Creatives Grab Coffee - How To Solve Problems and Build Teams | Creatives Grab Coffee 39

Episode Date: March 8, 2023

Today we welcome Tim Hedberg from Motivo Media. Tim is our very FIRST guest from the US.Motivo Media is a Seattle based creative agency that trasforms their clients’ messages into thoughtful media with an impact.Welcome to Creatives Grab Coffee, a podcast on the business of video production, hosted by Dario Nouri and Kyrill Lazarov from Lapse Productions.Our goal is to make the video production industry smaller by creating a sense of community. Whether you are a creative, an entrepreneur, or a professional, there is knowledge for you to learn. Join us as we have industry professionals from around the world share their insights on the industry and business. Welcome to Creatives Grab Coffee. Welcome to Video Production.SUBSCRIBE and FOLLOW for more episodes!To learn more about the show, visit: https://www.creativesgrabcoffee.com/

You know what, Tim? Let's start a little differently. Give us a little quick intro to you and Motivo. Welcome to Creatives Getting Coffee. My name is Tim. I'm actually the guest guest today. I am pretending to be the guest host, but I'm still just a guest. I've run Motivo Media out of Seattle, Washington. Been doing this for about five or six years, but time flies. So I think it's somewhere in that range. And I am so excited to talk to you guys today. So we're now called Creatives Getting Coffee, right, Carol? So Creatives Getting Coffee in their offices on Zoom.

Exactly. Creatives Getting Coffee on Zoom because Riverside wasn't working for some reason today. And here we go. Thanks for joining us, Tim. Absolutely. Super stoked to be here. And yeah, excited to chat with you guys. Tim is our first U.S. U.S. based company is the first one. So a lot of responsibility then to represent for the U.S. huh? You're representing America right now, so. It's a lot of responsibility. First impression. Yeah. My first impression, this is not going to help very much, is that I don't really feel very American at the end of the day because I actually grew up in

Caracas, Venezuela. So I spent seven years in Caracas and then I lived in Costa Rica for one year. And then within this country, I've lived in New Jersey, Orlando, Chicago, Washington, D.C., most recently Seattle. My wife, Andrea, is Venezuelan. My brother, Eric, was born in Venezuela. So and I spent a lot of time overseas at six months in Southeast Asia, working at refugee camps on the border of Thailand and Burma. And, you know, I really consider myself more of a citizen of the Americas, if you will, or a citizen of the world in other ways saying it. So you're basically a nomad at this point. Yeah. You just currently are in Seattle, right? Exactly. And I've only been here about

four or five years. And that's about where I start to get the itch to go check out something new. He's been there for so for that that long just because of the pandemic. It caught him there. Otherwise, he would have been somewhere else by now. Well, speaking of, I'm heading to Mexico on the 24th for about a month. And who knows if I'll ever come back? We'll have to see. Is it for a shoot?

No, actually. It's for basically a vacation. The first two weeks, I'm going to try to work at a co-working spaces in Mexico City, see if I can manage to run the business, work a full-time schedule, keep clients happy and do it from there. And then we're going to go on a two-week vacation

to some, you know, like more beach stuff and then coming back. But yeah, my wife who's fluent in Spanish grew up in Venezuela. She's also super interested in trying out some other cities, other parts of the world. And I think our strategy right now is to have like a backup exit hatch city or at least

a second place that we can travel to frequently and have basically like two homes, like a Seattle and Mexico city or Seattle and Bogota, who knows. So with the, when you have shoots, you're just going to fly back to like, if you have a shoot date in Seattle, you'll just fly back quickly, do the shoot and then go back to mexico city well i mean that's kind of what i'm trying to figure out so i have not committed to leaving seattle i should be very clear about that this is a a uh a mission to scout it out go see if it's possible go see if it's worth it or not um if i we end up doing something like that i'll certainly have to figure it out but i'm hoping it's a city that's close enough has direct

flights and where it's like not that big of a deal anyways. And so many of my shoots are around the country anyway. I'm always traveling for production. So what's a difference in a flight from Mexico City to Orlando or Seattle to Orlando? Kirill, I'm copying that idea. I'm done with this frigid country. I can't take it anymore. I'm done here.

Tim doesn't want to scare his team you know they probably if they're if they're listening to this like oh no is he leaving the u.s technically could but that's not a but that's not a terrible idea but yeah there's someone we know that that what what did they go to uh i think they did costa rica um i'm not uh i'm not sure but like they're like that's like basically they, they completely live now and they're not coming back at all. So I don't know how that would work necessarily like managing, uh, work in other countries. But then again, we've had, we've had guests on the show who basically run animation, their animation production company from across the world as well.

They have animators all over the world managing things, you know, but obviously that's a different business model compared to in-person video production. So like what are some challenges do you foresee kind of like in doing something like that? Yeah. I mean, so what we focus on primarily is short and long form documentaries, right? We also do advertising campaigns and content marketing and testimonials and remote production. But, you know, really it's the short and long form doc. And so the way it typically works is we'll be on set for one or two weeks filming a story. And then we go into post for two to three months on a project. So my plan would be to sort of plan to be in the States for the big shoots.

You know, like I'm heading to D.C. soon to shoot the host segment for the big shoots you know like i'm heading to dc soon soon to shoot the host segment for a five-part documentary series once i go get that shoot done then i got to go and edit all five parts of the the series right so i want to be here for the shooting and then potentially be remote in a tropical paradise if you will and uh you know have that benefit uh you know helping us throughout the post-production process which we all know can get uh quite tedious and especially being in Seattle, where it's so gray and dark out and you're in the office all day and you leave and it's dark and you wake up and it's dark. I think I might actually be a little bit happier, you know, going into those like three,

four week marathon editing post-production sessions being in a foreign country. I mean, that makes sense because you're dealing with, you're not dealing with like a quantity of work. It's not like you have a shoot happening for like a commercial shoot happening every other week or every week for different clients, right? Where you would need to be in person. You're more so having these longer form type projects where you might go shoot a few things. And like you said, then you have to go and do post-production for like two or three months. But I mean, like how often, how many do you typically have on the go that would allow you to do that? How many different productions at once? Yeah. Like typically, like in terms of management. I think, you know, I mean, we run a pretty full schedule. So right now I have about eight open projects, and these are 10 to 30 minute short docs or

explainer videos. They're at every stage of the cycle right now, and then I am currently in planning for another set of productions. But the way that I operate is to have a lot of different teams that I can call upon as contractors and I build teams to satisfy a project need. And then I'm the key manager and maintaining the client relationship. And so depending on the project,

the time intensiveness that my role can take can vary quite a lot. Sometimes I'm doing all the work myself. I'll DP something, I'll edit it, I'll deliver it. Maybe I'll bring in a sound mixer or colorist or something like that, but really it's an A to Z in-house production like that. Most of the time I have my go-to contractors.

So I have a suite of four super awesome editors and I kind of balance the projects between them, enabling me to go in, do the creative, find a vision for the piece, go do the interviews, be on set, direct it, and then hand off the hard drive to one of my editors. And then I'm working with, they're basically, we're working all the time. So we already have a shared language. They're part of my team, even though they're technically their own contractor,

and we can work that way. So it enables us to do a lot of productions without sapping all my time, basically. Let's talk about the Seattle market because we're familiar with Toronto and wherever we've had on the podcast from other Canadian cities, but we're a little bit curious about the Seattle scene. So tell us a little bit about what that's like. Yeah, so Seattle market is really interesting. I think it's dominated by the big players.

And the big players are Amazon, Microsoft, you know, you have Boeing, and you have these large companies that basically run the show when it comes to corporate video production. And there's a ton of production companies and agencies in our city that are really just extensions, let's say, of like Amazon's team, but they're separate or they're extensions, especially of Microsoft as a huge player here. I would not have expected Boeing of all companies to be in the corporate video production game. You know, I said Boeing, but now that I think about it, that just came to mind because I'm used to describing the biggest companies in Seattle when it comes to video that I know of. So, you know, I mean, those are those are three of the most well-known entities. When it comes to video, I should qualify. I do know

for a fact Amazon and Microsoft are the two major production demand. You know, that's where most of the demand comes from. And there's a bunch of companies you'll find in Seattle. They do side work. They'll work with other brands. But 70, 80, 90 percent of their business is geared towards Microsoft or Amazon. And so that's really the main space here. And then you have a bunch of smaller production companies like my own. And then you have a bunch of small studio spaces. And they sort of can be rented out or contracted with by agencies who have the direct relationship with the large clients. And then of course you just have your general video needs, right? You have your smaller companies, you have your growing tech companies, and you have all the players who are

kind of growing in space and they're looking for relationships to grow with. So that's kind of like what we're focused on right now. I have had the privilege of shooting, I think we did 13 mini docs for Amazon over the last couple of years and they were all super good, high quality. We really enjoyed working with them. But my big focus is on finding companies that are still in the growing phase, developing the relationship with them, providing value and being part of their growth so that they can really see how we think about things holistically, not just as video production company, but actually from marketing to video production is how I think about it. And help them with that growth so that

you become that established company down the road when these companies become, you know, the size of an Amazon or Microsoft, if you will. So that's really, you know, what I think about a lot. And then Seattle is definitely has some feature film stuff going on. There's a whole community of people that do spend time in that space, but it's nowhere near as developed, I'd say, as some of the other cities nearby, like a Vancouver or a Los Angeles. And, you know, I do know there's some bills going through and I don't know a whole lot about it, but to create some tax incentives. And I do know Seattle is currently building a huge soundstage and so, or nearby Seattle. So I think that there is some energy and some motion going on,

but I'm definitely much more focused on the doc world and on the nonprofit and growing business world. It's interesting to hear how, how well known that it's essentially like two companies that have the dominant, like say like 80% of the work that is coming through the industry in that city. And it just kind of trickles down like a web to all these different companies where they go through like a few different, a few different, how do you say, kind of like maybe like barriers in a way. So it's like maybe like this one client project would be having gone through like three production companies. Do you find any like challenges essentially in terms of like how communication goes between all these different like points of contact? Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, generally speaking, I try to work with people that are good communicators because that is the most important thing in our industry, I think, is being both a receiver and a giver of good, consistent, solid feedback. And that's

actually one of our core values at Motivo is communication. So I don't take every project and I don't work with every agency who comes knocking at your door. When you do this long enough, you sort of can grasp the kind of situation you're walking into and whether it's worth it or not. And I think obviously you got to do your homework and pre-production, make sure that you're working with good people at the gate. Now, up until now, I've had great experiences working with agencies that have hired me. You know, they have the relationship with Amazon, say they came to us, asked us to create 12 mini docs all across the country for, to, to, to feature Amazon Alexa and especially their accessibility features. So identify people who use Alexa who really need it for,

to get through their life. And so we, we did that from A to Z, but we worked with an agency partner and the agency did put us in direct touch with the end client. So we were able to have kind of like a triangle of communication, which enabled smooth process. And we would have the client on our shoots and they would be there to give us notes. And they knew that we were the ones doing the work or a lot of the work at least. And so I think it worked out pretty well. But I mean, you just got to ask questions up front and make sure that you are getting into a situation that you can work in. But what about you guys? Like, what, what about your market? And how do you find? What challenges do you experience when working with the variety of agencies,

production companies, clients, etc? Toronto market is pretty diversified, I think. I wouldn't say there's, I don't think it's like you mentioned in Seattle, where there's a couple of big companies, and they pretty much dominate the scene are giving out a ton of the work to the local businesses. Just the cell phone market. That's it. Those are the only ones with the big players. We have a monopoly on wireless carriers here. Yeah, but not video production. There's no I don't think there's a monopoly here. There's such a huge variety amount of work and demand in so many different industries. It almost seems like it could be potentially infinite. At least that's how I see

it. It's pretty well diversified in terms of types of businesses that are around here. I would say our biggest challenge is probably budgets, I would say. because once you get into like the 10 10 plus k budgets that's which is what we're dealing with a lot now obviously the pool of of potential clients uh drastically diminishes um versus i mean that's the question i was i wanted to ask you was in terms of budgets for you guys because our understanding of the u.s market is we're always saying that you know it's probably because it's like 10 times bigger than the Toronto market than the Canadian market. You guys are probably dealing with much bigger budgets, which I'm pretty sure you guys are. Right. So is that like is that an issue that you're finding over there or is that not even

a problem? Right. Just because of the size of the U.S. and everything. When you say budgets, do you mean, you know, getting adequate budgets to cover the quality of work that you want to do? Is that? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, it's really various. There is no consistency here. And I wonder if you find this as well, where, you know, we all know working as production companies, what the expected rate is for people at different roles, whether it's a gaffer, a grip or a DP. But we also know most of those people are very flexible for the right project. And people have their desired rate, but it's very flexible. And it's based on the relationship that you have with them, the quality that you're offering, the trust, how quickly you pay matters.

There's a lot of variables that go into what somebody is actually going to charge you. Also, what is the job? How difficult is it? How much gear am I bringing? How many other people are you hiring? That's huge, right? If I'm going to hire just two people for a doc shoot, they know I'm going to be given a lot of roles for this. There's no way only two of us can do it. You know, we're going to have to play sound and camera and grip, too. So all of that varies.

And I think the same thing is the case on client side. You know, clients have a variety of education levels about what video really costs. Sometimes they come in knowing what something's going to cost. But many times you have to educate them and you have to spend the time to explain this is why it costs what it does before giving them an end price. Because it'll be sticker shock for a lot of people who think, oh, video is easy. You show up with a camera and then you edit it and then it's done, right? It's not that hard. And you're like, well, hold on a second. Let's start. Let's start at the beginning. So I've found that to be the best approach is an educational approach and educate people on what their money is going to get them

and then help them see the trade-offs. You could spend this and this is what you'd get, or you can spend this and this is how much better it would be. Focusing, of course, on business results and driving what will help them. So that starts with questions and understanding what are they really trying to get out of the video. Some people just want to make something that looks incredible. They want it to look the best it can be. They're going for a branding campaign. They're not looking for a specific ROI. They just need a specific image, tone, mood, or story to be associated with their brand. And they'll pay whatever they need to make sure they have that. In that context, it's a very different conversation than when you're working with, an example

here is a local private school who came to us and they want to redo all their marketing materials. And they're a smaller company and they haven't done a lot of high quality video production yet. So I'm going through the process right now of educating, putting together comprehensive proposals, breaking out the budget into line items for them to see why it costs what it does, and then offering them a variety of benefits at the end, how much motion graphics do we want to do? Do we want to redo your logo and custom branding, or can we use what you already have? Um, you know, how many total videos do you want and how long are they going to be?

All of these things are very typical conversations, but can help them understand why it costs what it does. So to answer your question, budgets are always a struggle. Um, they're always a struggle. They're always variable. And as a business owner, we have to be, I think, smart about that and recognize that there's a lot going on beyond the money. Sometimes it's about the money, but a lot of the times, like I've said, it's about the relationship. And I'm willing to take a smaller budget to build something really exciting with somebody who I want to work with.

And that also gives you an opportunity to hire people, right. And to further entrench yourself in the local, um, you know, production company market, but also having those conversations with them and saying, Hey, uh, you know, this is what I'll say. You know, I work with a handful of DPs and we have a really good relationship such that I can come to them and say, hey, this project is for a nonprofit. It's a school. I know traditionally I pay you $1,500 a day for our Amazon projects. For this project, would you be able to do $1,000 a day for the same service? Because we're also taking a cut on the fee, but it's going to be really good for our community. It's going to be really great for Seattle to have more people learn about this option for their kids. And they might say, yeah, that's actually fine. And you know what? I'm actually free that day anyway. And if we can

keep it to 10 hours, I'm good to go. You know, and I have that happen frequently. And so, you know, but then you get the relationship, you go get to create the work and you build that trust with your community, with the people around you. And that just leads to the next project coming in potentially at a little bit higher or they recommend you to somebody. I've also had the opposite. I'm sure, I don't know if you've had this happen before where, you know, maybe it's a bigger established production company or agency. They come to you, you ask them what the budget is and you have that moment of who's going to say it first. And they drop a budget number that's, you know, very healthy,

maybe even 30, 40% above what I would have quoted. And they're like, I don't know if this will, this work for you. And you're like, absolutely. That works for me. But now you're not, now you have to over-deliver. Now you have to go over and above, and you're going to also have to make sure that you don't end up in post-production complications where you're billing them for every additional round, right? At that point, when I get to that kind of budget and somebody's going to give me that much money, I will go over and above. I will bend over backwards and I'll continue outside of our process to make sure that what I'm delivering is worth what they're paying. Right. If that makes sense. So actually it's a calling to, to be better than I would have otherwise when that happens. And I love that. I think, I think I've. I think maybe I didn't word it correctly or something.

Because again, we always thought because the US market was so much bigger, you guys were dealing with a lot healthier budgets than what we're dealing with here. Because here we're finding that I guess for a standard, I don't know, let's say a company profile video, standard pricing seems to be between $5,000, something like that. I always thought maybe in the U S because the market is so much bigger, be easier to pitch higher budget projects to clients, right? They'd be more willing to bite, but it sounds like it's kind of the same situation.

It's similar. There's, there's a similar aspect to it and to it. And Tim, you basically boiled it down perfectly where it's all about educating the client and communicating why things cost the way they do. What Daria and I have found that is very helpful is when we walk them through our process and tell them, this is how we will create the video from A to Z. We will focus this much effort and this is what we will produce in this part of the process. Then we're going to do this, this, and this in the next part of the process. And when you start breaking everything down to them, then they start to understand why things are costing as much. If you just simply tell them, it's like, okay, this is the video. This is the deliverable you want. It's going to cost as much. That's why I found that a lot of people have objections typically is because then they're like, but how does this work? Why does it have to cost that much? They have more so questions about what is the process they're just, but they're tied to the, to the budget aspect at that moment.

So that's why people start to ask like, Oh, why is it cost that much? What they're really asking is like, Oh, what does it take to actually really, yeah. What am I paying for? Like what, what does it take to create a video? And when you walk them through the whole process, it just, it just makes a lot more sense. It's like, okay, great. There's, it sounds like you guys are going to do a lot for me. That's the price. Perfect. Let's do it. And that's when I find that there's a lot less of that kind of objection at that point. And like you said, sometimes some leads, they know, they know what goes into video production. You can get right down to brass tacks.

Sometimes they don't. And that's essentially the situation where you have to do it. And it's nice to know that that's how it is everywhere. You have to educate people. Why don't I dive in a little bit from the money side? I noticed that you guys do a lot more like in Seattle, I guess. There's two things I noticed from a lot of people I've been speaking to. There's a lot more long form content and there's a lot more non-profit work in that. Like I was actually shocked to find out how much there was because here I don't think it's that high. as a starting point, there's more leads for like one-off projects, but it's rare that someone just reaches out and is like, hey, I want to do a doc series. It's like, what?

How does that work there? Well, you know, yeah. So while I do have a production company in Seattle and it's where I live, you know, I spent seven years working in Washington, D.C. And that's where a lot of my clients are based, actually, even though I live in Seattle. Washington, D.C. And that's where a lot of my clients are based, actually, even though I live in Seattle. And so in the D.C. world, it's much more nonprofit heavy, NGO heavy, government project heavy. And so you get a lot of that kind of work coming out of places like Washington, D.C. And then you also have, as we've all seen, an explosion of dot content across networks. And it's become a very popular genre, a very popular form. And so I do get reached out to by a lot of people curious about documentaries.

You know, what does it take to do one? How do we make sure it's good? You know, how can you help me do this? A lot of them have ideas of pitching it to a network and getting it picked up and something like that. And that might be like a private investment side of thing. But in general, I would say the content forms vary by city, by industry, by creative trends that are going on in the marketplace right now. But it's not like I just get like random emails of people saying, hey, can we do a doc series for this brand? Usually it's relational. People know me. I'm out and about. I'm going to film festivals. I'm going to events. I'm meeting people. I'm putting out work. I'm winning awards with the work that I have. People find out about me that way. And then when the documentary comes up in their mind for something they're working on, they come

to me to learn more about what it would take. And that's generally how it works for me and how I generate the work. So you're essentially setting yourself, you're putting yourself in those environments in a way, and you're, you're putting yourself in the environment where there are people who are looking for others who can produce that type of work and you're breaking into those networks. So I guess this just boils down to essentially what circle, what network circle you're kind of inserting yourself into and developing and growing those relationships. Whereas if you're trying to like build an online presence alone, you're going to get essentially that circle of people where they're looking for

creators that are like only through Google. That's the type of people that are going to be reaching out through there. Whereas a lot of these other bigger type projects, it's more so in certain circles that you need to insert yourself. But it's also heavier down there compared to like here. Especially cities. I liked what he said about cities because that immediately made me realize that, for example, in Ottawa, we hear a lot more about government related projects happen in Ottawa because obviously that's the government capital of Canada, right? Whereas in Toronto, this is more like the commercial capital of Canada at that point. And Vancouver is probably another one like that too.

And like Calgary has a lot more agricultural or what was the other one? The other one or whatever in the middle. Yeah, yeah. In the middle of Canada. Yeah. And I mean, you know, I do think you're right, though, which is you have to start putting yourself into the networks of the target or the kinds of people that do hire documentary filmmakers. And I think it's a smaller market for documentary filmmaking than, say, for a branded commercial, because almost every company out there is going to need to make a commercial for their product or their services. Whereas documentary, oftentimes the purpose is to educate somebody or to bring them into a world that they would not have otherwise experienced. Or it's to share the

importance of a mission and help somebody feel why it's so important to be doing what a nonprofit's doing. Usually it's easier and more helpful to show rather than tell. And documentaries are the perfect way to show what's really going on, right? A curated view into the mission or the purpose of an organization or a person because it's authentic and it's real. And of course, there's all kinds of ethical problems, especially now with manufactured documentary making, you know, filmmaking. But, you know, assuming that you're following ethical standards, I think it's the best way to bring somebody into somebody else's world. And, uh, that's what I like to do is help people, um, really experience things that cause them to question what they previously thought, what they probably previously believed, and then develop a

stronger perspective as a result of it. And to me, that's one of the most beautiful things, which is why so many of my films are about finding synthesis between disagreeing parties or disagreement. A lot of the films I do are to bring in experts who vigorously disagree on a specific topic, have them hash it out through the making of the film, and then present to the audience the best version of a variety of different viewpoints or stories around a particular topic. And I think that's a little unique. And I think a lot of clients who are familiar with our work know that and they want somebody who's going to be able to do that with or for them. And so they bring us in. And so it's even a little more niche than just documentary filmmaking. We tend to focus

on filmmaking that has an intellectual component, right? We always say that our purpose is to capture the heart and engage the mind and to do both of those well. And so that's really what we like to focus on is find topics that enable us to swim in that pool and find audiences for that kind of material. I just remembered what my initial point was. You were talking about challenges in Toronto. Here's one challenge we have. If we're dealing with a company that has their headquarter in the US, they're basically a US company, but they have like a Canadian office. The major issue we have is that a lot of the times because they're in Canada and it's not their headquarter, the budget we're dealing with is a lot smaller compared to their American counterpart. That's what I was trying to say earlier. Well, no, no, no. It's just because of what's been set aside because that's a specific department part of the bigger business. So like say if a corporation is based in the US, 70% of their business is there, 10% in another country, 10% in Canada. So they're only going to give that Canadian portion only 10% of the actual budget to do things. Yeah, that's what we deal with a lot. Yeah, that's a that's a biggest problem.

Yeah, that's why like, that's what I was trying to say earlier. Because that's, that's why we thought that, you know, since you guys, you're already in the US, like, the budgets, you guys must be dealing with, it's like, oh, it's so nice, you know, like all this money to play with compared to here. It's like, well, you know know it's like the small canadian division we only have this much to work with you know but but are they demanding equal amount of work with 10 or is it like they put 10 of the funding but you're only doing 10 of the content anyway so it's sort of no like i mean it depends on the project but it's always it's always going to be it i know for sure it's always more limited than what the u.s department is going to get i know that for sure they're always going to be, I know for sure, it's always more limited than what the U.S. department is going to get.

I know that for sure. They're not going to do the 100K brand campaign that is the face of the company in Canada when it's like 10% of the people. And they're also not going to do the cool stuff like that. They're going to do stuff for whatever. It'll be some internal stuff, maybe something for the canadian market but it's not as like i wonder if they think that we that their canadian counterparts are going to say a or a boot too much in the content that they're doing so they don't want to have that as like the main focal point oh man you'll do that to fly in some uh generic sounding people right for the a right a but the way i would think about is like couldn't they get

productions done much cheaper in canada and so they should be shifting more of their budget that's what i was that's what i've been thinking like but i don't know i don't know i think it's because they'd have to bring their those team members here maybe i don't know like why don't you tell why don't you tell your clients next time, you know, shoot in Toronto. Don't shoot it in Seattle, shoot it in Toronto. It's too expensive here. I mean, one funny thing that we've mentioned also before in the podcast, like now that we've like interviewed so many people in Canada, we've developed now a're trying to get into the U.S. as well and get to know great creatives like you. Because in case like say you need someone in another city that you haven't had the chance to explore yet, we can connect you to people that we've interviewed in that city who might know the market a little bit better, too.

So that's kind of what we're trying to just fly out to different U.S. cities and like continue shooting for your bigger projects? Because for here, I feel like it's not that common. To fly people to where the projects are? the projects are yeah like i think maybe the producer might producer might fly out or like it's it's not a usual request or like that like you'll get a contract to like fly out to maybe calgary or whatever that's why even for us like our whole thing is going to be like if we don't have to fly out to cal like i'd rather just outsource it to someone in calgary for example that'll be of the same quality i mean so like take those 12 pieces i did for amazon we shot them all over the country and we remotely directed and produced but we sourced vetted and

hired local crew and then we would zoom in like this and direct remotely we got really good at that over the pandemic and i think that's become more common because of the pandemic one of the i don't know if you had a chance to look at it, but one of the products that we developed at Motivo is actually a remote production kit, which is a carry-on suitcase that we can ship anywhere in the world and have full control over the lighting, the camera movements, the, you know, the camera settings. And that enables us to do productions at scale and at cost for a variety of clients. We even did a couple of shoots in Sweden where we shipped the kit to Sweden and then remotely shot it from Seattle to Sweden

and then got the content uploaded to the cloud and you can deliver content to the client within a couple of days, which is actually even quicker than sometimes in-person shoots. So that's one tool that we have that helps us do more of those remote productions and keep the relationships with the clients.

But to your point, it is sometimes common to send people around. But don't you think it's usually related to the projects, like the specific project? So I have a film currently in the film festival circuit. It's called Project Home. I was an associate producer on it. And it's about whether or not 3D printing can alleviate

the world's housing shortage. And we travel down to Mexico many times to film with families and get the stories there. And in this case, we would fly down as a crew and as a team. And sometimes we'd have to shift one person out or one person in based on availability. And we might have a different DP one shoot. But overall, you want your core team there every time to maintain consistency, vision, and the creative thread that's going to make it, you know, feel cohesive. So it really, it varies. content, a lot of the time it's, it's very straightforward direction and creative that can be communicated because a lot of people have more, more like universal experience kind of doing that type of work. Whereas if it's something like a very specific creative campaign where you need

to have this particular talented director and DP come in to produce it because only they, it's their vision, only they can execute it then yeah i completely i can i can see how that is the case yeah i mean have you guys had a chance to travel around and shoot much or are you honestly just at the at the beginning when we started that that was a request but we we really don't get many if any requests to fly out or shoot in different cities like but we're now like pitching like hey if you do have a shoot in another city, luckily we do have a network so we can, we can get that done. But it's not a common, like, I would say it's very rare. It was more common for us with, um, it was actually more common for us with, um,

when we were freelancing because some of the companies that we would work with, they might have some clients that need, uh, uh, that have like places in other parts of the country that need us to be flown out to. And like, yeah, as Dario mentioned in the beginning, we did a little bit of that. And I think now though, like one of our clients, actually, this was the reason why we originally got connected to you is because our client has a potential need for a work in Seattle. And so we started, Dario specifically started reaching out to companies within Seattle and some other cities that were also going to be doing work for them. And that's why we had to make the connection, right? So we could fly out, but like flying to

the US is a little bit tricky compared to flying within country, right? It's easy for us, actually, if we just have to say like, oh, we're doing this for a Canadian company specifically for the Canadian market type of thing. But we're not bringing any equipment or anything like that. That's why for that shoot, I'm just going to hire a local crew. And I'm not dealing with the carnage process. You can't pay me enough to deal with that headache. every creative has done when they were naive within the first year or two in their careers, which was fly into other countries without knowing that it wasn't allowed to do that.

It's not worth it. Yeah. And one of our favorite stories is when we, it was like 2015, we had to go to Houston for a shoot. And Dario loves this story because when we got to the airport there, he looked over and pointed out a suitcase that was busted open and he was like ah look at that some poor guy had his suitcase busted open and then he looks at me and my eyes were just like and then he sees me just slowly start walking towards the suitcase and it's just sprawled open with all the with the light all the light stands tripods everything is just sprawled everywhere you

didn't mention it was an open suitcase in a in a big uh cardboard box like it was in a bin it was just busted open and they just delivered to it like i'm like amazingly everything is here but it just like ripped open mid-flight and i'm just like oh my god so that was like the last time we did something of that nature and ever since then we're just like stay oh, my God. So that was like the last time we did something of that nature. And ever since then, we're just like, stay here for now. Yeah, but I mean, and I've had that happen, too. And it's been crazy. But even flying within the states, you have to be super careful. I was interviewing the former chief justice of the Michigan Supreme Court at 9 a.m.

And we were flying in the day before. Michigan Supreme Court at 9 a.m. and we were flying in the day before and my DP who had all the gear was flying in and he got delayed and his second leg of his flight basically got canceled and we had to shoot the next morning and he had you know two you know two red cameras the the lenses all you know so much of the gear that we needed so we had to figure out what to do luckily he was able to get on another flight but that flight didn't leave until like basically he would arrive at 4 a.m and we'd have to leave at 6 a.m for the shoot so he got on that flight but then they lost his gear oh come on he couldn't catch a break right and so so here we are. I'm the director and producer of this project and having to figure out how are we going to make this work. So we just started first thing in the morning calling every production company that we could find anywhere in Detroit, which is where we were at the time.

Otherwise, you just tell the client. Yeah, right. Oh, yeah, exactly. We got phones here. Just slowly, just like this. Oh, my gosh. But no, but it was gonna be you know it was really a really cool story it was gonna be a you know 20 30 minute

festival type film that we were making and it was in the courthouse that they let us use like downtown Detroit with the former chief justice of the supreme court I mean so what'd you do what happened instead of shooting on his cameras I shot shot on this camera, which is the C200, because I had that with me. And then for the B cam, we had to use a 5D Mark III or Mark IV, which is a DSLR camera. Not what we intended to use to shoot this film on. But we started the first interview with that. We had half the gear that we needed, but luckily my DP is phenomenal and we were able to make it look somewhat decent and then we were able to rent a couple pieces of gear on the way

into the courthouse you know like some c stands and just like random gear because it wasn't even like any um rental house was open it was actually just another production company that we called and they said like sure you can borrow our stuff but it wasn't a normal rental house shot the content and then before the next interview we had a call from the airlines and they had his bags and they delivered it to us uh that day like halfway through the day and we were able to use it for the rest of the shoot which was awesome and the film ended up coming out it was super great won a bunch of you know film festivals and it was one of my proudest films to date but the making of that film was one of the most incredible difficult

things i've ever gone through in my life but that's part of the making of that film was one of the most incredible, difficult things I've ever gone through in my life. But that's part of the story. And that's part of the fun of it, right? It's like, it's not just what the end result is. It's like, how did you make it happen? How did you make it work? And we as creators like have to always deal with some challenges that might happen. Speaking of hilarious challenges, we just did a shoot recently for a restaurant. And one of the key things for this restaurant was essentially uh filming with a bunch of tv screens as the backdrop and dario and i had it all planned out perfectly on the location scout everything worked fine and then dario was thinking okay we should be able to be wrapped by around like three o'clock today or something like that

we get there i was optimistic i said i told him, I told him that's not happening. And when we get there, it was on Valentine's day too, by the way, you should clarify that. We'll clarify it was on Valentine's day. And so unfortunately, uh, when we got there, we had a first shot in mind and then one of the main sets of TVs was not working properly. So we had to re reset and completely reframe the new shot. But then something started happening with the other two TVs that just did not want to work properly. And that delayed the entire shoot by two hours because we had to wait for a specific AV person that they had to come in and help fix it. And it still didn't fix it? No, it ended up working in the end, but it was like not exactly how we needed it.

So we had to adapt to it. But yeah, two hours was an issue. We had to completely change where we had to completely change the setup and where we had to place the camera, how we had to light it. I don't know about you guys, but I feel like that was a pivotal moment in my filmmaking journey when I became comfortable with just about anything could go wrong. And I know that I'll find a solution. And at the very beginning, when you're first getting into production, I don't know about you guys, but I was extremely nervous every single production

because I didn't know what I didn't know. I hadn't done it enough to know what could go wrong. And then when something would go wrong, which inevitably does, you're in a position of recognizing the knowledge gap that you have. I don't know how to solve this issue because you don't have the experience yet and so you have to figure it out sometimes the solution works sometimes it doesn't uh but after doing that enough times and i've had not everything that could go wrong but many like i've done been doing production for 10 years so i've seen so many things go wrong yeah and now i'm at the point where i show up and i'm pretty calm and I'm just ready for what are we solving today?

Like, what's the issue that's going to pop up? Like there's always a solution. I remember when I was in Mexico, I think I mentioned that we did lose gear like you guys did. And my, uh, the director was flying into Mexico. They held his gear for some kind of carne issue. We couldn't get it. And what note they held, they held the gear for some kind of carne issue we couldn't get it and what no they held they held the boom pole we were in rural mexico interview doing a sit-down interview with an

impoverished family and we needed to you know get the best quality audio and i was like i don't know what to do like am i gonna like put it on a stick get a stick just a bamboo stick broom a broom but even better check this out we threw it up over the branch and then brought it down and i have a bts photo i can show you we brought it down just in front of the subject and it actually worked perfect you should post that on shitty rigs yeah i should do that oh my god you know it's funny you're mentioning how like you were afraid for such a long time and i i felt like early on when we were starting out our careers, I didn't feel too afraid that often when I was going out to shoot. I think it's more so because

we had a very ignorance is bliss kind of mentality at the time where we didn't know how things work because Dara and I did not have a traditional education in this or knew how the industry worked. When I started shooting, I just picked up a camera and just made things the way I wanted to make them. I didn't know that there was like a particular way to do things that was like a standard across the industry. So Daria and I just made stuff, made stuff, made stuff, made stuff, made stuff. And I think we just got into that mindset and we just knew how to do things. And as as we kind of progress then it's like oh now this is how it works but uh okay so we have to plan like this we have to plan like this but

it got to the point if something happens on set dyer and i look at each other now we're like all right this is what we'll do we'll we can't make this work we'll do this instead boom done no problem i've kind of been always relaxed even now because especially now because we're just hiring more crew members and everyone's really good at what they do so it's kind of like okay like they got it taken care of like on the shoot that restaurant shoot it was like the gaffer's doing his own thing pa's helping him out girls lighting the scene and then before i knew it i kind of came back from talking to the actors i look at the show i'm like oh that looks so nice yeah if i was having to do that it would have taken so much longer.

I would have been way more stressed out, but they got it taken care of. You have to trust your team. Yeah, trusting a team is very key. Tim, you mentioned you have a set of four or five different teams that you've, it's like a well-oiled machine now that you're confident that you could even send them out. If you're sick that day, if something happens like that, you can make it happen remotely. No problem, right? It's huge.

It's again, another game changer is when you have the reliable team you can go to consistently at every stage of production. For me, though, the most important team to have down tight is your post-production team. Because post is like one of those fields where it takes a lot of time working with somebody to develop a style a tone a language and editors as i'm sure you've experienced i mean they range the gambit like any profession of style tone skill experience but having like a tight backstop you know a tight post team that you know will deliver quality consistently every single time it makes the whole production process easier um not because they're going to say i'll fix it in post but you

know it can be if you have to and that's a huge relief everyone needs to be good at what they do and like you mentioned um unfortunately like or not unfortunately but you're dealing with these longer form projects so there has to be a lot more thought put into the post side of things versus whereas more so kind of like ad content, which is like 30 second to two minute, uh, short promo videos, those can be turned out a little bit quicker. So it's not like, um, it's not like you have to have some kind of consistency that goes for like three, four months at a time where it's like just under a month, maybe two, three weeks on average, depending on the complexity of the shoot. And yeah, to your point, no two editors are the same. And I feel like in our industry, though, like almost every

at every role, there's no two people that are exactly the same. Everyone brings their own experience and their own views on how things are. Right. So it's just about finding the people that work well with you personally, not just who works well with other people too. A hundred percent. And also who can deliver what this particular project calls for, which is, it might be, you know, it might not be the same person every time and you have to be good at selecting that, I think. So yeah, you know, it's, it's part of the journey, but that's what I love about it, right? Everybody's so different. Um, so yeah, you know, it's, it's part of the journey, but that's what I love about it. Right. Everybody's so different. I get every person I meet you guys, anybody, you get to go through that discovery process of like, well, what are you about? Like, what do you like? You know,

it's like when you, you were the one that was saying you just started shooting. Right. And you were like, I just do it how I, how I, what I like, I didn't know that there was a way to do it. Um, well, that's pretty cool because that informs how you end up in the style that you are today, even after you start learning. But it's like, what is it that you like? Right. What appeals to you? Like, I'm curious, right? What, what, what is it that with no training you're like, well, this is how I like it.

And then, you know, finding people that genuinely uniquely have a passion, not just for production, not just for video, not just for, you know, the video production, but specifically like I want to create things like this. And I'm passionate when I get to, you know, light a scene that uses this kind of look, or when I get to do stop motion animation and post, or when I get to do this. And that's what excites me because I love to serve that up to clients on a platter. And it's like, I have just the person that is going to get so excited about what you want to do that it's going to blow you away. And then that's like when the magic starts happening.

It's like at each role of finding people who are uniquely excited about what you get to offer them, which is always the, you know, the best situation to end up in and what drives me. How long have you guys been doing this? You mentioned you've been doing it for a while. 32 years. How long have you guys been doing this? You mentioned you've been doing it for a while. 32 years. How old are you? So Dario's 30 and I'm 29. I started doing this while I was in university still. So I was dabbling in it for like a few years, just like for fun before I decided to fully take the plunge. And then it was like halfway through my business degree, I decided to do it.

Then Dario shortly, like about half a year later, started working with me as well. We started doing a few like small projects and then we decided it might be a big step, but let's start a production company right off the bat and then learn with it as we went. Like we probably had no business doing it back then, but given the lack of experience or knowledge of even how to do things, like I think at that point when we

decided to do it, Dario hadn't even been on a, on a shoot yet, even almost at that point. But we knew that that was potentially something that had longevity to it. So, and we've mentioned before on our podcast that we didn't really start pushing it more so as a business until really the pandemic, like the pandemic forced us to really rethink it. So now, and that's actually how this podcast even came to be is because of, uh, because of the pandemic and like shifting our mindset in terms of like how to run things. Right. That's why I consider the business to just be two years old. Yeah, I agree. That's how it feels. Yeah. And we only really started bringing in more and more crew and talent after we made that switch mentally, right? In how to run things. Because up until the pandemic,

99% of the time it was Dario and myself and maybe hiring one or two other people here and there self and maybe hiring one or two other people here and there just to kind of fill out what other needs there were. But now it's gotten to the point where it's like, for example, Dario would be, is like running like three to five different client accounts. I'm running like three to five different client accounts. And we're like kind of dividing and conquering. We come together and work when possible, but if need be, we, we split up and we handle different projects like as you need to. That's awesome. So you, so you kind of stumble, it sounds like you, you kind of little by little made decisions as the world, you know, was moving and you were learning and eventually you found yourselves like running a two person production company. We had no clue

where it was going at this point, you know, and I'm actually curious, like, how did you decide to jump into it? You said you've been doing this for like 10 years, right? Like, how did you, how did you, how did you decide to do video production? I didn't study video production in college at all. I didn't really think I would ever be doing this. I studied political science, philosophy, and economics. And I decided right out of college to go get a job at George Mason University in Virginia, right outside of DC. And I was working in like a PPE type program, politics, philosophy, economics, and I was doing marketing for their online education. Well, to do online education, you need video. And we had a video team doing the videos and I was doing the marketing. And I would get these videos sent to me and they were like, okay, do your magic,

go make this thing go viral and i'm like oh but this is not viral content like this just is not gonna work and some of it was great but it was like the little things that weren't optimized for distribution you know the intro was way too long nobody was gonna watch 30 seconds to get to the good part we had awesome graphics and they came in three minutes in the video like well i mean, I mean, you got to start with that, right? And the music, there was nothing leading it. And we didn't have any click-through call to actions at the end. And so I was giving all this feedback to the video people over and over again. And at some point, one of them was just like, do you want to try?

Like, this is harder than it seems. I was like, heck yeah, I want to try. Thank you. So I got to do my first video and then market the video. And it worked really well. And then my boss said, hey, you can have a knack for this. Why don't you do like 20, 30% of your role in video? So I started to spend, you know, one day a week working on videos, four days marketing. Well, next year I had another chance for a renegotiation and I asked for 50% of my role

to be video. And they said, all right, you're on. So 50 video percent, 50% marketing. And every year it went more and more into video until I went full-time video, creating hundreds of short videos with professors around the world about the key ideas of their research. Using animation, motion graphics, live action. I even got to write and direct several short comedies and skits that would actually recreate their ideas.

So that's where I cut my teeth. And I was very fortunate to work in a nonprofit where we had gear, we had the time, we had a decently sized budget, and they gave me the freedom to fail and to experiment. So I could come up with an idea. So, you know, one of these professors, he's a philosophy professor that works on the ethics of immigration. And his view was that immigration is generally a positive thing and that we have a lot of myths around what that means. So the idea that I came up with with him was, I kid you not, call random Ubers, call them up on the way to pick us up. I would just ask them, hey, do you mind if we interview you while you drive us to our location?

And about 50 percent of them said no problem. So we'd hop in the vehicle. I'd be in the back of my camera. The philosophy professor would be in the front seat and he would just interview them. Most of the time they were immigrants. the philosophy professor would be in the front seat and he would just interview them. Most of the time they were immigrants. We were able to gather the most incredible stories of immigrants from Vietnam, from Bangladesh, from India, from all over the world in the context of them driving their Uber at night through DC.

And then he would lecture in between that around immigration and his views. And so that was just like one idea that gave me experience making doc content for this product. Coming out of that, I then got bit by the startup bug. And so, you know, I did a lot of videos about economics. And if you study enough economics, at some point you're going to think, I got to do this. Like entrepreneurship is like how you succeed in this world. I didn't think about this before supply and demand. Okay, let's jump in. I can do this. So I jumped into a startup and it was called Clink. And it was an alcohol delivery app and website. And I started as a community director in DC, but after three to four months of 20% month over month growth, I got

promoted to the chief marketing officer. And right when I got promoted, we had just landed a deal with AB InBev. So we got to launch the Bud Light button in Washington, DC using our app and technology, which means that you could order Bud Light to your door in under an hour anywhere in the city and you would get special deliveries. So they had Steve Aoki showing up and doing deliveries. And then they had like the Redskins football team would show up and do deliveries. And then we got hired by Corona to go do deliveries off of dinghies in the beach in Florida and created a campaign around it. And so we did a lot of this experiential marketing that also gave me experience with video, photography and creative work. And so through that project, I actually got to direct the promo campaign I'm most proud of about Clink, which is like our brand manifesto. And I shot it in two days with under $500, all of it in my house. But it looks like it was shot in 10 different locations

with paid actors. Everybody's volunteer. And it's just, it's a really cool piece. I should send it to you. So I got a lot of experience that way. But then I wanted to stay in the startup world. So I decided to start a company that would help people buy and own real estate together. The idea being that if you rent for 10 years with the same people, you know, friends or whatever, 10 years later, you're out your rent money and the landlord, you know, made all the money off of you. But you live with the same people for 10 years. Like what's stopping us from actually getting equity in the houses that we live in? us from actually getting equity in the houses that we live in. So I wanted to start a company to do that. Linked up with a company called Kobai in Seattle and they offered me an opportunity again to be their chief marketing officer. So I moved out to Seattle to work on Kobai and part of the way to educate people on this was of course videos. So we did short documentaries about the Kobaiers, people who would Kobai about the team that would help them. But as you know

startup world is brutal. There's ups, there's downs. There'll be a couple of months where you don't get paid. There'll be, you know, a good year after you raise a bunch of money. And so to keep moving forward, to keep paying the bills throughout the ups and downs of the various startups, I had to bring in money. So that's when we started Motivo. And Motivo was just started as a side project, you know, two to $3,000 a month in income that could keep me going while I was working on these bigger dreams. Motivo. And Motivo was just started as a side project, you know, two to three thousand dollars a month in income that could keep me going while I was working on these bigger dreams. And, you know, it came to the point, though, where Motivo was growing every single month without me having

to put more than five to ten percent of my effort into it. And it just became really clear that there was some energy here and something was you know inherently worthwhile valuable and insight interesting with what i was doing so i made the shift from the startup world into motivo full-time and then my business partner at the time a couple months later also quit his job and went into motivo full-time and so then we just went all out on motivo and that's been about i mean i'm pretty bad days, but I think it's about three or four years since we actually both went full time into Motivo. And then that's what took us to today. Um, and that's why, you know, I'm a little bit more than just this podcast.

Exactly. I mean, this is the culmination of every moment before to get to creatives, grab coffee. That's, that's what it was those 10 years. So that's my little story, but I did have a question I wanted to ask you before you asked me that question, which is, you know, so you guys have been doing this, you said for two years now. Well, it's what we consider. It's what we consider. What we consider. Yeah. That I, you know, you told the story. It sounds like, you know, you were kind of trying to, you know, figure it out one day, month at a time, the pandemic hits, how are we going to do this? And, but now you have a pretty good thing going, right? You have your three to five accounts each and you're growing and you have a podcast do you know where you want to

go next do you have a a plan or a mission we have an idea of some things not really no we don't really i i actually wanted to have a conversation with kyril this week about that like uh we i think we actually need to just sit down and like plan out like what our short term, medium term and long term goals are going to be and what kind of milestones we want to hit. We haven't really focused on it though, Kirill. We haven't had the chance to really dive into going in too much depth into like what our long term goals are.

We've been trying to kind of get the business as quickly to the point where it can be sustainable. That way we can have a little bit more flexibility to start thinking about that. I mean, like I personally want to do more documentary type projects. I just haven't had the chance to sit down and think about how we can kind of dive into it a bit more because we've dabbled here and there. We want to kind of grow to like try different types of productions, you know, on larger scales too. But in terms of actually, as Dario mentioned, to sit down and try to plan out what the long-term goals could be, we haven't had the chance to do that yet. Yeah. It's something that I'm becoming more and more interested in because, you know, we can as creatives, especially

in video gets so caught up in the busyness of the day to day, right? There's always another edit to get out the door, another proposal to send another client to bring in. But then as a result, I think we sacrifice sometimes telling our own story in a way that actually attracts the people that we want to be working with and taking the time to envision a state that we want to get to. So it really does take, it requires us to take a pause and step back and really imagine in five years, what would be your dream life. Like more than just work. Like what do you want to be doing?

But what do you want your life to look like? Imagine it and then work towards creating that. But that's something I'm very interested in myself having done this for a little while is getting better at honing and refining what it is that is my purpose. Why do I do this every day? You could do anything. Why this, right? What is your mission, right? Like what am I really trying to do in the world? Because there's the obvious answer, which is we're a business. We're trying to make a living, you know, we're trying to provide services and help our clients do the best job. But like, I kind of want to hone it even further than that. Like, why me doing this right, right now? Like what, what are we really trying to accomplish beyond

that top layer? What, what end product, what, what would we like to see change about the world? And I feel like, you know, the better that I get at defining that, the better I get at convincing myself that that is my mission, because you're kind of selling yourself on your vision. You have to actually sell yourself on it because you might not believe it's possible. You might not believe it's the right version of it. But the more that you sell yourself on it, it's almost like it becomes obvious to other people. And you start finding the clients that enable you to do the work that you want to do. You know, like the documentary work in the context you just gave.

Or for me, my big next goal is to work on a Netflix documentary or a Hulu documentary or a major documentary that can then get onto the streaming platforms and kind of give me that first directorial documentary debut in that bigger context. And so the more that we're able to hone that, the hope is the more opportunities come your way and the more open you are to even seeing those opportunities when they pop up. But that's why I was asking you guys,

because you're talking to a lot of creatives and you're in the same industry. And I don't, I don't get to talk about that a lot with people. So I was just kind of curious, you know, where you are in your journey of mission, purpose, and all that. Still figuring it out. Ongoing. And I feel like we're all kind of like trying to figure that out as we go. And sometimes we have an idea of what we want to do. But I think part of the cool thing of what we do is that we may have an idea

also of where we're going. But what's cool is that by doing the work and like going, being in the industry, you don't know where the path can kind of take you sometimes. And it, and it's, and sometimes I'm very curious about that. I like to explore those little avenues, you know, like I never in my life would have thought that we would be doing like a podcast show. You know, I never thought that it was like something that I would be interested in, but it became kind of like a, like a happy accident, uh, uh, starting it, you know, and it's to your point, like Daria and I get, get a chance to sit down now with a lot of different creatives and even discuss things that probably we would never have even thought about discussing ourselves at times. Honestly, when I, when you reached out and

I heard about your podcast and your show, it was like, I've been looking for something like this. I'm not even kidding. Right? Like the title, everything is perfect because I'm a huge podcast listener, but there's not that much content out there geared specifically for people like us with people like us doing what we're trying to do. So, you know, after I only, you know, heard about it a couple of weeks ago, when we first connected, I'm definitely excited to keep listening and encourage you guys to keep doing it. Cause I think there's a huge need for it. So I'm just stoked that you guys took that step and are creating the content. Thanks. And we're happy that, you know, it's being well received by at least some people, right? Like we're right now at this stage of the recording, we're at what, 53 subscribers

on YouTube. On Instagram, it's like 180 followers, but who knows what it will go to. Like we didn't do this for the following initially. And that's not really what our goal is. It's just to kind of build this network in this community. Right. And, um, definitely, like you said, there's a need for it for a lot of us and hopefully we're kind of providing that. Yeah. And I mean, as you know, with this kind of content, it just takes consistency, a lot of it and a lot of time, you know, to build the audience if that is what you want. But there's the inherent value in having conversations with interesting people and you might as well record it. If not only for your own, you know, ability to go back and reference it, but then also to share that with other people. So, yeah, it's just super cool.

And I guess this is your first, the first person in America that you're doing this with. So just wait for that subscriber number to start blowing up now that you're in the bigger market. 10 times the budget for the subscribers, right? 10 times the followers, right? Thanks, Tim, for jumping on the show with us. We really appreciate it. And honestly, this was a great episode. And yeah, look forward to to chatting more as well likewise thank you guys for having me thanks for creating the space for us to have these chats i hope this isn't the last time we all get to to talk together even if it's off camera and uh yeah looking forward to seeing what comes up