the team began a process of studying how high performing marketing teams operated, and from that research, decided to focus on content marketing as the core of their strategy going forward. From their, Vlad identified that there were three main pillars of effective and efficient marketing teams - people, process and tools. When it comes to people, Vlad says that marketing teams need to have individuals with clear roles and clear ownership, as well as a defined quarterly marketing plan. The teams processes need to deliver transparency, consistency and alignment. And the tools that the team uses need to be effective. Vlad's team uses Zoom, Slack, Dropbox, InvisionApp, Google Drive, Planable, and Frame. Resources from this episode: Save 10% off the price of tickets to IMPACT Live with promo code "SUCCESS" Visit the Planable website Follow Vlad on Twitter Connect with Vlad on LinkedIn Listen to the podcast to hear Vlad describe, in detail, the approach he used to build Planable's marketing team and how that structure has enabled the company to grow 25% month over month. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host Kathleen Booth, and this week my guest is Vlad Calus, who is the co-founder of Planable. Welcome back, Vlad. Vlad Calus (Guest): Thank you. Thank you Kathleen, and thanks for having me. Vlad and Kathleen hamming it up while recording this episode together . Kathleen: I am particularly appreciative that you joined me, and it is crazy late at night, your time, because you are based over in Europe. Vlad: Yeah, exactly. I'm currently in Bucharest, and in Eastern Europe. Kathleen: Well, I appreciate you staying up and burning the midnight oil to join me for this podcast. For those who are listening, can you talk a little bit about what Planable is, and your background? About Planable and Vlad Calus Vlad: Definitely, yeah. So, Planable is a content collaboration platform for marketing, freelancers, and agencies. Basically it's a mock up of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram, that helps you preview how the content would look like, like 100% pixel content, and then you can simply just ask for feedback or collaborate with any of the stakeholders in the team, including brand managers, or human resources, or legal, or anyone else just to make sure this is the right content that you want to publish on social media. Then you can just simply ask for an approval, and then schedule the content directly to social media. Kathleen: Great. And you personally have a really interesting background. You went through Techstars, you were on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list, you're a very active startup mentor. Can you talk a little bit about your background and what led you to co-founding Planable? Vlad: Yeah, I would love to. So, I would say that at the age of 16, I started participating in a lot of non-profit organizations and starting my own organizations, just because I was feeling and trying to fix the problems in my own community. Like starting from really small problems and then just trying to get some use time and good time for myself, and learning something from everyone. And then at the age of 19, I found my first or second job, and I went to a startup competition called Startup Week in Moldova, in my home country. And I ended up meeting two of my current co-founders of Planable just by accident. I was just walking around them, looking for a team to join during the competition. And when I just started with Xenia, who is my current co-founder, we start chatting about the idea that we wanted to work on, and I just started talking to them, "Hey, may I join with your team? Would really love to participate. I really don't want to go home. I would really like to make it happen." And then we started, on the second day, we started actually working on this idea and debating it more. We participated with something related to the social media, but it was like an initial concept before making everything happen at Planable. And we ended up understanding that all of us shared the same passion and frustration for social media, and frustration in terms of the problems that marketing agencies and social media managers are fighting with. And couple of hours after that, we just won the competition, and we were invited to a pre-accelerated program in Romania. And we just founded a company then, and everything started there, and just in couple of months after that, we ended up being part of Techstars London, which I really believe changed the way our company work and exists, because it gave us a big round of funding, over 120K, and lots of support. We also started the company, we started monetizing the product and the company then, during the Techstars, and gave us the first support from actual people, like actual customers, and people that we understood that really, really believe in our vision, our company, our product, and everything that we are doing right now. Kathleen: That's great. And I've always been impressed by the businesses that have come out of Techstars, and so it's fun to get to talk to someone whose gone through the program. Now, one of the things that I thought was interesting about the experience you've had is, you started right from the very beginning, you're one of the founders, and you've been growing this company, and a lot of the people I talk to on this podcast, we talk about their marketing techniques and strategies, and how that fuels growth. And when you and I spoke, I thought something so interesting was that you have plenty of marketing techniques and strategies, but one of the things that you consider to have been a major contributor to your growth is the way you've structured and grown your marketing team in particular. And so, I wanted to dig into that a little bit more with you, and explore how that has worked, and the results you've gotten. How Planable's Marketing Team Is Structured Vlad: Definitely, yeah. So, changing the way our marketing works, our marketing team works, actually was one of the most important things that happened to this company. Because the product side was always working and ticking, and the product was always developing. We had and we still have a brilliant co-founder and CTO that came up with the product and division, and the way everything works. But we had to compensate this with the marketing and the business, and actually getting the first users and customers to the product. So, the first two years of the company, we were trying really, really hard to do any growth hacks that you could ever read on the internet, and all the Facebook groups, and Slack communities, and Twitter, List, and everything else. I would say that we really tried to bootstrap our way in the most possible way. But then we just understood that nothing is actually working, and nothing is actually scalable. Like really, really scalable that could generate us success in the long term, and that we could actually replicate all of this. So, in I would say April last year, we ended up partnering with a brilliant new employee, who is called Miruna. She's our head of marketing at the moment at Planable, and we just started talking with her about the fact that we need to restructure our marketing team. We need to work on something from the ground up and start making some extreme, extreme changes. And we started this by analyzing the whole industry and understanding what are the biggest issues of marketers, and what are our issues, and starting to understand how can we work on solving this problem from the very beginning. So, right now, marketers are facing enormous challenges when it comes to content marketing, because content marketing was something that we wanted to focus on, completely. This would be the ground zero, the main, main focus of our marketing team. And when we understood that there are couple of main problems, like an enormous amount of wasted time and effort results in productive ... loss of productive hours than creating the content. And lots of PR crisis are being created because there is no clear approval process, there is no feedback, there is no communication. And there are campaign that are launched, that should've been launched exactly because the content was not approved. And then we also started to think more about the content marketing, and how can we actually scale it. So, we ended up thinking about many of the pillars, or many of the parts of content marketing, and how it should be structured. And we ended up creating a system for our own team that we started with couple of colleagues and analyzing this within the team, and then we understood that many big companies actually have a very, very similar structure but we would never actually understood this. This was just the way we were. So, we understood that there are three main parts of ... of an effective and efficient marketing team, and this is the people, the processes and tools. These are the three main pillars that we understood that we have to implement in our team. "There are three main parts of an effective and efficient marketing team - the people, the processes and tools." - Vlad Calus Click here to Tweet this quote Building a Marketing Team: The People Vlad: So, I would say that the first when I was mentioning about the people. People are obviously the essence of any content marketing process. You have to have people in order to deliver everything that you want. And then we understood that in order to have an efficient marketing team, all of us have to have very clear and understood roles in our team. And start working on the main skills and best skills that each of us have, in order to actually succeed. So, we just looked at each other and started to think, "What's all of us do?" Because all of us, we were free marketers back then, and we were like full stack marketers. We were doing everything- Kathleen: Everyone was doing everything? Vlad: Exactly, yeah. Everyone was doing everything, no matter what. We just looked at the task and then was like, "Should I do this? You do this? Okay, let me do this today, and then we can next week ..." This is how we would do it. And then we just understood, we looked at everyone and started discussing this. "Okay, what can I do?" I am not the most, in my case, it was I'm not the most creative person, but I can really deliver. I am an efficient person that can deliver lots of stuff, I can promote our content, I can work on twitching the content exactly the way it is from the technical perspective. And then Miruna, my colleague, was the most creative brain of Planable, because she could really speak the way our brand would speak on social media and digital. This is something she just had this from the very first day, and I was amazed by this. And then we also had the third colleague. She was Luciana, she was the most creative person on the social media. She likes engaging with people on social media. So, we understood that we need to have clear roles. In my case, it was SEO, search engine optimization. I need to tweak all of the content that we are creating, and then I also need to write the content for Planable outside of Planable, like writing guest blogs, and also representing Planable outside the building. Miruna was the one that was creating the content and also doing all the design part, and Luciana was doing the social media and the newsletters. So, we had three main pillars of content marketing, divided by three persons, so we understood that we have clear roles established. This was the first part to create clear roles. And also, the second part was to establish a clear ownership of everything. So, if you, for example, Luciana was doing social media and newsletters. There might be chances when we have to help Luciana, she needs creative ideas or design materials on everything else, but this still means that Luciana has a complete ownership on this. We even made ... and this was the second part, and the third part that in terms of the people, we had to do a clear plan for the next quarter. We are doing 12 weeks iterations on the marketing plans, because we think this is the most efficient. We are not trying to jump on the next six or 12 months, or even three years. We believe that this might be a waste of time, so this is why we try to stick close to three months iterations only. So, just to sum up, this was, for us, having a clear ownership, having clear roles, and have a clear definitive marketing plan for the next three months on all of the marketing objectives that we do. Kathleen: Yeah, we use quarterly planning as well, and I agree with you. You certainly could come up with a plan for a longer time horizon, but so much changes, and I've really found over time that quarterly is the most effective time interval for that kind of thing. Vlad: Yeah, definitely. I also was speaking with lots of teams that they are also using that quarterly, but also six weeks iteration. This is definitely something that you can do. Unfortunately, being a small team such as ours, it's hard to actually feel like you've implemented a lot during the six weeks, so we just give us lots of time during this 12 weeks, like three months that we do quarterly. Kathleen: Yeah. So, that's how you approach the people element of your team- Vlad: Exactly, yeah. Kathleen: Yeah. Vlad: And there is also something that we also related to the people, something that was super, super important for us. We understood that we cannot do everything, so this is why we need to get other stakeholders into the team. Meaning that we started using lots of video and audio production teams, like design and branding, website building, link building, data scrapping, people on the PR side, people on the page marketing, and so on. Because we believe that everyone should do the best that they could, and if you don't have the time, but have the resources, you should definitely use. Because for example, we are also doing people of marketing, this is a video blog, and we just understood that we would waste a lot of time on video production. We can film, or we can create a content, but editing and post producing the content is super, super hard for us. Kathleen: Yeah. Building a Marketing Team: The Processes Vlad: Yeah, so moving on. The second part was about the processes, because in terms of the processes, we wanted to make sure that we don't have only a clear plan, but we can also implement all of this plan and we can deliver everything that we proposed ourselves. Unfortunately, lots of teams are making critical mistakes in terms of this, because they are not having the clear workflow and the clear processes established within the team, and within the whole company. And we understood that we have, and we need three main aspects of this. First, we put transparency at the top of our processes. And we put transparency at the core of our entire workflow, because we believe that transparency was the most important thing, and transparency in terms of what's everyone doing today, this week, this month? What are the main files that we should access, for example, I should have the access to all of the marketing files, and all of the marketing materials, even though I don't actually have a need of them, but I should have them in case I need to be involved in this process. And transparency, because there is, for example, social media or email marketing teams, they have two departments and therefore two ways that they are not even communicating between them at the time that they most need, because we believe that collaboration empowers teams to not only create better content, but also be more efficient, and better at the way content marketing team works. Then the second part was about consistency. We understood that we need clear consistency on everything we do. For example, when I just started content marketing and writing articles, this was one and a half years ago. I was literally staring at the blank Google Docs document for 20 or 30 minutes, and could not came up with any ideas at all. So, because of that, I was just trying to get inspired all around the internet with any ideas that I could, and just writing random keywords, and starting to write something from those keywords, just to get this creative flow going somewhere. And then I tried to make it consistent as I could, so I just had the task in my task management tool that each day I am writing at least one hour a day. No matter what, no matter if this is good, no matter how perfect this is, but I just wanted to write. And then at the end of the week, I was starting to editing all of this content, and putting everything that I could. Because I was trying to throw all the raw idea that I had, and instead of editing and then being depressed because nothing really works, I was just trying to constantly came up, like throw ideas to this digital paper, and make sure that I move and I do something actually. Kathleen: Yeah. It's a great goal to be able to write out an hour a day. I feel like so many people say they're going to do something like that, and then they never follow through, so kudos to you for actually doing it. Vlad: Yeah, because I believe that a lot of marketers, and they really show this when I was speaking with marketers over the past year, a lot of marketers have exactly this struggle of writing content. They think that writing an article of 2000 words, or 3000, or even in my case writing a book of 30 000 words, this is super complicated. But I think about this like a process that you have to complete, and something that you have to deliver if you are consistent, and I believe that writing, especially writing, this is a skill that you empower with consistency. If you write more, you can create more and you write better. Kathleen: Yeah, and we should mention that you are a published author. You did write an entire book called Marketing Teams of the Future, which is sort of what we're talking about here in terms of how you built your team, so this isn't just a couple blog posts that you're getting out. This was an entire book. Vlad: Yeah, exactly. Because I focused the book exactly on this part, how to build your marketing teams by showing all of our examples of the team, and then speaking with some of the best marketing teams out there, from InVisionApp, Digital Crowd, Night Watch, and many more, and trying to understand what are the most efficient teams in the world, and how can we do this better with our help and anyone else. And then the third part of processes was about alignment, like making sure that alignment starts with a clear strategy, and then with consistent daily variables. In our team, these are two parts that we did. The first part is that we have a marketing meeting at 10:00 AM each Monday. There is absolutely no chance that we skip this meeting, unless you are on vacation we give you the full freedom on your vacation. But usually if you're traveling, if you're not in the office, we will connect you with a Skype call or Zoom call, or anything else, and we'll do this meeting at least for 10 or 15 minutes to make sure that everyone is aligned. And then the second part, also something that lots of marketing teams give, I believe is super important to do it one to one's between the marketing managers and between the marketing teams themselves because there are lots of things that people usually want to speak, but we just miss speaking just because maybe this is not the right time, or maybe this is not the right environment. Or this is just not the conversation that you would have at the desk with other colleagues in there. And this is why, if you at least plan one, one to one, at least once a month, or in our case once in two weeks, this will help you make sure that everyone is on the same page. You have everyone is expecting the same thing from you and from the team, and from the deliverables and everything that you do. Kathleen: Yeah. So, you've got your three points under people, you've got three points under process. Let's recap each of those again just so that everybody's following along. Vlad: Definitely, yeah. So, in terms of the people, the three things that we did was about making a clear ownership, what's everyone doing, and then the second part was about establishing clear roles, and clear things that everyone is doing. And then the third part was about creating a marketing plan for the next quarter, because this is what we do at the quarter, and this is something that I would recommend. And in terms of the processes, there were three parts of what we do, and I would suggest implementing in your team as well, this is first of all transparency. Everything has to be transparent across your marketing organization. The second part is consistency. Really embrace consistency from the very beginning. Try to do content marketing each day, try to write an article each day, do social media each day. Write at least one newsletter each day, and you will see that day by day, you will feel improvement in yourself, and your own marketing team as well. And then the third part is about alignment by making sure that everyone is on the same page, and discussing and communicating all of the expectations and the variables clearly within your team. Kathleen: I love it. Thank you for recapping that. And then you had ... so, in addition to people and processes, you had sort of your third overarching category of things. Could you talk a little bit about that? Building a Marketing Team: The Tools Vlad: Yeah, the third part was about the tools, and in terms of the tools, I would say that this is pretty straight forward, but I want to mention first of all that, do not rely on tools because no automation tool can or should replace the creative force of your team. Because when time consuming, repetitive tasks are automated, these billable hours can't be spent on creative work. So, we should work only with the tools that we really understand that value for us, and that really feed for our team. And in my case, in the book I just presented a couple of tools that I can also send you the links after that in email, but in terms of the list that we are currently working with the tools, and something that we would suggest. First of all, this is using Zoom for all of your video calls and everything else. We switched to Zoom. Before that we used Appear.in. I really loved Appear for connecting on the video calls directly for the browser, but that didn't work for us all the time. Sometimes we had issues, sometimes our customers couldn't connect, so we just switched everything to Zoom, and wow. Over the past four months, I never had a bug. Never had an issue. Kathleen: Yeah. Vlad: This product is just working- Kathleen: It's pretty great. And people who are listening can't tell, but we are on a Zoom call right now. That's how I record the podcast, and I probably spend six hours of my day on Zoom, because we're a mostly remote company, and so all of our meetings, all of my conversations are on Zoom. It's fantastic. Vlad: Exactly, yeah. And in terms of the other tools that there are, I would obviously recommend to use Planable for all of your content management creation and social media, and then there is also InVisionApp, for all of the prototyping in terms of images and creative content that you are doing. There is also Frame. I really love this company. If you even open the website that they have, it's a super beautiful website. When you are a creative person, or work in a marketing team, this really fulfills your heart when you see a beautiful website in a team. Kathleen: And what's the URL of that website? Vlad: Frame.io, I think. Yeah, Frame.io. Kathleen: Yeah, I'm pulling it up now so I can look at it while we talk. I love looking at nice websites. Oh, okay. So, for video review and collaboration. Vlad: Exactly. Yeah. Kathleen: Yep. Vlad: This is something, so we are basically describing Planable as Frame IO, but for social media. Kathleen: Got it. Vlad: Because this is something very similar. And if you look at the list that I am presenting right now, you can actually see that all of the platforms are also collaboration, because I really believe that collaboration is the key of any marketing team right now. Kathleen: Yeah, absolutely. Vlad: And then there is obviously the Slack for building a transparent environment that we were speaking about because you can create all of those channels, and anyone can join those channels and you can simply collaborate on everything that you do. Obviously also for assets management, you can use Dropbox, or Google Drive, or anything that fits you. We are personally using Dropbox, we are personally using Google Drive across the company. I am using Dropbox and Apple Cloud for some personal stuff that I am doing right now. And then the last one that I highly recommend almost all the time, this is Airtable. This is spreadsheets on steroids. Anyway, this is the way I am ... the founders describe it, because you can almost do anything in Airtable, that is similar experience to spreadsheets but actually really different. Kathleen: Well, you have a very similar list of tools to me, because we use all of those I think with the exception of Frame. We actually use Wipster, which is really similar, so very similar functionality. But yeah, if I'm not on Zoom, I'm usually on Slack. Vlad: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Kathleen: And yeah, and we are using Airtable as well because we had some complex spread sheeting needs that we couldn't solve with Google Sheets and its been great. Vlad: Yeah, exactly. And we use Airtable for almost anything that we do in terms of the list, and the databases in our team. For example, we have a specific list in Airtable for recruiting, we have another sheet for marketing list, like events, or podcasts that we are listening, or events that we want to be part of, or speaking engagements. And lots of other stuff that we do. And Airtable really, really helps us make sure that we are on point with our idea. Even though our marketing plan and ownership plan, and everything that I was saying is also part of Airtable. Kathleen: Yeah. That's great. So, you've outlined really your overarching three kind of pillars, I would say. The people, the processes, and the technology. Talk to me about how that impacted your ability to grow the company, to deliver results through marketing. How Planable's Team Structure Enabled It To Grow Vlad: Yeah, definitely. So, we started implementing all of this processes, and then we obviously did not see any major results from the very first day. But when we started observing some of the patterns that are happening in all of our analytics, so first we started seeing a growth in our traffic. So, it was like the first couple of weeks, it was an incremental traffic. Like 10%, and then 15%, and 20%, and then everything else. And we actually felt like wait a sec, it's growing. It's actually something is happening in here. And when we started understanding where this is coming from, and we ended up analyzing all of the sources, and it's actually from the content that we were creating. And then we started speaking with the people that shared this content on social media, like Facebook, Twitter, and everything else, and we were saying that it's really exceptional content that we are creating, and we really feel like we answered the questions that we proposed from the very beginning of the piece. And this was a clue for us that we are doing something the right way. We are actually creating the right content for the teams, and we understanding for us, this was exactly because we built this processes and workflows in mind, and we were building everything the right way. And when we saw the growth in traffic, we saw the growth in the number of users, and this obviously reflected the number of our revenue. So, and then looking over the past 12 months of the growth from June last year to June this year, we can definitely say that we have month over month growth of between 20 to 30%. I would say that the median number is 23%, but it obviously varies from one month to another month. For example, for our surprise, December was one of the most spectacular months that we've ever had. Kathleen: That is interesting, because I feel like almost every company I know that works in something related to marketing, December is a very slow month because- Vlad: Oh wait, no. Sorry. Sorry about that. This is June. No, this is January. So, January was the most spectacular month, and then December was one of the ... oh my God, one of the most horrible months. Kathleen: I was going to say, that sounds more like every other company... Vlad: Yeah, sorry about that. Yeah. Yeah, this is because we felt ... and in January, we felt like is there anyone looking for a new subscription for their team. Kathleen: Right. We have the same conversation every year. We have usually got tremendous traffic growth in the fourth quarter, and then after the first week in December, it's like it all falls off a cliff. Nobody's working, it seems. Vlad: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I never saw so sad Google analytics on our website like in December, especially the past two weeks. It was just dropping. We had probably minus 60% drop in all of the traffic and then it quickly came up- Kathleen: Which, as long as it comes back is fine. Because if you know it's going to dip every December, you can plan for that. But yeah. Vlad: Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And the most funniest thing, I will never understand this, is that people were signing up for new subscription on January 1st. And I was like, "What the hell are you doing in a new subscription?" Kathleen: Right. Vlad: But then we start analyzing, and we understood that their trail had expired, and they had lots of content planned, and they did not want to give up on this, and then we just ended up publishing next. And we had to renew their subscription, which is a good sign, so we can put- Kathleen: That is a good sign. Vlad: Yeah. And we can prepare for more marketing campaigns or ideas at the end of December and beginning- Kathleen: Yeah. What I like about this story is I've always personally had a belief that marketing is a little bit like weight loss, and health and fitness, you know? There's lots of people who kind of think they're going to get this magic solution, this diet that's going to miraculously have them lose all their weight, and it might in the short term. There's all kinds of fad diets that help you lose weight quickly. But does it last? And usually the answer is no. And unfortunately, the real solution in health and fitness slash weight loss is consistency and good old fashioned calories in, calories out, right? And in marketing, I honestly believe it's a lot like that. There are plenty of little fads and shiny objects that you can chase, and they might give you a short term boost, but as you said in the very beginning, those are not scalable things. And with the tech changing so quickly, and algorithms changing so quickly on social and on Google, if you're just chasing the latest greatest fad, you're always ... it's like chasing your tail. You're always going to be chasing something. So, it made me happy to hear that your great results came from consistency and good old fashioned, you know, content marketing. Vlad: I love it. I love your comparison. I was actually thinking yes, this is totally true. I completely agree with that, yeah. Kathleen: Yeah. It's great to see. So, the company is now how old? Vlad: So, we are now ... so, we started the company in February 2016. I would say that we worked two years in order to get the product on the market and actually feel like people see the value of this product. We started monetizing the company after one year and a half, but then it took us two years in total to get to the product market feed when we understood that people actually see the value and we understand, and we are building something valuable for people. Kathleen: Yeah. And in the meantime, you've been seeing this consistent growth and traffic, and leads and sales, and- Vlad: Yeah, exactly. Because we just understood that if something is working, let's try to stick to it. And you can always stick with consistency. Try incremental, super, super small, super, super small steps. But just do this consistently, week over week, month over month, and make sure that you keep up the same pace. Kathleen: I think that you had a lot of great tips, but I think the one for me personally that resonated the most and that I'm going to try to take to heart is blocking off an hour every day to write. Because really, we do live in a world where content is so central to getting found online, it's also so central to how you nurture your leads and convert them. Even once you have customers, content is central to that. Preventing churn, and developing loyalty, so I love that suggestion, and again it goes back to that exercise and eating right analogy. You got to do it every day, you got to stick with it and you will eventually see results. So, that is going to be my resolution. It's not the new year, but I'm going to make a resolution to write for an hour every day. I love that. Vlad: Yeah, definitely. That's a good one. Kathleen's Two Questions Kathleen: Well, before we wrap up, two questions that I always ask all of my guests, I'm curious to hear your take. When it comes to inbound marketing, and content marketing, is there a company or a person that you think is really doing it well right now? Vlad: Yeah, I actually have someone else in mind, but when you just asked the question, I immediately came up with Drift. I really think that oh my God, I'm following these guys over the past years. We are using [Intercom] personally, just because we went with Intercom, and it was a great decision back then. But we just can't really change from Intercom to Drift, but I just look at the Drift with what we do, and wow, these guys, what we do is completely amazing. There is the founder, and then there is ... Kathleen: Dave Gerhardt. Vlad: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Kathleen: Dave Cancel, and Dave Gerhardt, or as they like to call themselves, DC and DG. Vlad: DC and DG. Yeah, exactly. DC and DG, and what they do on social media, this is completely nuts. They are super, super active what they do. They came up with new projects, new content, new ideas, new landing pages, new books, new everything. And then we do this all of this experience is so beautiful and so extraordinary that I feel like I am part of this company every single day. Every time, when I read something about the company where they are products, I really feel proud that we did this, that we are doing this. I feel part of this company. Even though I am not even a user, I am not even a customer of this. And they did this just by creating a culture of their company that this is like we are building something extraordinary. Especially even their attitude that they do. DC, when they have a conference that we are organizing, probably a couple times a year, and they saw how DC is writing messages in Twitter that, "Let me know if you are coming to the conference. I am coming to personally pick you up at the airport and get you to the conference. From the airport, to the conference." Kathleen: Yeah. Vlad: This is the most amazing thing that a founder can do in the day of the conference. When you have so many things to focus on in the day of the conference, you are picking up people from the airport. Like, really? This is the commitment that I want to see from all the company that I am using. Kathleen: That's great. You know, it's funny. So, I did have Dave Gerhardt, who's DG, on a as a guest on the podcast, and he was one of the earlier guests, and it was so fun to pick his brain specifically about what he is doing with LinkedIn Video, because he's really good with that. And but what I love about what you just did is I've had, since that time, I've had a lot of my guests actually mention Drift when I ask this question, but you're the first person who's gotten really specific about what it is you like about how they're doing their marketing and how it made you feel. And I think that's so interesting, and I love what you said about feeling like you're a part of the company even though you're not an employee, you're not a customer. That's a very fascinating take on it. Vlad: Yeah, in case of my book, I interview 20 people, and DC was one of the people that I wanted to make an interview for 20 minutes, to get him in the book. But he actually didn't have time, and he forwarded the message to DG, and when DG also didn't have time. But when I asked for a quote, and he gave me at least a quote. Kathleen: Oh, that's nice. Yeah, they have a lot going on. Vlad: Yeah, exactly. I was like, "Okay, I totally get it. Please give me a quote at least. I would be super, super happy for a quote." And they did it. Kathleen: That's good. Well, second question. The world of digital marketing is changing at a lightning fast pace, and the thing I hear from most marketers is that they don't have the time to keep up with it. So, how do you personally educate yourself and stay on top of everything that's changing so that you remain on the cutting edge? Vlad: So, couple of things that I do, this is I have couple of people that I'm following on Twitter. This is obviously Matt Navarra, everyone knows about Matt Navarra in social media. There is no chance you don't know about Matt Navarra in social media, because he is writing all the latest updates in social media, and everything what's happening. And then there are also other people that I am following, like Geoff Desreumaux, from We Are Social Media. Also, I am also following We Are Social Media a lot. This is WeRSM- Kathleen: WeRSM. Yeah, one of my other guests turned me onto their newsletter, which is great. Vlad: Yeah, this is super awesome, I love their newsletters just because they add the GIF usually in the beginning of the newsletter, and it's usually fun. Yeah. And I'm also following, and I am part of lots of Facebook groups. Like SaaS marketers and founders, and product marketers with Josh Fechter, and B2B bloggers as well. And I believe that Facebook groups are helping me to stay in touch with the marketing industry, like from underneath. From the underground of it. Because you can read lots of updates and everything else what's happening in the industry with like on TechCrunch, and many other websites. But actually getting the true reaction and understanding what's truly happening in industry, you can only get from the people that are doing this every single day, consistently. And then this was the first. There's Twitter, then second is Facebook, and the first part, this is Zest. I met the founder last year, and- Kathleen: Yam? Yam Regev? Vlad: Yeah, exactly. And they are doing an incredible job with building a platform that helps you put all of the best content right in front of you directly in your face, and they really put some of the best content. I am constantly ... if I'm looking for some marketing content, there is no chance I'm not looking this on Zest first of all, and if I don't find a good answers, I might Google it or as for someone else for more tips and tricks on this. Kathleen: Yeah, that is a very good one. I know we use it a lot at Impact. And I actually just emailed Yam, who is the founder of Zest, saying I wanted to have him on the podcast, so Yam, if you're listening ... answer my email. Vlad: That's awesome. Yeah, if you want I can just drop him a quick message- Kathleen: Do it. Do it. Let's gang up on him and get him to come on. He's great. Vlad: I will message him on Facebook after our call and make sure that he answers your message. Kathleen: Perfect. Vlad: Yeah, he's really cool. I invited him for a conference in Moldova, in my home country, and lots of people said that he was one of the best guests that they had. So, I really think he'll be a great addition to the podcast. Kathleen: Yeah, yeah. And Zest, it's Zest.is, if you're listening. It's a great browser extension for Chrome, so when you open a new window, literally it's like a curated publication of top marketing articles. So, totally agree with you on that one. Great, great suggestions and insights, Vlad. How To Connect With Vlad Kathleen: If somebody wants to learn more about Planable, or get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that? Vlad: So, if they want to get in touch with me, like really if you have absolutely any questions, hit me up on Twitter, or LinkedIn, or Vlad@Planable.io. I am more than happy to help and answer any questions. As Kathleen also said in the beginning, I am trying to be active in mentoring communities, so I am trying to ... I'm currently actually mentoring couple of people on building their own digital agencies, and also their startups. And if you really have any questions or need some advice in this, we'd be more than happy to chat or jump on a call. And then if you want to learn more about Planable, and see how we are changing the content marketing collaboration generation, just go on Planable.io. Kathleen: Great. Well, I'll put all those links in the show notes, so if you want to check any of them out, head over there and you'll be able to get in touch with Vlad, or check out Planable. Thank you so much. This was really fun, and it's great to hear your story, and I'm so impressed by what a structured process and team you have for a company that really is still very young. So, there's kudos to you for figuring that out as quickly as you did. Vlad: Thank you. I really appreciate that, and thanks a lot for having me today. You Know What To Do Next... Kathleen: Of course, and if you're listening, and you liked what you heard, or learned something new, of course leave the podcast a five star review on Apple Podcasts. We always appreciate it. Vlad: Yeah, totally. Kathleen: And if you know somebody else doing kick ass inbound marketing work, tweet me @WorkMommyWork, because they could be my next guest. That's it for this week. Thanks, Vlad. Vlad: Thank you.

The possibilities that something like YouTube has for motion designers to help take our careers to the next level are truly amazing. But where do you start? How can you build an audience, find professional opportunities, create great content, and make it all worthwhile? Today’s guest has done all that and is ready to tell you how! Kelsey Brannan, better known as Premiere Gal on YouTube, has helped countless motion designers up their game when it comes to creating amazing content. With over 130,000 YouTube subscribers, Kelsey must know a thing or two about connecting with her audience. Besides having her own amazing career making videos, she has made it her mission to share her expertise with people like you and me. In this interview, Kelsey shares what it takes to start your own successful YouTube channel and make money from it. We also discuss some of the avenues available for making passive income as motion designers. Kelsey breaks down everything from finding the right affiliate programs to selling without “selling out.” Much of her advice is all about making good connections and following your interests. After listening to our chat, I’m sure you’ll feel more empowered and confident to get started on your YouTube channel too! In this episode: Why making your own instructional YouTube channel will help improve your skills too Using YouTube as a way to get exposure and find clients The pros and cons of selling templates as a form of passive income Using affiliate marketing to make money while you sleep Advice for motion designers who want to start their first YouTube channel Why it’s not necessary to publish on any sort of strict schedule Building the right relationships to get great sponsors Quotes: “If you want to up your skills in anything, definitely make a YouTube channel.” [7:25] “While it may seem like you're just promoting template packs, you’ll probably get requests from a lot of different people who are looking for some custom graphics.” [16:51] “It’s not selling out -- it’s just being smart about how you’re presenting your work and working with good companies that believe in your voice.”  [28:45] “The great part about YouTube is once you have your channel and your audience, you can do other things and not have YouTube take over.” [36:36] “When you’re doing YouTube videos, think about how well you can present it uniquely and have fun with it. The last thing you want to do is have it be like a laundry chore.” [40:21] Links: Find Kelsey Brannan online Follow Kelsey on YouTube | Twitter | Linkedin | Facebook | Instagram Premiere Bro Envato Pond5 Social Bluebook Peter McKinnon on YouTube Get your free trial of Wipster   Find the full show notes here Keep up with everything Motion Hatch   Follow Motion Hatch on Twitter | Instagram If you haven't already, would you mind leaving us a rating and review? It really helps!

Who doesn’t want a massive YouTube following? It will help you connect to other filmmakers, find clients, and showcase your skills all in one place. Garnering a huge number of subscribers may seem like the Holy Grail of video on social media, but with the right approach and dedication, it’s totally possible! And today's guest, Kelsey Brannan is the go-to person for growing your following and creating an epic Youtube channel that will work to showcase and grow your business. Kelsey is the creator of Premiere Gal, a YouTube community of over 117,000 subscribers which is focused on video, photo, and audio production. After getting a Masters degree in documentary filmmaking from Georgetown, Kelsey worked as a filmmaker with the State Department. She’s since moved on to helping others learn the ins and outs of her craft and is the head of creative growth at Wipster, a video feedback and collaboration platform for creators, teams, and businesses. In this interview, Kelsey talks about what it’s like to grow a YouTube channel to over 100,000 subscribers and why as video makers we should be striving for this as well. Kelsey also discusses the difficulties that many freelancers face by not being part of the companies that they want to work for as well as some great advice on how to surmount this challenge. Kelsey goes on to talk about the challenges of communicating with clients and how platforms like Wipster can make this infinitely easier. Before our talk comes to an end, Kelsey shares what she knows about affiliate marketing in relation to YouTube video marketing and how it can expand your passive income stream. Do you use a tool like Wipster to that helps you be more efficient or creative? Tell me what it is in the comments on the episode page!   In this episode: Why your business shouldn’t rely on a single source of income The biggest challenge that freelancers experience and how to overcome it What Wipster is and how it can streamline your communication with clients What to consider when deciding whether or not to create a YouTube channel for your business The kind of YouTube channel that will attract the most potential clients Useful and actionable tips for growing your YouTube channel How to make extra passive income with affiliate marketing on YouTube   Quotes: “Whether you decide to go to college or not, just surround yourself with people who inspire you and just start getting your hands dirty.” [9:20] “If you present yourself as an expert on YouTube and you grow that following and that expertise, you can really bring in more business for yourself.” [25:20] “It’s kind of like the power of the network too, because you may get a lot of solo entrepreneurs and freelancers watching you, but then they talk about you and refer you.” [29:25] “You can’t expect instant results. It takes time, persistence, and patience. But if you can impact just one person, that’s a win for me.” [35:20] Links: Premiere Gal website Follow Kelsey Brannan’s Premier Girl on YouTube | Twitter | Instagram | Patreon   Wipster NAB Giveaway Wipster Follow Wipster on Facebook | Instagram | YouTube | Twitter | Linkedin   NAB Show Book a meeting with Wipster at NAB Show The High-Performance Planner vidIQ     Additional Links: Check out the full show notes page Do you have something to share on this podcast? Fill out this form here. Be sure to take the Studio Sherpas survey for a chance to win some incredible prizes (if we do say so ourselves!) Stay up to date with everything we're doing at Studio Sherpas Tune into our weekly Facebook Lives Follow Studio Sherpas on Facebook | Twitter | Instagram   If you haven't already, we'd love it if you would take 1 minute to leave us a review on iTunes!

Today’s guest is Kelsey Brannan also known as the Premiere Gal. She is the Creator of Premiere Gal Media. Her youtube channel generated well over 5 million views and over 114k subscribers. Kelsey is also a Director of Creative Growth at Wipster. Website: www.premieregal.com | www.youtube.com/premieregal Wipster: www.ukramedia.com/wipster

How does a small, 25 person SaaS company regularly attract 700+ registrants to its webinars?   This week onThe Inbound Success Podcast my guest is Andre van den Assum, the Marketing and Partnerships Manager for Wipster, a cloud-based a video workflow collaboration review platform. I had heard from a colleague that Wipster was absolutely killing it with its webinars and was excited to talk with Andre about how he consistently generates such large numbers of attendees. Our conversation gets super detailed, with specifics on how much Wipster spends on paid media (TL;DR - not much), what the click-through rate is on their email newsletter, how long their promotional timeline is for each webinar, and the percent of leads they get from each marketing channel.   This week's episode of The Inbound Success Podcast is brought to you by our sponsor, IMPACT Live,  the most immersive and high energy learning experience for marketers and business leaders. IMPACT Live takes place August 6-7, 2019 in Hartford Connecticut and is headlined by Marcus Sheridan along with keynote speakers including world-renowned Facebook marketing expert Mari Smith and Drift CEO and Co-Founder David Cancel. Inbound Success Podcast listeners can save 10% off the price of tickets with the code "SUCCESS".  Click here to learn more or purchase tickets for IMPACT Live Some highlights from my conversation with Andre include: Wipster is a video workflow collaboration review platform. The company currently has 25 employees with offices in New Zealand and Portland, Oregon. They have thousands of customers around the world, including big brands like Disney, Red Bull, Shopify and Delta Airlines, and many smaller brands as well.  Wipster regularly gets hundreds of registrants for its webinars, which it typically produces with partners. They get many of their webinar leads from email marketing, and typically include a promotional video about the webinar in their emails. One channel they use for email promotion is their newsletter, which goes out to 40,000 people that has a 25% open rate. Their webinar marketing campaigns typically last two weeks. For a recent webinar on which Wipster partnered with Brightcove Deloitte, 50% of the registrations came from email marketing (12% were from promotions in Wipster's email newsletter), and out of 1100 total webinar registrations, Wipster drove 700 of those (with the remaining 400 from Brightcove). 10% of their webinar leads come from social media. For one webinar, Wipster advertised in Marketing Profs' email newsletter. The cost for that campaign was $3,000 and the newsletter went to a list of 13,000. That yielded 120 leads at $24 a lead.   Wipster posts all of its webinars to its YouTube channel, where they typically attract 600+ views each. Resources from this episode: Save 10% off the price of tickets to IMPACT Live with promo code "SUCCESS" Register for IMPACT's upcoming webinar with Wipster on Make Better Videos In-House: How to Create Consistent Video Production Visit Wipster's website Subscribe to the Wipster Weekly newsletter Wipster's YouTube channel Wipster Stars Facebook Group Connect with Andre van den Assum on LinkedIn Listen to the podcast to learn all about the marketing campaigns and tactics that regularly attract 700+ attendees to Wipster's webinars. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host):Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host, Kathleen Booth, and today my guest is Andre van den Assum, who is the marketing and partnerships manager at Wipster. Welcome, Andre. Andre van den Assum (Guest): Welcome. Yes. Hello. How's it going? Kathleen: Good. I feel like it's hello from tomorrow because you are across the other side of the world, and it is the next day and sunny and beautiful where you are, and it is yesterday and freezing cold where I am. Andre: You got it. We're a little bit in the future here in New Zealand and it is the middle of summer for us so we're kind of on the back of a nice middle of summer Christmas holiday break and just cracking 2019, so yeah, nice to be on your show. We've got some fun things coming up with IMPACT actually so this is nice to compliment that as well. Kathleen: Yeah, it's great and I'm excited to have you here and for anybody who's listening, you can't see, I'm looking at Andre through the video and he's sitting outside and the trees are blowing in the warm New Zealand breeze and there's like, water in the background, it's really stunning. And I'm sitting in the 20 degree weather in the Mid Atlantic region of the United States thinking, "What am I doing here?" So if you're listening you can always go to the show notes and I have a picture in there of the two of us recording so you can see- Andre: If it makes you feel better the roles reverse in June, July and we have a team in Portland and the same thing happens, you know? Kathleen: We all have our turn. Andre: They're all off to festivals and beaches and we're freezing down in New Zealand at the bottom of the South Pacific so don't worry. Kathleen: Well it still sounds like a great place to be. About Wipster Kathleen: So for anyone who's not familiar with Wipster who doesn't know who you are could you tell my listeners a little bit more about yourself and about the company? Andre: Absolutely! So I've been with Wipster for almost five years now, I was employee number five and we've got about 25 of us now. We're a video workflow collaboration review platform. Born from the idea of a video producer/director who was kinda sick of chasing feedback with his clients and wondered why people can't just comment directly on top of the video, so click on top of the frame, make your comment, kinda Google Docs for video, and so he went looking for that solution and it didn't exist. So we were the first people to kind of create a product where you could literally click on top of the frame. There's a couple of others that do it now but we're first to market about five years ago and it's been an interesting journey over that time you know, going from kind of an idea, a spec, into a kind of fully fledged company. I guess we're still a start-up with 25 or so employees but we've got thousands of active users, thousands of customers. Some of the biggest brands around, you know, the Disneys of the world and the Red Bulls and Shopify and Delta Airlines and yeah, we've got a ton of big users but we've also got a bunch of small users, a bunch of agencies that use it for review and approval. Something we're seeing a lot of is some of that capability moving in-house so you know, we're talking to more and more brands who are wanting to kind of scale their video and we can help them do that, you know, by speeding up their workflow, making it easier to pump out the video 'cause we're not talking about kind of one video a month, we're talking about you know, three or four or five videos a week ideally, and some of them even more than that. So yeah, it's been a fun journey and been kind of ... Selling software as a service means you can do it from New Zealand at the bottom of the world but obviously we needed some people on the ground in the US so our founder moved over there and has built a team over there as well so yeah, it's been quite a fun few years, you know, a bit of a rollercoaster but yeah, definitely very rewarding in trying a bunch of different digital marketing tactics along the way to kinda get our name out, you know, being from the bottom of the world to kind of getting that presence, you know, we're in 150 countries or something like that as well, so it's a pretty interesting time to be doing marketing and kinda trying to do this kind of thing I think. Kathleen: Yeah, and as far as the product is concerned ... So we use it, full disclosure for everybody listening, we're a Wipster customer, and we have a video team at IMPACT, it's a couple of people, and we do a ton of video. In fact, I was just up in our office last week and we must've shot, I mean, it's close to a hundred videos in one week because we had a lot of people in from out of town so we wanted to maximize the time. I first was exposed to Wipster really as somebody who provides feedback so our video team was like, "We have to use this platform," and whenever we do a video they send it over to me and I get the link, I go into Wipster, and I'm able to just like, as you said, it is very much like Google Docs for video. I can just pop my comments in there and I'm not a technical person so it's really nice because it makes it very, very easy for me to provide my input. Andre: Yeah. Well, that's how we got traction from the get-go was kind of making a tool that was just very easy to use. The editors are kinda used to these big, complicated editing suites, Premiere Pro and stuff like that with a lot of buttons, but you know, when they're sending it to their clients or their team members or the legal team or the exec team to get approval or feedback, they just wanna be able to click a link, watch the video in a very kind of simple, enjoyable kind of experience, just click on top, make videos. And there's quite a few things going on behind the scenes, you know, like we've got integrations with Adobe, with Slack, with all the publishing platforms, so we can kind of help the more technical people as well but in terms of the end user we try and make it as simple as possible and I think that's what made us so successful so early on was just, it kind of just worked, you know? Kathleen: Yeah. The simpler the better. Andre: Yeah, that's what software's gotta be like these days, you know? I think there editing some big shifts and you know, you used to have to get a software team into the company carrying massive servers on their backs and all this hardware and the IT guys have gotta do all this year-long onboarding and all that kinda stuff. But that's changed, the price point has changed, the experience has changed. So yeah, so it's nice to be part of that movement. Wipster + Webinars Kathleen: Now, one of the reasons I was looking forward to talking with you for this podcast is that you were chatting with a colleague of mine about us doing a webinar together, which we are going to do, so stay tuned if you're listening, and I remember it was my colleague Vin and he said, "You know, you should talk to these guys at Wipster because they get a ton of people coming to their webinars." Webinars are so interesting to me, I'll have to preface our conversation with this. In some respects they're a dying marketing form because so many companies do them and I think people have become so used to webinars and so used to webinars especially that are recorded and they send you the recording afterwards and so people might sign up for them but then they never watch them 'cause they're like, "Eh, it'll come to my email inbox and I'll watch it someday." You know? And so there's this element of folks being jaded by webinars and you know, having said that I think there are some people doing them really well. You're not a huge company as you mentioned. You're 25 people, but you're getting large numbers of people to your webinars. So I wanna dive in and learn more about what you're doing and what's the secret sauce behind these great results you're getting. Andre: It's interesting because you've got all these different things that you can be doing as a digital marketer and you know, for us, you know, we've been doing webinars for a few years now and you know, it's among other things managing all the social channels, doing all these big kind of product campaigns, doing events, doing more tactical campaigns, you know, ad words, all the rest of it, so you know, where do webinars fit in? I think there was a point where we were kind of, you know, we wanted to kind of partner with more people in our ecosystem, other brands, other product services, and so when we called up these people we kinda went to the table with a bunch of ideas and were open to doing whatever with them. You know, might be events, might be, you know, we could do some blogging, you know, guest blogging on each other sites, you know, good for back links, good for awareness, maybe getting them to share some stuff in their newsletter. So you know, we tried to think about all these things that we could do, even create some content for YouTube and stuff like that or you know, data content. So there's actually quite a few things you can do with someone but it was funny because it almost always would just keep coming back to webinars, that was the thing that kind of ticked all the boxes for both sides. A webinar is something that when you approach someone, they already have their audience, they're very protective of the community of the audience, they're not gonna just be kind of sending anything you send them on to their audience, they're the gatekeepers and when it comes to webinars, you know, the key is coming up with a really good topic, a topic that kind of speaks to both the audiences. So I think the first thing we do is kind of figure out what the overlap is for both of us. You know, what are we both standing for and in the case of doing something with IMPACT, you guys are doing some amazing kind of consultancy work around helping brands scale their video. You know, we happen to make a tool that helps them do that so let's kind of talk about that. It should never be salesy, so you know, I think part of the secret sauce is just coming up with something that people wanna click on that's really, truly valuable when they click on it and learn something. So that actually can take a little bit of back and fro. I've even had to kind of can a webinar late in the planning phase because we just couldn't quite come up with that ... And that was a tough decision for me to say, "Look, you know, we're just not quite aligned. You wanna talk more about this but that's not really interesting to our audience. We wanna talk more about this but you don't have enough leadership in that." So kind of to answer your question, the reason why we do things in the first place is because they're really easy to share to both your communities, they both provide a lot of value to both those audiences, and they provide leads and bound leads, you know? A lot of these other pieces of content doesn't have a gate and a form like webinars do and it's just natural to enter your email and sign up for these things. So therefore when you're looking at kind of what the outcome is for both these companies, you know, you both get a nice list of leads and you both provide a lot of value to your audience and it's very easy to share. And then so once you've got a really good topic and once it kind of ... You know, that's gonna help massively and then there's a few other things you can do to help drive them and one of ours is to have quite an active community, to have quite a big email database, you know, a good open rate, so that's kind of some of the work we've done over the years to build that up that we can now go to with good content. It's quite traditional marketing really. We still get a big chunk of our leads through email. Another one, which is kind of obvious for us, but make a video to promote that webinar.  When you look at the click through rates on the emails or even with our partners, we really tend to always overshoot their goals on what they kind of expect. And even when we have at times kind of brought less, you know, having not done a partnership and having to drive all the traffic ourselves, you know, gone through things like MarketingProfs and kind of sending out email blasts to 15,000 users, for them, you know, they come back, it has a thumbnail, so we create a GIF thumbnail with a play button on top and they're like, "Oh, this is some of the best results we've had!" And that's good topic, good copyrighting, and a video thumbnail to help drive it. But yeah, we use our social channels. We have audiences across different social channels.  We have an in-app kind of pop-up that lets people know. We have a newsletter that goes out to 40,000 people that has like a 25% open rate. So it's a combination of all these things, you know? Probably there's no secret sauce on it - it's a combination of value and you know, and finding something that kind of works for both you and some potential partners. Kathleen: So taking a step back, you mentioned you start with really trying to figure out topics that will resonate with your audience. Tell me a little bit more about who your audience is. Andre: Yeah, yeah, for sure. So we stand for video, you know? We're born out of video, out of making the video workflow easier, about helping people speed up their video workflow. So that's the kind of things that we like to talk about. The topics that come under that are kind of, you know, video marketing, or video ideas, creative ideas, you know, making videos for your clients, things like that. Our audience is a few different types but our main audience is the video creative themselves, so the video editor, video producer, video director. They can be a freelancer, they can be working for a small production company or an agency, they can be in a brand, you know, be an in-house team for a brand, you know, so that's pretty much the mix. They can also work for big media companies as well. And so they're all slightly different, you know? We have actually done quite a bit of content targeted as well, at kind of marketers, marketing managers, marketing execs, to help them scale their video strategy and the reasons why they need to do that. So that's kind of our audience, but I think that the large chunk of that is video creatives. Kathleen: And assuming you're able to really nail down a topic that's gonna be relevant and useful to that audience, you then talked about working with your partner that you're doing the webinar with to really refine the topics, make sure the presentation is not gonna be too salesy, and that sort of thing. How long does that process generally take for you guys? Andre: I mean, sometimes you just come up with that topic and it's just real obvious and you kind of nail it. It's one of those ... Kind of that creative writing part of it is hard to ... You always think, "Oh, I've got a couple of hours, I'm just gonna smash this out." Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, you know? It's a bit of wordsmithing. I think one of the key steps to this - and this wasn't, you know, we didn't have this from day one– was having that kind of, that one page, well, not one page, just that one document, that collaborative document that starts with a time and a place and a kind of general theme. You kind of flesh that out, you come up with an abstract ... a title, abstract and a few bullet points. It's actually not a ton of words but you kinda wanna kinda get it quite synced and really kind of interesting. I think part of that process as you're doing this, you know, you actually list all the kind of requirements for your partner and it kind of helps to show what you're gonna commit to. Especially around promotion, you know?  We've kind of been burnt in the past by kind of our partner not living up to what we'd expect for them because I've got other things going on. That's fine, but you know, when you've got in writing that's saying, you know, "We're gonna send it out to our email list of this size twice," you know, "and on these dates. We're putting it out to our social channels. WE're gonna throw 500 bucks behind it to boost it." Once you're kind of quite transparent about what your expectations are and then relaying how many registrations have come in as it happens, put the heat on a bit more, but it gets fun, you know, you share in that success. So I think, you know, it does take time and I know some companies do a webinar a week or something like that. You know, I do too many other things to be trying to take on that. Even a webinar a month is pretty ... I've done that for a few months in a row, you know, four or five months in a row and that's like, you do at least two months promotion time for each of them. Especially if they're using customers, customers are really good if you have a shared customer with your partner. That's ideal, but you're also adding another person who's busy into the mix and so, yeah, be a little bit realistic about the times and it does take a bit of time, you know, and I wish it took less time. There are actually other models or other styles that can take less time. You know, AMAs on Twitter or you know, we're thinking about starting kind of a live video kind of creative chat, monthly chat. That actually requires less of our customers and more people that we want to highlight and less of us in terms of kind of planning the content and stuff, but when it comes to webinars it does take us a little bit of time to get all that stuff together. A few moving parts. Kathleen: Yeah. I love that idea that you mentioned about having that collaborative document. I almost think of it as like a creative brief for the webinar and getting both parties in it and aligning around it because I do think that it's easy to say, "Hey! We're gonna do a webinar on X," and the two parties have very different visions of what X means and should represent and you certainly don't wanna be surprised the day of with slides that are not, you know, that are not along the lines of what you were hoping to see. Time-wise- Andre: Yeah, you do wanna control, not control some of that but yeah, you wanna avoid surprises, have those timelines, have the dry run. You know, do all that stuff, have all those steps in place, and once you've kind of got a document that kind of outlines that stuff you can copy the document, pull out some stuff depending on what the next one is, and at least it kind of puts that up front very early on in that kind of conversation. Kathleen: You were talking about timelines earlier and it sounds like, if I understood correctly, you leave yourself about two months to promote a webinar. Is that accurate? Andre: No, two weeks. Kathleen: Two weeks, oh, I thought you said two months. I was gonna say, "Man, you're really good about planning ahead!" Andre: Well actually we're gonna be doing one with IMPACT in just over three weeks, and they do three weeks promotion so I was quite impressed with that. As long as we've got a solid two weeks of promotion time we find that's plenty to kind of include it in some of these letters that we send out, you know, pop-up in-app, put it across the social. So yeah, as long as we've got two weeks we're pretty good at pulling a bunch of registrations for sure. Wipster's Webinar Promotion Campaigns Kathleen: So let's break down your promotion process. You've got these two weeks, you just mentioned a few things you do, let's start with email. Am I correct that you have a weekly email newsletter? Andre: Yep, every Thursday, US time, we send out a Wipster Weekly and this has been something that's been really successful for us. We've had it around for ages, and we curate a bunch of content, you know. We kind of scour the interwebs and find all the best kind of video production, video marketing tips and tricks and you know, educational stuff, so we pool all that together. There's like five articles and then inspirational video of the week. One of those blogs is our blog. We put out a new blog every week, and so that's kind of pretty value-driven and people love it. We get a lot of responses from it saying how much they look forward to watching the weekly and the different articles and pieces in it and it also provides us a pretty good regular promotional tool. We've got a little banner at the bottom that we can use and also the intro to the newsletter is personalized so we can kind of let everyone know that there's a webinar. Kathleen: And that's going out weekly. Do you do then on top of that separate like, email blasts if you will, to your list? Andre: Yeah, definitely. Yeah, and we don't send a ton of emails to our users, you know? So I know even for us we're quite sensitive about kind of sending too many emails but actually we don't send that many. For a webinar we typically send either two or three. You know, one kind of a week or week and a half out or two weeks out from the webinar. I think, you know, because people get that Wipster Weekly every Thursday they also might not have time that day and kind of know what's in it but when you send a dedicated email and the subject line is all about that webinar, it's a bit more focused so it's gonna get some different types of people clicking on it. And so that's an important tool, you know. I was just looking at some numbers earlier ... Let me just have a quick look here. But to give you an idea- Kathleen: As you're looking at those numbers I'm curious, and I don't know if you can get this specific, but you've got a two week time period. Is it one email newsletter mention and then one email blast or ... What does that cadence look like? Andre: Yeah, it depends on what day it falls on but usually it would be like one email kind of a couple of weeks out, a week and a half out, and then a kind of reminder one day away email. We might sometimes send two emails with different subject lines and different content with that big thumbnail as well, ideally a thumbnail. Then send that kind of one day away, just last chance to catch it, and if we get clever on it, if we've got other promotional stuff going on and we don't ... 'Cause it kind of depends if we've got other things going on whether we send two or three emails and sometimes, you know, if people have clicked on the email but haven't registered then we might only just send those guys the one day reminder. So we play around with it a little bit but they'll always get at least two dedicated emails you know, about the webinar and then also one to two mentions in the newsletter because it can just be as short as a little intro in the newsletter just reminding them. So it's just, you know, you're actually letting people know something that they like to be kept informed with, you know. Especially if it's good content highlighting some amazing customers at Deloitte, a video team of three making video for a company of 280,000, you know, learned how that's successful with internal video, et cetera. So that's stuff that you're proud to share and I think that's a real key part of it. And just to kind of talk about you know, where some of our leads come from. We did one with ... We did a webinar with Brightcove and Deloitte, as our customer, someone I just mentioned, and 50% of our registrations came from our email. You know, that was dedicated email, from the newsletter, that was like 12%. So out of 1100 registrations we drove 700 of those ourselves and yeah, so 50% came from emails. So email is really powerful and then ... Yeah. Kathleen: So then I have a really specific question and you may or may not have an answer for this. With email I know my team spends a lot of time, because we're all total marketing geeks, talking about subject lines. And you're obviously getting great results from your email blasts and we've debated back and forth, especially for webinars. Does it make sense to have the word "webinar" in the subject line or like ... Have you found any lessons learned from how you craft your email subject lines for your webinars that seem to work well for you? Andre: We do typically use the word webinar, but in saying that, we sometimes don't and you know, it kind of depends because we're only doing these every couple of months. You know, we have those conversations at the time, "What are some good subject lines?" We're also sending probably two emails plus a reminder so "webinar" is gonna be in there somewhere. But nothing really stands out for us in terms of you know, in terms of what works more than others. It doesn't vary hugely, you know, as long as it's a good topic, you know? I don't think things like that make a massive difference for us. Definitely not something we've noted, but we're all so busy that it's kind of hard to get too down in the details. But you know, I think it's good to let people know that it's a webinar. I think people still enjoy webinars and you're saying that they are kind of old-fashioned and we've had those same conversations. We go to the table with these partners with you know, "Let's do a video series on ... We can create a landing page, do an educational series about how our brands are turning into media companies," you know, "Put a topic outline," and then it's kind of like, "Well what's the goal here? Are we looking for leads? 'Cause where do they enter their details? This is quite a lot of work to do, you know, where is it gonna live?" And it just starts getting quite complicated so you know, it just keeps coming back to webinars being really successful for us. Kathleen: Yeah. And in the emails themselves, are you putting ... You mentioned that you make like, a promo video for your webinar. Are you putting that video with your animated GIF into the email? Andre: Yeah. So yeah, like, if you can't do a GIF - they're pretty easy to make as much tools - you can just do like a screenshot of your video, so a thumbnail with a big play button. The play button is one of the most recognizable, recognized logos there is. You know, everyone knows what that means and people just wanna watch that video so that's something that really increases your engagement or the click through rate of that email. So yeah, definitely recommend doing that. What we've been doing recently is kind of taking a few frames and making a little GIF with a play button over top 'cause GIFs play inside the email. Thumbnails don't. Videos don't.  And then everything drives to a landing page which is optimized and that's something we've kind of ... There's a few steps we've taken over the years and we've actually been using a site called Instapage, you know, where it kind of takes away your navigation at the top and really kind of makes it clear what the offer is on that page. It's got a form above the fold. It's got the video kind of above the fold. It's got the description so kind of, you know, making that as nice and as optimized as possible, not a ton of ticks, you know, really clear what they need to do to sign up. So that's something that has helped our conversion rate on that end.   Kathleen: So you talked about how you use Instapage and your emails and things. You also discussed that when you're doing these promotional workflows for the webinars you have a couple of other channels you use and one of them was social. Can you walk me through what you do on social to promote your webinars? Andre: Yeah, for sure. Social, you know, surprisingly social will only get us about 10% of our sign ups but you know, it's all about ... For me, I think social channels are really good for brand awareness, showing that you're active, that you're in the conversation, that you have an opinion, that you're coming up with thought leadership. So we kind of throw around $500, if we're doing something with a partner we might throw $500 or so dollars just to kinda get that topic and webinar in front of a bunch of different people and you know, our target audience, showing that we're just leading thought leadership, we're talking about the things they care about. It often doesn't result in a ton of registrations, as I said maybe 10%. We have used, on Facebook, we have used the forms before so people can ... So the form is actually embedded in Facebook, it auto-populates some of the details on there because Facebook has already got that information. And so that has worked out for us, you know. They're like $10 a lead or $10 a registration, which is actually lower than almost anything else we put money towards. To give you an idea, you know we, for that MarketingProfs, email blast, that cost us $3,000 and that's a list of 13,000 and I think that got us like ... What was it? That got us ... Let me see, that got us like 120 leads, so that was $24 a lead. So $10 with $24 ... Yeah, so social typically doesn't work out to be an amazing return on getting leads. Plus you know, with something like Facebook, for $10 for using that form, we have to integrate that form with our content management system that integrates with our webinar thing so it takes a little bit of back and forth work. We've tried it, it's a pretty good cost per lead, but we don't think the quality there is really very high. So yeah, I mean, the videos are great because honestly I think the video is the key on a lot of this stuff because video looks great on all these social channels. It shows what you're doing. It does drive registrations, but about 10%. I think it's a collective, kind of, you're using all these channels and if you're building them all up I think it all really helps. You know, 10% is nothing to kind of scoff at, that's really important, plus it's quite low cost. But yeah, it's not super efficient in terms of driving leads and it just provides us really good content to share and shows that we're kind of active and talking about the topics our customers care about. Kathleen: That's interesting to hear how ... Some of the different paid media channels that you've used. Have you done any other promoted newsletter placements like you did with MarketingProfs or was that the only one? Andre: That's the only email blast that we've done and the reason we had to pay for that one, because we ended up throwing like five grand at that webinar, we got like 550 registrations. It was really good content but it was a little bit more targeted towards marketing strategy and marketing teams so it's not gonna be quite as attractive to all our freelancers and production companies- Kathleen: Got it. Andre: So I think that's why we didn't get quite as many. But however, you know, we also ... It was something that we ran completely ourselves and we didn't have a partner to leverage their audience so then without putting a bit of money ... I mean, at the end of the day we all want new leads or new eyeballs on our product or service, on our thought leadership, we wanna attract people that are outside of what we already have, which is pretty much our primary KPI. There's still a lot of benefits to be had about engaging people in your database, you know? People that aren't quite customers yet or even customers. To reengage them with how other companies have been successful and et cetera, et cetera. But you know, when we're working with a partner we really wanna kind of get in front of a new audience and so when we've done webinars that highlight our customers, and we haven't done this with a partner, then we've gotta look at new ways to kind of top that up. Andre: I mean, so we got 130-odd registrations, you know, through that channel with $25 each so you know, that was quite interesting. But then if we look at a webinar we did with Lemonlight we got like 1200 registrations. The topic was kind of, 24 inspirational video ideas or something like that, so a little bit more generic, a little bit more kind of collective for quite a wider audience. And we spent $500 on that, you know, so 10% of what we spent and we got a bunch more leads. But you know, you've gotta consider what you're looking for, what the cost of your product is, how much you're willing to spend to get someone into your, kind of into your world and educate them about what you're offering. We're a business-to-business product, we have kind of a varied list of what we charge our clients so it depends. When we did the webinar with Brightcove and we highlighted Deloitte that was a bit more of an enterprise play and Deloitte, I mean Brightcove, you know, by and large their customers are bigger companies, bigger media companies, bigger brands. So they're a real enterprise solution. So even though we attracted 700 versus their 400, you know, we got some really top quality brands that came along to that. You know, like an amazing list of brands that tuned in for that one. So it also isn't always about quantity, you know, there's also a quality argument to that as well. Kathleen: Absolutely. It sounds like especially if it's maybe an audience that isn't in your core of the video editor, the producer, et cetera - like when you did the MarketingProfs thing - it sounded to me like you're looking to maybe expand into and get more leads in a segment where you didn't traditionally have a ton, so that makes sense. Andre: No, absolutely. When we started this business all those years ago, you know, our bread-and-butter customer was video producers and agencies and freelancers dealing with that client feedback process. And so we saw a big opportunity in these brands because things were starting to move a little bit more in-house. So we really wanted to get in front of brands as well and help them along that journey. So then you start to do some kind of more tactical plays in terms of getting in front of those decision makers, their brands, the marketers, and whatnot. So that influenced our content strategy last year when we really made some kind of conscious plays targeting marketers, video marketers, marketers in general, making sure they're aware of tools like ours to help them scale their video. And then, so part of that is creating the topic and the ideas that are really valuable to them. That was highlighting Xero's journey, you know. They have an amazing in-house video production team. They use video across their kind of content strategy so it's not all actually just marketing, it's about all the education and kind of onboarding and all that kind of stuff as well. They are a global company with an awesome in-house team and the guy that runs their team kinda walked us through how they went from you know, 10 videos a year to 1,000. So that was really targeted at these brands who have started their video journey but wanna kinda scale it up. So it wasn't really targeted at those freelancers necessarily. And then that was just part of our overall kind of marketing strategy in terms of building awareness in that segment and kind of trying to drive some business in that area. So yeah, I think getting new eyeballs and getting new leads, you know, based off what your kind of strategic objectives are as a company, but getting some new leads I think is one of the big outcomes of webinars, especially when you're doing it with partners 'cause there's already ... Kathleen: Definitely. Yeah, definitely. Now, going back to your data on where your webinar leads are coming from. We talked through email which is 50%, talked through social which is 10%. What were some of the other significant sources for you? Andre: Well actually ... I was actually looking at the Xero webinar numbers so I've kind of got that a little bit wrong. The numbers are still correct but this was for the Xero, not the Deloitte one. So this was the time where we had to drive all the registrations ourselves. So 50% email, 22% came from that email blast that we paid three grand for, 12% was the newsletter, and then like eight or nine percent was across our social channels. We also have a pop-up in the app and that kind of drove a couple of percent and also our website as well. So on our homepage we have a little banner at the top of our homepage and that drove another two and a half percent. So that's our 100% there. You know, if you look at when we do something with Brightcove, you know, we pull 700 and they pull 400 so they're bringing in ... I don't know what that is, 30-odd percent themselves. Kathleen: I love that you're pulling in more leads than Brightcove. Andre: Well you know, that was- Kathleen: I mean, they're a decent sized company, you know? Andre: That was fun because they said to us, you know, they were like ... I was like, "Okay, what's our goals?" 'Cause I already had this kind of, you know as I said, the documentation to help drive the process, and usually I always put a goal here and I kind of put, "What is our goal and what is our stretch goal?" And so they were driving this one a little bit and they said, "Well, our goal was 300 registrations," and I was like, "is that each?" And they're like, "Oh no, total." I was like, "We'll get that ourselves, no problem. I think we should aim higher." And when we launched our campaign we launched it a few days before them and we kind of got 300 out of the gate and so then that kind of lit a fire on them as well to really kind of drive registration. So you know, if you think about it, they were aiming for 300 all up and they ended up driving 400 themselves. So that actually made them push harder. We got 700 of those and then we just kind of ... I had a chat with the team on slack but the kind of brands that we attracted was Bank of America, Oracle, Cisco, Goodyear, McCafee, Oxford, Milwaukee Tools, Hallmark, you know, Sears, Walmart, SAP, Apple, Pixar, Canadian Tire, Baby Center, Airbnb, Visa, UNICEF, LinkedIn, Salesforce, Air New Zealand, LA Times, Whataburger. So you know, when it came to big brands, and a lot of those we actually drive ourselves, but they pulled some big brands in there as well. It was a roaring success and you know, the guy that spoke for us was a great presenter as well so it was really a valuable webinar that everyone got a lot out of. And then actually ... You know, you talked about, what is it, about 15 or 20% of people turn up on the day, I think that's roughly the number, maybe 25, 30% turn up to these webinars on the day. But then of course we do share them and we even put them on YouTube and like, that webinar has got 600 or so views on YouTube, you know, for long form content of an hour long webinar, you know, you are getting people engaging with it, even if they don't turn up on the day. Kathleen: Yeah. Now, I'm super curious, you do an event with a company like Brightcove and you pull in 700 registrants, they pull in 400. I mean, both numbers are great, but to what do you attribute your ability to pull in such large numbers? I mean, you're not a much larger company, I don't know if you have a larger database than they do. Is there something that you're doing differently that's getting you those results or is it something about your relationship with your audience? Andre: Yeah, I'm not sure because I guess we're both using the same video and we're both using the same kind of a topic so you know, so that stuff, you know, we take pride in getting that stuff up to standard. Yeah, I think we do have an engaged audience, I think we do understand our audience. Yeah, I'm not sure what drives that kind of engagement. I think from the get-go when this company started we were very kind of interactive with our audience, we did a lot of AMAs on Twitter, our social channels were quite active, we had a Facebook group. You know, we've always been about thought leadership and sharing knowledge and trying to drive it through value-first based content, so maybe it has to do with our relationship with our audience. Our database is about 40,000 strong, which is pretty decent. Yeah, I'm not sure. You know, I know like for those guys ... Maybe it's also because we're quite agile and we can use all these different channels, you know. Like I'll put up the banner on our homepage myself, I'll set up the pop-up in that myself, I'll create the landing page myself, I'll schedule some ads myself. So maybe that also means that we can kind of be more active on these different channels and leverage these different channels. If they were to do a pop-up on their landing page, or not a pop-up, just a little banner at the top, they might have a few more hoops to go through in a bigger company with other things going on so maybe that works top our advantage as well in terms of getting the message out. Kathleen: That's a good point. There are definitely some advantages to being small and agile. So interesting, you know, and I appreciate you sharing so many details about this because it is ... The devil is in the details with these things, so, fascinating to me. Kathleen's Two Questions Kathleen: I wanna change gears for a second. I have two questions that I always ask everybody who comes on the podcast. You're somebody who's doing a good job with his inbound marketing, doing a great job really, with the results you're getting. When you look out in the world is there another company or an individual that you think is doing inbound marketing really well right now that you would hold up as an example? Andre: Yeah, in the video space I always love what Wistia does. You know, in terms of like, you just go to their website and how they've separated their content and each product and the education center. It's all really nice and all really value-driven and the content in the videos they create and the kind of brand personality that they've created is really good. And you know, if you wanna look at an engaged audience, they have one. Massively. You know, people are part of the Wistia tribe, you know. They've got a Slack group that creates content on it's own. They're all sharing tips, discussing, critiquing, you know, providing value for each other. So they're really good. In fact actually, I've been on IMPACT's list for years so it's quite cool to be doing something with you guys 'cause you do some amazing content that's definitely gone in front of me time and time again over the years so that would be a couple. I really like what Wistia are doing for content-wise. Kathleen: Yeah. They do have a great brand personality and I've actually spent dome time in their offices and got to be filmed for a little video they were making about their partner agencies and it's just a fun group of people to work with and they know what they're doing for sure. Andre: Their office is in Boston, yeah? Kathleen: Yeah. Andre: Pretty cool office and they've got this like stadium set up. You probably saw all that. It's like, "Stay Weird" on the walls and you know, kind of embracing that kind of diversity and just ... I don't know, there's definitely something they're doing right and being good at video, you know, using video because video says so much more than a lot of other mediums so you know, they've been at ... If I just say one thing on a video you actually get a lot more because you might see where I am, what I'm doing, so they've really used that to their advantage and done a really good job, which they should be because they're advocating for video. Kathleen: Right. Agreed, agreed. And what about how you keep up to date? Digital marketing is changing really quickly, there's always something new happening or you know, Facebook changes it's rules, whatever. How do you stay up-to-date and current with everything going on in the world of digital marketing? Andre: It's hard because, you know, I often don't have time to click on even the most interesting subject lines but I do follow a couple of good newsletters that I get in my inbox and I click on those. One of the things that I think keeps me quite up-to-date and inspired about marketing and particularly videos is just talking to some of our customers. You know, I've had some really good, in depth chats over the years with some really interesting people who are kind of ... You know, I talked about Xero, this guy, Pat MacFie, he's just like ... I get off the phone and every time I get off the phone with him I'm just pumped, you know? Sephora, you know how they've kind of grown, they were making 24 videos a year and now they make over 1000 and they're talking about ... And that just started with one. They brought in one video producer in-house, they were kind of renting a studio in San Fran once a month and just shooting a bunch of content once a month and now they've got their own studio in LA and all the brands come to them wanting to borrow their studio and they've got all these ... So just watching that, and that's over a couple of years. You know, you talk to these guys about how they've kind of actually built that and the process, the steps that they've gone through and in two years to be so different and why they're making educational content and how-tos on YouTube, you know, what is that trying to achieve, and the greater trends around kind of how brands now own ... You know, you don't have the gate keeper of the big TV stations anymore. You've got all these different channels. You've got millions of people on YouTube and Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and there's no gatekeeper. You can kind of ... So it's all about audience building and engagement. So talking to the people that are doing it for some of these big companies. Shopify, the guys there make wildly high production video content that they're trying to shop out to people like Netflix, you know, so they're taking a different approach where they're going super cinematic. You know, if you talk about branded content, that makes them like, cringe, you know, it's just like, disgusting, you know? We're all about making the audience feel different, you know? Kathleen: I'll have to check those out, I wasn't aware that Shopify was going in that direction. Andre: They also do a ton of video for more technical purposes. You know, helping people use the platform, TVCs, little technical campaigns on Facebook promotions, so they still do that kind of video but they've actually got a department fully focused on you know, entertaining their audience. So actually that's probably where I get most of my inspiration - off talking to customers, specifically around video. But I think it just depends on what I'm trying to focus on, you know? I talk to some peers around Wellington, kind of around what they're doing on LinkedIn, what they're doing with their blog around driving inbound traffic. So I think, yeah, talking to people has been quite useful to me. How to Reach Andre Kathleen: Great. Well, if somebody is interested in learning more about Wipster or wants to get in touch with you and ask a question, what's the best way fro them to connect with you online? Andre: Twitter might be an easy way to find me, you know, @Andre_VDA, but LinkedIn ... I'm probably more active on LinkedIn. It's got my full name in the description or something like that, just search me on LinkedIn and yeah, we can connect and chat marketing. I am quite passionate about where it is and all the tools we all have to kind of use and kind of to tell our message, tell our stories and help each other out. So yeah, I'm open to any connections for sure. Kathleen: And Wipster's URL is? Andre: Wipster.com. W-I-P-S-T-E-R.com.   Kathleen: Yeah, I'll put links to all those things in the show notes so if you're wanting to find that information just head to the IMPACT website and you'll find it on there. Thank you Andre, it's been- Andre: We'll be doing that webinar in a few weeks as well so make sure to look out for that and we're talking with Zach, so he's a video consultant for IMPACT and he goes to a bunch of different brands and actually helps teach them to make a video because he's a firm believer that the only way you can actually make multiple videos a week that's kind of affordable, scalable and kind of really effective and authentic, the only way you can actually do that is to start making it yourself because the agency model doesn't quite work when it comes to making a handful of videos a week for these kind of different purposes. You know, because you can't really pay an agency a lot of money to do that and get the ROI so that's gonna be all about kind of helping you guys make more video in-house so check that out. It'll be in a few weeks time, I'm sure you'll find out about it through the various channels we have. Kathleen: Well, and I'll put the link for that in the show notes as well, so. Click here to register for the webinar with Andre and Zach Andre: Perfect. Kathleen: So you can click that and register. If you're listening and you found this to be helpful I would love it if you would give the podcast a review on Apple podcast or the platform of your choice and if you know someone else who's doing kickass inbound marketing work, Tweet me @workmommywork because I would love to interview them. That's it for this week, thank you so much Andre! Andre: Thanks for having me. It's been fun.  

In this episode we talk about some ways to create some side coin in addition to your typical bread 'n butter. It's nice to pad the bank account with some supplementary income. Here are some ideas of how you can do that. Creating stock video/audio while simultaneously filming for another project? Utilizing a parallel skillset like photography or motion graphics? Time to think outside the box and bring in some extra cash on the side. Here's what we talk about in this episode: Newest Adobe features announced for CC ...and amaze-balls demo of Adobe Senseii Big updates to Frame IO and Wipster coming later this year Introduction of Soundstripe PRO and what changed with the regular Soundstripe license AVID Media Composer Troubleshooting Tips - This episode is brought to you by Studio Network Solutions and their EVO Shared Storage unit. Every EVO includes their easy to use media management software for organizing, tagging, and finding your media across all of your storage devices—even external, local, and cloud services. For more info check out studionetworksolutions.com/commandedit. Song used in this episode was Casual on Soundstripe. Get royalty-free stock music from Soundstripe! Use the code COMMANDEDIT for 10% off! Follow us on Twitter: www.twitter.com/CommandEdit Join our Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/CommandEdit/ Get more of the podcast at http://www.CommandEditPodcast.com

Have you ever come across a tool that makes you business run so much more smoothly that you would gladly pay 5x the price for it and still feel like it’s a steal? Yeah, me too, and for me, Wipster is one of those tools. Wipster is something of a “Google Docs for video”, allowing for commenting and collaborating right on top of the video, where it makes sense. You can even export those comments into your Premiere timeline to keep them front of mind when doing a round of revisions. It makes collaborating with clients and other members of my team SO much easier than it was in the past. Seriously, this tool couldn’t have come around sooner for me and my business, it’s that good. Not only does the Wipster team have an amazing product (they actually don’t feel like they even need to sell to customers), they are deeply in tune with the pulse of the industry and where it’s headed. Content Marketing Manager Hayley Jordan and Partnership Marketing Manager Andre Van Den Assum join me on the podcast today to talk about what trends they’re seeing in the world of video, where we’re headed, and how Wipster can make your life easier. Find the original post at: https://studiosherpas.com/category/podcasts

On this episode I’m talking with Rollo Wenlock, CEO of Wipster. We discussed what makes a great review service and where the benefits of using Wipster will impact your projects the most. We also discuss the pricing model changes at Wipster which had previously caused some confusion. Rollo clears this up and explains how they came to the new pricing model and why.   Company Links Wipster - www.wipster.io Wipster Blog - https://wipster.io/blog-overview   Social Media Aaron Levie - https://twitter.com/levie Elon Musk - ‏https://twitter.com/elonmusk Jason Lemkin | Saastr - https://www.saastr.com/   Applications Plex - www.plex.com   Software Adobe Premiere Pro - http://www.adobe.com/products/premiere Adobe After Effects - http://www.adobe.com/products/aftereffects   Podcasts Startup Podcast - https://soundcloud.com/hearstartup 99% Invisible - http://99percentinvisible.org Andreessen Horowitz | a16z Podcast - http://a16z.com/podcasts   Websites Motionographer - http://motionographer.com Google Search - colour picker   Inspirational Video Frita'Rita - Uhh

Happy 30th Birthday, Josh! Join me in congratulating him for surviving on this earth for 30 straight years without incident. Tweet the show or leave a comment and I'll make sure he gets it. Send beer. Long work hours. No sunlight. Dwindling social life and home time. With only the occasional interaction with a human. It can get pretty lonely in the edit bay. Today we talk about how depressing it can be working in post (whether solo at your home office or with a team in a studio) and how you can beat those post-pro blues with just a few changes to your day. You know what else will make you weepy? Wipster's big changes to their pricing plan. The video review service made several editors the world over shout in frustration with their 400+% price hike to their plans. Find out how this affects you and what other options there are. (psst...and if you ask us, you should be using Screenlight anyways). Remember us gushing about how awesome Soundstripe is? (for those who didn't, listen to Episode 65 with our interview with Travis and Micah from Soundstripe). Now you can sign up for an account with them AND help out the podcast at the same time! Soundstripe is now a proud (we assume) sponsor of the Command+Edit Podcast! Use this link to get access to Soundstripe's music library and get unlimited tracks and licences for all of your projects. One size fits all, no more worrying about those expensive licences or how many tracks the budget can afford. Other things we mention in this episode: Use a white noise generator to keep productive and focused at work. Try https://www.noisli.com/ or https://www.calm.com/ Subscribe, hit Like, leave a comment and generally let your other editor pals know about us. We do this podcast for you so your feedback is welcome! --- Follow us on Twitter: www.twitter.com/CommandEdit Join our Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/CommandEdit/ Get more of the podcast at http://www.CommandEditPodcast.com

The following is a reading of my guest blog post Essential Tools For The Ultimate Post-Production Workflow written for Wipster.com. As a reminder, these blog readings are the perfect excuse to step outside and take a 15 minute walking break. Useful Links:  Trello Lynda Trello Tutorial Post-Production with Trello The Checklist Manifesto Google Drive Slack Optimize Yourself Be well. Zack Arnold, Creator Fitness In Post  

On last week's season 2 premiere of Radio Film School, 30+ year editing and producing veteran Chris Fenwick provided some great perspective. But during my conversation with him, we talked about a number of things. One of them was his comment made about the second installment of our "Breaking the Glass" docu-film series wherein animation editor Christine Haslett shared frustrations about not advancing as far as she would've liked in her field. Chris' commentary on her situation is the impetus for today's discussion.After the credits, there's a fun preview of our brand new podcast about HBO's hit new series "Westworld." I like to refer to it as "The Westworld podcast Samuel L. Jackson would love!" You can subscribe to the new show in iTunes. Find it online at daredreamer.fm/westworldpod.About the Mini-seriesBreaking the Glass is a Radio Film School podcast mini-series and short film docu-series addressing the issues of gender inequality in film and television. You can catch all the podcast and video episodes at daredreamer.fm/breakingtheglass.VideosHere's the BTG film episode referenced in this episodeHere's Dane Sanders' keynote address at Engage15 that is referencedSponsorsWhen you visit or support our sponsors you support the show.Song Freedom: when you need high-quality music for your productions, including mainstream music as well as "oldies but goodies". Sign up for a new account at songfreedom.com/radio and get a free standard gold level license worth $30.VideoBlocks: a subscription-based stock media company that gives you unlimited access to premium stock footage everyone can afford. Unlimited daily downloads from a library of 115,000+ HD video clips, After Effects templates, motion backgrounds, and cinemagraphs. Click here for a 7-day free trial allowing you to download up to 140 pieces of content. You can also sign up for their annual plan which is $99 for unlimited access to their library.We also want to give special thanks Wipster for helping to spread the word to achieve gender equality in the biz.MusicMusic in this episode was curated from FreeMusicArchive.org. Songs in order of appearance were:Gettin' Paid, Pt. IIby Alec's Band (CC BY)The Journeyby Marcos H. Bolanos (CC BY-SA)Out of the Skies, Under the Earthby Chris Zabriskie (CC BY)The InsiderTheme by The Insider (CC BY-SA)Click here to learn about Creative Commons licenses and meanings.

One of the goals that Yolanda and I have for this special series is finding concrete solutions to the whole gender inequality issue in the entertainment business. One solution that is often bandied about (and in fact was an impetus for this mini-series) is for women to adopt more of the headstrong, confident, dare I say, "aggressive" tendencies of their male counterparts. But in this special bonus episode, Yolanda shares a heartfelt and personal sentiment that makes her want to call bullsh*t on that notion. It's a short episode, so I really encourage you to take the ten minutes or so and hear what she has to say. We'd love to hear YOUR story as it relates to what Yolanda shares. Feel free to do so anonymously if you so desire. You can email us your story to radiofilmschool@daredreamer.fm. Or, if you're so inclined, send a voice memo to that email address, or leave a voicemail at the bottom of any page on daredreamer.fm. Your story just might be what some woman out there needs to hear right now to change their whole life.About the Mini-seriesBreaking the Glass is a Radio Film School podcast mini-series and short film docu-series addressing the issues of gender inequality in film and television. Learn more and see the trailer at daredreamer.fm/breaking-the-glass.SponsorsWhen you visit or support our sponsors you support the show.Song Freedom: when you need high-quality music for your productions, including mainstream music as well as "oldies but goodies". Sign up for a new account at songfreedom.com/radio and get a free standard gold level license worth $30.VideoBlocks: a subscription-based stock media company that gives you unlimited access to premium stock footage everyone can afford. Unlimited daily downloads from a library of 115,000+ HD video clips, After Effects templates, motion backgrounds, and cinemagraphs. Click here for a 7-day free trial allowing you to download up to 140 pieces of content. You can also sign up for their annual plan which is $99 for unlimited access to their library.We also want to give special thanks to Wipster for helping to spread the word to achieve gender equality in the biz:MusicMusic in this episode was curated from FreeMusicArchive.org. Songs in order of appearance were:Another Version of You by Chris Zabriskie (CC BY)Undercover Vampire Policemanby Chris Zabriskie (CC BY)Click here to learn about Creative Commons licenses and meanings.

A lack of or poor communication is often at the heart of conflict. Today we explore how this has a profound effect on gender inequality in business.If you ever need a great movie or television scene to creatively illustrate a life lesson, you need look no further than Star Trek. You read that right. Star Trek. Everything you ever need to know about life, love, friendship, family, politics, whatever, can be learned from the annals of the various starships Enterprise and their respective ongoing missions. And today, I use an episode from Star Trek TNG as a metaphor for this issue of communication between men and women and the role it plays in gender inequality.Radio Film School regular and Breaking the Glass co-producer Yolanda Cochran takes the helm of the discussion and as a segment producer engages in a conversation with her business partner Christina Kremer. A conversation that will give you an important perspective. About the Mini-seriesBreaking the Glass is a Radio Film School podcast mini-series and short film docu-series addressing the issues of gender inequality in film and television. Learn more and see the trailer at daredreamer.fm/breaking-the-glass.Be Notified When Film Series StartsThe film series portion of Breaking the Glass will begin next week. Subscribe to our email list to be notified of when it drops!Only a Few Days LeftWe want to include your talent in the short film docu-series. Each winning entry will get almost $1,000 in prizes from LensProToGo, Song Freedom, Muse Storytelling, and Shane's Inner Circle. Click here to learn more.SponsorsWhen you visit or support our sponsors you support the show.Song Freedom: when you need high-quality music for your productions, including mainstream music as well as "oldies but goodies". Sign up for a new account at songfreedom.com/radio and get a free standard gold level license worth $30.VideoBlocks: a subscription-based stock media company that gives you unlimited access to premium stock footage everyone can afford. Unlimited daily downloads from a library of 115,000+ HD video clips, After Effects templates, motion backgrounds, and cinemagraphs. Click here for a 7-day free trial allowing you to download up to 140 pieces of content. You can also sign up for their annual plan which is $99 for unlimited access to their library.We also want to give special thanks to Wipster for helping to spread the word to achieve gender equality in the biz.MusicMusic in this episode was curated from FreeMusicArchive.org. Songs in order of appearance were:God Be With You Till We Meet Againby Chris Zabriskie (CC BY)Village Dreamingby Visager (CC BY)But Enough About Me, Bill Paxtonby Chris Zabriskie (CC BY)I Want to Fall in Love on Snapchatby Chris Zabriskie (CC BY)Outro - Totally Here and Nowby Kyoto Connection (CC BY-SA)Undercover Vampire Policemanby Chris Zabriskie (CC BY)Click here to learn about Creative Commons licenses and meanings.

Superhero movies are all the rage lately. Believe it or not, there is a lot filmmakers can learn from them. Today is Part 1 in a new Short Ends series.This week we hear from:Robert Meyer Burnett: A 25+ year veteran of Hollywood, Rob is a director, editor, frequent co-host on Collider Heroes, and self-proclaimed comic book geek. Currently directing the Star Trek fan film Axanar (which raised over $1 million in crowdfunding).Sasha Perl-Raver: movie critic, television journalist, actress, and co-host of Collider TV Talk as well as FX Download.Brett Culp: director of the documentary "Legends of the Knight", a feature-length documentary about the legend and story of Batman inspiring people living with debilitating or even life-threatening illnesses. Through the success of that film, Brett has since founded "The Rising Heroes Project," a non-profit that creates uplifting films to support charitable organizations and inspire communities. They are now working on their follow-up to "Legends" with "Look to the Sky."Music in this EpisodeMusic was curated from FreeMusicArchive.org. In order of appearance, the music in this episode:Subdivision of the Massesby Philipp Weigl (CC BY)Dracula, Killed by Bondby Ian Alex Mac (CC BY)Bernard FINALby Ian Alex Mac (CC BY)Click here to learn about Creative Commons licenses and meanings.VideosSuperman 75th Anniversary Animated ShortMan of Steel Review - Nostalgia CriticThere's A New StoryBuilder App from Muse Storytelling by StillmotionMuse Storytelling by Stillmotion has released a new app that will change the way you tell stories. Use it to work out the four essential "P's" of every story: People, Places, Plot and Purpose. Add photos to help you visualize the story. You can even join a community of like-minded creatives who can all collaborate with you on your story's development. Head on over to buildstory.org and sign up for a free 14-day trial. No credit card is required.Wipster + Adobe Premiere Pro. Wipster + Vimeo.We're thrilled to have Wipster join the Radio Film School family. Wipster is a leading video collaboration tool, allowing you to share your video with clients and colleagues and collect feedback. Go to Wipster.io to sign up. And if you're used to using Vimeo to share links with clients, no worries. Wipster has exclusive integration with Vimeo. Go from Vimeo to Wipster and back again, seamlessly.Wipster also has a built-in panel that allows you to share your video directly from within Premiere Pro, and you'll be able to see client's feedback on that video directly within Premiere. Check out their 1-minute walk-through.Grow in Your Craft and CareerWe're also supported by YOU, the listeners. Become a Dare Dreamer FM Premium member and gain access to bonus episodes, ebooks, templates, and other resources to help you grow in your craft and career.

If you're serious about learning video, chances are you've come across one of the videos of Dave Dugdale of LearningVideo.com. Today we have a bonus episode of Radio Film School where I have an in-depth chat with Dave.When Dave Dugdale talks, companies listen. Why? Because he has one of the most popular video education channels on YouTube—with over 170,000 subscribers and 20+ million views. What sets Dave apart from many other "professionals" in this industry, is that Dave will be the first to tell you he doesn't consider himself a pro. He's just a regular guy trying to learn video and sharing what he learns with the world. He doesn't put on a face and try to make himself cooler or smarter than he really is. He's like the friendly neighborhood dad down the street...who just happens to be a minor YouTube celebrity.Today's bonus episode of the show is my full, uncut interview with Dave. This was actually an interview I did with Dave for my now defunct podcast, The Solo Creative. I don't want the Solo Creative interviews I did to go to waste, so periodically I'll post them in the Radio Film School feed as bonuses.In this interview with Dave, he covers how he got started, his strategy for making passive income with his websites, mistakes he’s made, where and how he learns, his philosophy on life and work, and the value of just putting yourself out there. I have no doubt you’ll be inspired.Other 1-on-1 Filmmaker Interviews: Crossing the 180If you like these one-on-one style interviews where I dig deep and wide with filmmakers, you'll love my back catalog of Crossing the 180. This was my first filmmakers podcast. Over 100 interviews with filmmakers from just about every facet of the business: from Hollywood DPs and directors, to DSLR luminaries, to wedding "rock stars." Become a Dare Dreamer FM Premium Member, and you get free access to these sets of interviews as I make them available. Go to daredreamer.fm/x180 to learn more.Music in this EpisodeIn order of appearance, the music in this episode:Getting Paid, Part II and I Don't Think by Alec’s Band (CC BY)Click here to learn about Creative Commons licenses and meanings.VideosIntro to Dave's camera coursesAn Intro to DaveAn excerpt from Dave's Sony A7s II training videoDave rambles about NAB2016 for 30 minutes ("rambles" was his words. :)There's A New StoryBuilder App from Muse Storytelling by StillmotionMuse Storytelling by Stillmotion has released a new app that will change the way you tell stories. Use it to work out the four essential "P's" of every story: People, Places, Plot and Purpose. Add photos to help you visualize the story. You can even join a community of like-minded creatives who can all collaborate with you on your story's development. Head on over to buildstory.org and sign up for a free 14-day trial. No credit card is required.Wipster + Adobe Premiere Pro. Wipster + Vimeo.We're thrilled to have Wipster join the Radio Film School family. Wipster is a leading video collaboration tool, allowing you to share your video with clients and colleagues and collect feedback. Go to Wipster.io to sign up. And if you're used to using Vimeo to share links with clients, no worries. Wipster has exclusive integration with Vimeo. Go from Vimeo to Wipster and back again, seamlessly.Wipster also has a built-in panel that allows you to share your video directly from within Premiere Pro, and you'll be able to see client's feedback on that video directly within Premiere. Check out their 1-minute walk-through.

Today's episode is a must-listen episode for anyone out there who has procrastinated or dragged their butt on getting a project done. An update on my documentary "Mixed in America".Five years ago I embarked on a personal project to create a short film documentary series about biracial people in America. It's called "Mixed in America" and the first installment of the series is about my daughter, Imahni. The name of the installment is "Little Mixed Sunshine" and it combines a personal interview various b-roll and re-enactments. Well, five years after first interviewing her and even uploading a 1-minute teaser, the project still isn't done.Out of a desire to educate and inspire other filmmakers and creatives (or, quite possibly, a temporary loss of sanity) I made the decision to share my progress of the film on this podcast. The segment has been cleverly called "Shooting Sunshine." Today you'll hear the latest installment of the series with an update on where I am exactly with "Mixed in America." Show regular JD Cochran is back to give me some "tough love." If you've ever dragged your feet on getting a project done, particularly a film project, this is the episode for you. project done. An update on my documentary "Mixed in America".Five years ago I embarked on a personal project to create a short film documentary series about biracial people in America. It's called "Mixed in America" and the first installment of the series is about my daughter, Imahni. The name of the installment is "Little Mixed Sunshine" and it combines a personal interview various b-roll and re-enactments. Well, five years after first interviewing her and even uploading a 1-minute teaser, the project still isn't done.Out of a desire to educate and inspire other filmmakers and creatives (or, quite possibly, a temporary loss of sanity) I made the decision to share my progress of the film on this podcast. The segment has been cleverly called "Shooting Sunshine." Today you'll hear the latest installment of the series with an update on where I am exactly with "Mixed in America." Show regular JD Cochran is back to give me some "tough love." If you've ever dragged your feet on getting a project done, particularly a film project, this is the episode for you.Another great bonus segment is at 37:01. It gives additional insight into the making of "Mixed in America."Music in this EpisodeIn order of appearance, the music in this episode:Remembering Past Everythingby PC III (CC BY)The Theatrical Trailer for Poltergeist IIIby Chris Zabrisie (CC BY) dreamgate by Fog Lake (CC BY)“If I Don’t Fit” by Imahni Dawson. All rights reserved. (I hope to have an iTunes version you can buy when the film is released.)Mockingby David Mumford (CC BY)Please Listen Carefullyby Jahzaar (CC BY-SA)Knock (Instrumental)by Josh Woodward (CC BY)Click here to learn about Creative Commons licenses.Videos MentionedThe original "Mixed in America" teaser (from Jan 2011)The most recent teaser-trailer (Oct 2015)There's A New StoryBuilder App from StillmotionMuse Storytelling by Stillmotion has released a new app that will change the way you tell stories. Use it to work out the four essential "P's" of every story: People, Places, Plot and Purpose. Add photos to help you visualize the story. You can even join a community of like-minded creatives who can all collaborate with you on your story's development. Head on over to buildstory.org and sign up for a free 14-day trial. No credit card is required.Wipster + Adobe Premiere Pro. Wipster + Vimeo.We're thrilled to have Wipster join the Radio Film School family. Wipster is a leading video collaboration tool, allowing you to share your video with clients and colleagues and collect feedback. Go to Wipster.io to sign up. And if you're used to using Vimeo to share links with clients, no worries. Wipster has exclusive integration with Vimeo. Go from Vimeo to Wipster and back again, seamlessly.Wipster also has a built-in panel that allows you to share your video directly from within Premiere Pro, and you'll be able to see client's feedback on that video directly within Premiere. Check out their 1-minute walk-through.Grow in Your Craft and CareerWe're also supported by YOU, the listeners. Become a Dare Dreamer FM Premium member and gain access to bonus episodes, ebooks, templates, and other resources to help you grow in your craft and career.

Last month we had one of the most attended NAB Shows ever. But in true Radio Film School style, our "coverage" of it won't be what you expect.The National Association of Broadcasters (aka NAB) had its annual expo and convention last month. There were over 100,000 people in attendance. And as is the case every year, NAB was the place to find all the most anticipated tech, tools, and toys that will be the next, over-hyped "game-changer." This week on the show we're going to talk about technology and the role it plays in the lives of storytellers and filmmakers. But if you are expecting a run-down of the latest and greatest cameras, drones, lenses, microphones, digital recorders and capture cards, I'm sorry to disappoint you. You won't find that here.However, if you enjoy a deeper conversation about technology and how we as filmmakers relate to it, the good and the bad, then sit back, relax, and enjoy the show.This week we hear from:David Shulman, executive director of The Seattle Film InstituteJames Kaelan, editor-in-chief of BRIGHT IDEAS Magazine, the print publication arm of filmmaking crowdfunding site seed&sparkRollo Wenlock, CEO of WipsterPatrick Moreau, Emmy award-winning filmmaker of StillmotionMara Tasker, head of original content creation at seed&sparkMusic in this EpisodeIn order of appearance, the music in this episode:Somnolenceby Kai Engel (CC BY). I pretty much used Kai's newest album as this episode's soundtrack.Anxietyby Kai Engel (CC BY)Deliriumby Kai EngelOneiriby Kai Engel (CC BY)Tapesby Gumbel (CC BY)Comatoseby Kai Engel (CC BY)Soporby Kai Engel (CC BY)Another Version of Youby Chris Zabriskie (CC BY)Laserdiscby Chris Zabriskie (CC BY)Fortsetzung Folgtby Gumbel (CC BY)Levelsby Gumbel (CC BY)Click here to learn about Creative Commons licenses and meanings.Videos MentionedChris Milk's TED Talk about EmpathyNo Film School's Private Lytro Cinema Camera DemoThe Lytro Cinema Intro VideoLearn How Stillmotion Tells Emmy Award-winning StoriesStillmotion’s Muse Storytelling is the process they use to tell the kind of stories that has helped them garner five Emmys, and go from shooting weddings to shooting the Super Bowl. They’ve generously offered our listeners a special offer. Details are in the episode.Wipster + Adobe Premiere ProWe’re thrilled to have Wipster join the Radio Film School family. Use the offer code “RFSandWipster” and get your first seat for just $13/month. Go to Wipster.io to sign up.Wipster now has a built-in panel that allows you to share your video directly from within Premiere Pro, and you'll be able to see client's feedback on that video directly within Premiere. Check out their 1-minute walk-through.Grow in Your Craft and CareerWe're also supported by YOU, the listeners. Become a Dare Dreamer FM Premium member and gain access to bonus episodes, ebooks, templates, and other resources to help you grow in your craft and career.

Gordon sits down with Rollow Wenlock to discuss getting into film and how that led to him starting Wipster.io. He currently runs the company out of New Zealand.

Rollo Wenlock (@RolloWenlock) CEO and founder of Wipster dives into the freelance world of film making, failing fast and onto developing a creative web platform - from "Video Boy" to "Video Man". It is fascinating to hear Rollo discuss how he views running a business is a lot like an orchestra, comprised of many instruments working together, not just a lone jazz flute. And of curse we cover the recently announced Wipster / Vimeo partnership but also the work they are doing with Adobe, at which point Raj may or may not have gotten a little excited.------------------------------------------------------We share the stories from people that work in New Zealand tech, social media, startups. If you have a story or know someone that does - get in touch!Mike Riversdale (@MiramarMike) background is explaining stuff, connecting people and getting things done. Raj Khushal (@nzRaj) background is in video, design, media and making things happen.All our past shows are on our websitehttps://www.accessgranted.nzFollow and Like us on:https://twitter.com/AccessGrantedNZhttps://facebook.com/AccessGrantedNZhttps://linkedin.com/company/access-granted-podcastSubscribe to the show however you want:https://www.accessgranted.nz/subscribe/

In this Shoe DNA chat about getting delayed by Irma (:57), peruse some news (5:56), and play a new game called "Who am I?" (25:16)