For the past nine months I’ve been incubating a new production company with a couple of friends. We’ve produced a few things, and it went well, and now we want to give it a more focused effort.
Basically, we’re a startup company that happens to operate in the video production space. For me, the phrase “startup” conjures visions of the tech space and there’s a lot of overlap between the two: my team is remote, we’re technology dependent, we want to move fast, our clients (and potential clients) are all over the place, etc.
I find it interesting there’s a ton of writing about starting up a technology company – tools, strategies, project management, people management, software – but almost nothing about starting up a video production company. There’s an awful lot about how to make a video, create a special effect, finance a feature film, even organize a shoot, but precious little about the business and operations side of video production. What goes on behind the curtain.
So I decided to turn to the tech startup world for ideas for our little startup. We will be launching in the next month or so, once we complete our first big client project and get a couple more things squared away. But there’s a bunch of stuff I’ve been working on for the past month to start building some systems, structure, and culture – and I’d like to share them with you.
I cribbed heavily from John Saddigton’s (@8bit) article How to Start a Company in 72 Hours. It’ll probably take me closer to 72 days, but the principles are the same. They may even be the same for any company – new or old, digital or analog, creative or seemingly boring. I’ll leave you to decide.
If you’d like to follow along as we start this company, go read that article first. It has a wealth of knowledge about beating friction by just getting things rolling. I’ll be writing several posts over the next month or so about how we applied those lessons to our situation. Hope you can apply those lessons as well.