Gadgetory

Los Angeles land of palm trees silver screens and broken dreams at least it's what we're supposed to think but is it true yes but we're not here to talk about Los Angeles we're here to talk about Sandwich video our company is pretty straightforward they take an interesting product to make an amazing promotional video for it and share it with the world this is nothing new though Don Draper has been doing it since the 60s what is new is that sandwich video is collaborating with the companies they work with in order to potentially scale what was once a totally unscalable business roll the tape i'm alexis ohanian start-up founder and Y Combinator partner over the last year I went on a 200 event book tour and met people building small empires all across North America now I'm back with a new season revisiting some of my favorite stuff short old video is increasingly becoming the way that we consume content online and the power of a good launch video is massive the highest-grossing Kickstarter of all time the coolest cooler failed its first shot but 10 months later they came back with a retooled video and raised more than 10 million dollars sandwich video in Los Angeles is the leader in the make a video for a startup category and they're experimenting with totally new ways of making deals with smaller companies so that they can make high quality content without taking a huge amount of cash from the burgeoning startups who want to work with them that's pretty cool my name is Adam Lissa Gore nice to meet you thank you I founded a company a video production company called Sandwich video here in Los Angeles in downtown in the Arts District we're a small company of nine people full-time and we make videos for mostly for tech companies for startups and sometimes bigger tech companies sometimes public companies sometimes scrappy one person indeed iPhone developer companies the whole gamut of interest interesting tech stuff and figure out how to condense what they're doing into a 90 second to two minute piece of video that that can be shared to tell a story so how did I end up here I booked it on Airbnb once I knew I was coming to this city I took just a quick search on Airbnb to find what I was looking for sandwich video is the de facto video if you're going to make a sort of exciting promo like shareable video about a thing it's a sandwich video how did you end up here um it was it was basically by accident and the way it happened was I got really exciting in post-production in the film and TV industry I got really sort of bored with that side of things I got excited about the tech industry and I started making connections with people who made things in the tech industry made tools made platforms were working on working with the web a friend and I decided to try and make an iPhone app we made a small iPhone app for Twitter it's called burn house and I made a video for that so that's bird house a notepad for Twitter available today on the iTunes App Store the video got a lot of attention and then unexpectedly bigger companies started saw that who had seen that video and how its er drove a certain amount of attention to the software product and where you know came knocking on my door and asking for something similar so after I had made a few of them it became clear that this could be an you know an enterprise in of itself making a few successful videos helped Adams clients build their businesses but it didn't mean Adam had built a business yet it wasn't until he had so much inbound that he realized he couldn't do everything himself writing directing producing I mean he was doing everything so realized needed to find great people and then still do all that stuff but also be their boss so for the first year and change that I was doing videos and working with freelancers I was a one-man company working out of a second bedroom and then my dad of all people suggested you know he seems pretty stressed out maybe you should bring somebody on to help you and then I heard that guy sitting right there JP you and Adam met on Twitter right he posted a tweet a really eloquent tweet about needing this number two to help him take his business to the next level and I was familiar with his work I saw the square video and I just loved the tone of it I thought it was something new I mean it was something I had never seen before I just liked how honest it was I liked that he was dry and he he wasn't really selling anything he was just talking about it in a really cool way and I love that you sometimes get paid for this but sometimes get equity from startups is that is that a normal thing in this world certainly not it's not common at all in production or in advertising we do things that cost real money we're not doing work for free and asking our friends to work for free paying people a piece of work is going to have a cost and it's a real cost in and a lot of times that cost is out of the reach of a smaller tech company but what as you know what they do have to offer in their early stages can be even more lucrative than whatever the cash value of the booth of the work that you producing is and so that's that's a really interesting way for me to participate clients that we work with is this a way to kind of hedge for the long term in terms of building a business that has the potential of just growing faster and bigger than its peers I mean think the thing that offsets the equity the long-term effect of the equity is that we're also doing the rev share in the short term and those happen I mean sometimes that's happening the day after we were a liver and then that in the rev share you know is a much more immediate return a kind of balancing that so that we're not just waiting on equity to pay off long term now that the business has evolved so much you all have no shortage of deal flow planning everyone wants you to make a video yeah how do you decide who to work with and then how do you decide the sort of equity trade-off for compensation so we have two models we do the traditional cash you know bid out a job this is how much is going to cost we make it but for a lot of the more interesting jobs and frankly the the jobs that sandwich has sort of made its reputation by creating content for their startups that don't have a lot of funding and if someone comes to us with X amount of money we don't necessarily want to make a video for that because you know where we have a certain status of the quality of the crew we work with and the expenses that go along with a shoe you know crew size and whatnot so we want to make a video for three times with what they have in cash so at that point is just the first thing is you know is this a company is this a product that we're gonna regret not launching a lot of times these are companies for products that we would want to use ourselves so we're just we were able to tell a much bigger audience about these things that we love to and something had to change so yeah we tried slack I mean there's some jobs that are just absolutely no brainers like we want to be the people to introduce this then what was one of those companies you know something like square we're very proud to be able to say you know we're the people who wrote that when we launched that product and then something like navdy we're hoping that you know in a year from now that'll be the exact same thing hi mom okay I love you I'm making a video right now oh okay I love you my name is max co-founder push for pizza and push for pizza is the easiest way to order pizza ever oh you just push the button once and pizza comes after you give us your location in your credit card and when you all first approached sandwich how much of a budget did you have so our budget was super super minimal fortunately Cyrus and I had a little bit of capital to be able to live really and put up a little bit for the video but it was you know less than 7 grand so what how did you approach the negotiation about actually getting the work done so I made it fairly clear in the first email that we didn't have much money and you know as we continued the conversation that became more and more apparent but we could afford to get ourselves out there and put up what was considered the bare minimum to at least you know get kind of the basics down obviously the video would end up costing more than that we put down however it was enough to give Adam a reason to want to negotiate a deal with us one of the really exciting things to me was that we were eliminating the agency we were working directly with clients and I saw it sort of as oh this isn't necessarily commercial we're not making commercials we're trying to tell companies stories in a way that we're interested in using my coffee good it's made me be a better person it's definitely much more of a community feeling than service so are you betting then you know there's the story of the graffiti artist who tagged up the walls of Facebook for some stock who I think is now a multi-millionaire are you betting then that some of these companies are going to become that successful and and and and this is like how much of this I guess is financial and then how much of this is like you know what I really like what you're working on you clearly don't have the money right now so here's a way to compensate us about 50/50 I talked to the company earlier today that was founded by an eighteen and nineteen year old and they're doing something that I don't think many people are doing in the category that they're working in and they already have a viable product and it's bringing a very very small amount of revenue and I know that if I were to step in and make a video and put my my own money into it and make a video that would show their products - you know conceivably a hundred thousand people that are their target customers then it's going to have a profound impact on their revenue stream that they're bringing in and when I can do that for the relatively small amount of money I can go out of pocket and see a return on that investment I'm talking like a VC now but when I can do that and of course it's really interesting yeah I'm willing to take that bet it's in very rare rare circumstances more often it's like these companies are just big enough that they can pay for video hmm just small enough that it hurts a little bit you know to write the check and that in that case it makes a lot of business sense to do a little bit of deal making and then you know with the risk of you know where could this lot could be worthless the oh yeah absolutely in fact statistically more than likely to be worth nothing yeah but it you found that there is this balance you can still pay the bills still pay your people but but how do you evaluate the value of that when you don't have a ton of budget and an equity is so important yeah it's really hard you know it's one of those situations where like you said you want people to know about your product or or not and we you know we were prepared to make the sacrifice to let people know in order to give up some equity and some cash however with that said you know that it's you know Adam is a very fair guy he's not someone who's looking to like rip startups off of equity he's looking to make a deal that's great for founders and great for him and I see no reason why you know a deal cannot be organised regularly with someone like Adam for a small portion of equity for what you get in return because when you perform relationship with Adam it's more than just the video he acts as a mentor for us in many ways someone I go to we go to for advice and someone we hope to work with in the future on more projects within push for pizza or even beyond you know these guys reached out to us it was sort of a plea for like hey we don't have money but we really want one of your videos and we just really liked them and that's a big part of it they were just really we wanted to work with them it was an equity arrangement where we you know they just really didn't have much capital and yet what we created I think is you know they had a huge success on their launch and I think the video was a huge part of that and looking at that you know it's I don't think that given the market and what other people are willing to do I don't think they would have been able to have any sort of commercial if sandwich hadn't done it but nothing similar to what we delivered both in the production value and the creative quality it's like over for pizza we can't say uber two choices for now to keep it simple plane and pepperoni just pick your preference then and push the button push the button push for pizza how are you a good judge of a start-up I think that I'm just kind of like I'm just enough of an early adopter you know I have just enough of a vision on the tech landscape I I'm just a progressive enough but I'm not too progressive I'm not too much of a futurist so I still am grounded in what and what my parents are going to think about a thing that's what I've always kind of felt about why why I can sort of feel whether other people in enjoy your enjoy the experience of a piece of technology it's a little bit of empathy and I feel like this might be a misstatement but it feels like empathy is sort of what's missing from a lot of the of the tech world anyway so that's why this city was built on empathy entertainment is built on happen that's why we have something interesting to to lens to the technology what I love about slack is how it connects the team with direct lines of communication business uses it to send 20 pictures I use it to send funny pictures I know what is sandwiches I don't know what sandwich video is is it a production company is it investment company they're doing something really different here I've never seen anything quite like it before they're making the same kind of evaluations of early-stage tech startups that an investor will accept instead of giving them money they're helping them tell their story the more you know about your body the better you can be at taking care of it so smile this is Wella I know there are entrepreneurs out there working on the next big thing who just don't know how to communicate it let's the advantage to having an investor like Sandwich video they're not just writing a check they've got a whole team of super talented people we're gonna help you introduce yourself to the world on your terms you know if they come to us and they want a sandwich video and then we tell them what our traditional price points are it can be a letdown but then when we say the other option is what cash do you have we can take that equity reps or whatever proportions of that makes sense in this specific arrangement and we can deliver a video that's more in line with the cashier providing but what we want to make for you and they get really excited I think a lot of people aren't necessarily expecting that that's an option but most of the time like I've gotten to the point where when a client isn't interested in equity in rupture when startups and you aren't interested in I'm surprised whereas before I was you know think that this is a crazy idea no one's gonna go for it now I'm just like why wouldn't you and most of the times when we talk through it they realize oh this is in everyone's best interest a number of your videos you don't have to pay the lead actor yeah because it's you it's true how did that how did that come about because you I mean I like I said when I came in here I kind of felt like I already knew you from these different videos why why did you always want to be on both sides of the camera none at all no I put myself on camera beyond for the video I made for that Twitter app I was mentioning Bertos because I didn't know any actors and I didn't have any crew but you were in LA and you didn't know any actors yeah and I work in the filming but I but I put myself on camera and I just set up the camera in my back yard and I just ended up being the the sort of the path of least resistance to putting a video up and then my next client was Jack Dorsey and then he had seen that video he thought I was decent on camera and so rather than he being on camera to represent square he asked me to do it and then that kind of just worked out for me I think it's fun I mean I think it's cool that we're able to have a part of us in those videos or like it's him as the founder having a having something that's intrinsically sandwich in the videos is a pretty cool surely most of your clients are in San Francisco yeah why not why why does this have to be in LA I'm a tell a kid I'm used to this climate I love it here my family's here I love that everybody has an ambition but it's not debilitating I love that everybody considers themselves free to be anything not just free to be one thing it's an industry town but I feel like you becoming more and more diverse more than any of that in the context of working with the tech industry oh I really love that I'm an outsider in the tech industry that I get to just chill out over here and sort of let things over happen in that cauldron and it really does feel like a cauldron yeah you know I can't imagine being there even when I visit and do meetings and stuff it just feels like overwhelmingly tech oriented oh yeah so I just kind of like sort of separating myself from that a little bit I think we've done 50 shoots this year which is for this size of companies doesn't really wait yeah and it doesn't seem like it's slowing down what's happening is we're becoming more and more picky about who we work with I mean ultimately sandwhich what it's known for you know as much as we're a team and we collaborate and everyone has their strengths Adams voice is inevitably the strongest I mean he's he created directs everything whether or not he's directing in himself you know he approves every script he approves every casting choice every location photo so there's there's always going to be a point at which that's the bottleneck and I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing because I think that is the quality control I don't think we're ever looking to be just the ability to take on infinite amount of work because ultimately unless there's another Adam there's gonna be a chunk of work where he's not involved and that's not that that makes you a much more generic company and reduces what's unique about sandwich I think how do you imagine scaling this thing then because again right you've got nine people shooting a video clearly takes a number of talented people if you want to do more of these you need more people like people are always gonna be the living reagent yeah unless you can find you know great ways to scale up revenue like taking on investments right so that's one way and then the other the other way is to just by brute force and add more people and add more infrastructure we're sort of doing both in parallel we're keeping up right now but I can tell you it's very stressful to keep up the one lesson that I've always like kept very very close to my heart that the core tenets is to do things very slowly and methodically and never grow faster than is comfortable I feel like the smart way to not screw anything up because there's a lot to lose at this point I don't want to ruin my reputation and the creative would suffer and it's a domino effect and so yeah how do we scale it I feel like building reputation and strong relationships we're at this really cool time where before broadcast videos were what everybody was seeking to make everybody wanted to make TV commercials and I think even when I joined sandwich video I was hoping oh I can't wait until we do TV commercials well now I don't think we really care about that I think we care about making cool videos that a lot of people are going to see so I think it's going to be delivery method that changes you know broadcast budgets are coming down Internet videos budgets are going up and who knows what the next content delivery method is but I think sandwich video will be in a good position to tackle that when it comes about sandwiches doing something hold they're making advertisements for other companies but they're doing it in a new way online and they're taking revenue share as well as an equity stake in a portion of their non cash deals all right I know that's a mouthful but what it proves is how important it is for a new startup to get their message out in a way that is elegant and effective great ideas don't always have great big budgets that's the lesson from sandwich and it's applicable to founders really anyone know what you're bringing to the table and how much it can help the other party next time you're going to negotiate with someone keep that in mind maybe have a sandwich first running a successful business involves more than just selling products or keeping your inventory stopped what makes small businesses stand out amongst their larger competition is the ability to offer impeccable customer service so try focusing on your social media marketing post questions to customers online or offer tips and advice that pertain to your product you can also create unique offers for customers such as special discounts when signing up for your newsletter and finally make it easy for customers to find you think about what words or phrases they might use when looking for your service or province just because your business is small it doesn't mean you can't make a big impact on your customers for more business advice visit the ATT Business Circle wait T didn't have a beard when you started working together no I just had like stubble sort of like this beard has become is a recent development it's grown on you oh nice oh come on you're just always striving for that easter egg I just want it you just want something someone we can use that okay