Juggling different projects

Jul 27, 2020

I’m doing too many things at once. In a traditional video production company, this wouldn’t be a big deal - you’d have client A and project A, client B and project B, maybe client B and project C.

We’re used to doing different kinds of videos for different people - completely custom animated explainers, interview-based projects, etc.

But as I’m trying to think about my video production company more like a SaaS, I’ve created separate landinging pages and “companies” for each service. Here’s the full run down of what I’m doing and how it’s evolved over time:

Patchbay Media

This is the production company I started in 2012. Since then I’ve worked with close to 100 clients and have made over $1.2 million. Because I never did any advertising, people don’t really know the name, the know ME. By last year I’d estimate that 90% of my clients were repeat clients and the last 10% were referrals.

My first productized offering. In 2018 I thought this was different enough from Patchbay that it justified having its own URL.

For a new client - If a custom project from Patchbay wasn’t an option, no problem! How about a simpler, less expensive video through Social Video Studio?

For an existing client, How about we take the footage we shot and turn it into some additional assets for you in the form of social videos?

In January I thought I would go all in on this idea with the unlimited subscription model. I upgraded my Squarespace account to handle subscription billing (Stripe). I set up an email account.

I currently have 1 communications agency on retainer that absolutely loves this service. We make awesome videos for his clients and I know he’s able to bill his clients a lot more, just by delivering them 1-2 videos per month.

Based on my experience with this one client, I know there is a huge opportunity here to partner with other agencies, so in July I rewrote the website copy to this agency persona. I have done zero thus far to promote it because I’m working on…

Edit Video Calls

Based on my work with both Patchbay and SVS over the last few months, I realized there was an opportunity to create very simple edits from Zoom calls. Instead of the typical $395 per video via SVS, we could do these for $75-100 per video. This has been my muse for the last 2 months.

The billing and orders are handled through SPP (Stripe). I do not have an email account for this URL.

I’m sitting here with 3 “companies” and it is STRESSING ME OUT.

3 URLs
3 billing accounts (2 Stripe, 1 Freshbooks)
2 email accounts
Very little continuity

I need to do something to streamline this, but I’m not sure what makes the most sense.

Option 1 - Patchbay + parent company for productized services

My initial thought was to keep Patchbay as the traditional video company and create a “parent company” to house the existing and future productized video services.

For instance, I’ve had some success with editing videos for real estate agents in a “send me footage that you shot on your phone of the house you’re selling and I’ll edit it” kind of way. That’s a service I would love to start someday!

I own the URL productize.video. I could set up a quick Carrd landing page for Productize Video that says “A new approach to remote video production. Our microcompanies create simpler, less expensive videos that deliver the same results.”

I would house Social Video Studio and Edit Video calls and whatever I wanted to do in the future here.

Option 2 - Patchbay + Social Video Studio

Instead of Productize Video, I would keep going with Social Video Studio name. This is basically what I’m currently doing. It’s not wrong to consider Edit Video Calls a type of social video production.

Option 3 - Everything Patchbay

This is probably the most straightforward. Everything just becomes an extension of Patchbay Media.

This would be good because I have everything in one place. I haven’t changed my Patchbay homepage in forever and there I could change it to “a new kind of video production company” and talk about EVC and SVS.

This would be bad because my Edit Video Calls client (coaches) is NOT my Patchbay Media client (mostly large nonprofits).

Immediate steps

I think the first thing to do is consolidate email into Patchbay Media and retire Social Video Studio email.

I’m going to take my one client from SVS and put them on the the EVC client portal (SPP) for project management and billing. That eliminates Asana from the workflow and also removes the Google form for asset intake.

I should rename my SPP dashboard but I’ll deal with that later, don’t want to break links.

Ever since I started Edit Video Calls this has been a huge mental hurdle to organize everything I’m doing. I need to choose something soon and stick to it.