Going Pro: Case studies in Super Niche

For many, the idea of “Super niching” feels like a pair of handcuffs.  Like you will be limiting potential clients.  If you want to build a company quickly, the natural instinct is to cast a wide net.  The benefits of targeting your audience, however, is central to every book on marketing you’ll ever read (and I recommend you read a couple if you’re just starting out).  Seeing it work in action is impressive, and far more convincing than anything you’ll read in a book, though. 

Illy Cafe Shoot - Illy is a super niche within the coffee world

Case study, Shmuley Hoffman 

Shmuley Hoffman at Hoffman Productions is an excellent example of “super niching.” In fact, that’s who I borrowed the term from.  His company’s primary focus is not simply promotional videos for summer camps, he’s honed it to Jewish summer camps.  As of this publication, he keeps a wonderful-if-brief blog with great business tips for starting out.  In his videoblog interview with Thomas Roberts he doubles down on the super niche idea.  Thomas took his non-video career in medical instruments and turned his contacts into lucrative video clients. It’s a great example of using your existing relationships to identify your niche, and he gives a first-hand account of his experience here: http://entrefilmmaker.com/get-high-paying-projects-with-super-niching/.  I always look forward to Hoffman’s amusing and helpful posts.  And Shmuley’s video production is first rate—worthy of study.

Spark Shop Creatives (http://www.sparkshopcreative.com/)  is another company that started as a super niche.  I worked on a project with them a few years back and got to share more than a few Indian beers with Chuck Fryberger and his team.  His company grew out of a love for rock climbing.  Chuck started by filming their climbs.  Their self-produced videos attracted the interest of companies like Cliff Bar and climbing equipment companies.  It expanded to Red Bull and detoured into other areas.  But they’ve kept their identity around climbing, sports, and the outdoors.  When you think about it, that’s a huge market.

It’s worthwhile to note that “super niching” (and yes, I’ll stop using that word soon), also positions you as an expert in creating videos for that audience… even if your skill level isn’t above average in general.  If you “specialize” in creating videos for non-profits, you present yourself as an expert in the field just by not catering to everyone.

So how do you pick your niche?  There’s no science to this process, but here’s a tool that might help:

1.       Divide a sheet of paper into three columns

2.       In the first column, make a list of the types of businesses you already interact with professionally; include personal relationships with business owners.

3.       In the second column, list the areas in which you’d say your knowledge borders on expert or near expert; include hobbies.

4.       In the third column, make a list of the clients you’d like to work with.  This might include businesses from your first column, but also dream clients.

Now look for common elements across these three columns. Any item that appears in two or more columns is a potential niche.  Give the first column preferential treatment, because these are potential clients you already know.  Circle the businesses, knowledge areas, and clients that overlap in some way.

Now comes the time for a heart check.  Make another list of the kind of video you’d like to create.  This list can be genre’s (testimonials, documentaries, short film), and also how they will be experienced (uplifting, grand in scope, gritty).  Do the descriptions from the heart check list fit with the clients?  Where’s the most overlap?

Just joining us?  You can read about the beginning of the Going Pro series here.

Going Pro: Conquering Uncertainty

Because of some complications, I know the exact date of conception of my child. Knowing that isn’t exceptional-- most couples can guess-- it’s knowing on the day itself that life has begun.  People don’t tell you how poor the odds are in those first few days. First few weeks. First few months.  It starts below 15% likelihood of survival.  As the cells multiply those odds ever so slowly grow.  One’s heart is bent around the possible child from the first hour-- pinned to hope as embryos show promise, stall, die, grow in fits and spurts.  It is ridiculously unreliable, our reproductive system.  There were times I wondered how anyone was born. 

By the end of the first trimester your odds are looking pretty good (though frankly, still terrifyingly uncertain).  I had a sensation similar to stepping on a broken escalator.  You know intellectually that it’s not moving, but instinctively your foot falters, anticipating the familiar motion below.  And even as I climb the stairs of my own volition, my feet are not quite steady.  There’s an ever so slight sense of vertigo... the anticipation of movement below my feet.  That’s the first trimester.

But you hope.  And hate that hope just a little, for fear of it all falling apart.  There’s a correlation here, to starting ones own company.  The ridiculous, uncontrollable odds.  The vertigo. The anxiety and fear of failure.  My mantra has become a simple cliché:   more dreams have been destroyed by fear than by failure. 

"More dreams have been destroyed

by fear,

than by failure"

So go out and do it, fear be damned.  People say life is short.  That doesn’t motivate me.  Life is long motivates me.  You’ll live with your mistakes, your fears, your missed opportunities for a long, long time.  So if you’ve made a mistake, fix it.  If you’re afraid of something, push it aside.  If the opportunity presents itself, grab it.  Reasonably.  Strategically.  Passionately.

Next time: case studies in successful super niches.

Going Pro: Pick your poison-- super niche

Day 4:

Picking my poison.  The most common advice for photographers embarking on a career is to specialize.  Be a portrait photographer, or an architectural photographer, or product photographer.  When you can, subdivide that specialty: don’t just be a portrait photographer, be a high school graduation portrait shooter, a fashion shooter, or an actor’s headshot shooter.  Super-niche, because there are enough people interested in whatever fraction of the photographic world you choose to sustain you, and the customer wants to know they’re in the hands of a specialist.  It’s good advice, and I think it applies to being a videographer as well.  

Of course, I didn’t follow that advice as a photographer.  But that’s largely because I didn’t start out trying to build a career as a photographer—I wasn’t paying the mortgage with that income so I could afford the lean months.  In fact, I never made more than $1600 a month as a photographer, and most were closer to $500.  I’m glad I chose that path; it gave me a broader base of work, and because I wasn’t in a hurry, over time I created a broader base of clients. 

But this wasn’t a gentle stroll towards a client base.  I needed a grab—the fastest, surest path to generating income while staying true to the types of shoots I found satisfying. 

Pick a specialty

So here is step number one:  you need to pick your niche.  This comes before a business plan (though some would say it’s the first step of a business plan), your marketing plan, your website-- everything.  Pick a niche that is both of interest and can generating income for you.  Not for someone else.

 What does that mean, exactly?  The temptation is to pick the most attractive niche… what you really want to be shooting.  Set that aside.  Look at who you are right now: what field do you work in now? What hobbies do you immerse yourself in?  Those are your best bets because you’ve got connections… trust in those areas.  Don’t think, “wouldn’t it be great to make documentaries” if you’ve never created a documentaries.  That’s your 2-year plan.  Your today plan is to partner with potential customers that are already in your circle.  Don’t rush this decision. You probably have more history to draw from than you think, and those connections have other connections.

You already work in your niche

I’ll repeat myself:  examine your current business and your hobbies in order to find your niche.  If you work at Dairy Queen, fine.  The first company you should approach is Dairy Queen.  Then boutique ice creameries.  Then specialty deserts.  Then specialty restaurants and major ice cream makers. 

Here’s the misconception about picking a niche.  You’re not picking the genre  you’ll shoot for the rest of your career.  You’re picking your first bread a butter clients.  Branching out to other forms of videography is much easier when you have a body of work and a regular flow of income.

My work had been environmental health, specifically in chemical exposures that affect human health.  Over the past couple of days I researched other agencies that do similar work. Those included companies that do almost identical work, and then expanded out to companies that do similar work. Even if I don’t know anyone at those companies, they’ll recognize and respect my agency.  And they’ll treat my correspondence with professional respect.  They won’t ignore any email or call, because they may end up in a meeting with me next month—even if they’ve never met me before. 

I put together a simple Excel spreadsheet.  The categories were:  

Organization   Type   Contact Person   Email   Phone   Address   Outreach

My “identical” companies included competitors for my current employer.   These groups did environmental health research and education.  Then I added companies that did environmental advocacy and education.   These included both small community based organizations and governmental agencies.  On this list I also included my own company as a potential customer.  I started with 10 names on this list, knowing that it would… should grow over time as I made more contacts.  These included my company’s current competition; another company that had interviewed me for a position I didn’t get; another that was the colleague of a CBO I served on the board of; a government agency that had funded other projects for my company years ago; and a couple of organizations I didn’t really know. Out of these 10, the goal is to land 2.

Next time:  conquering uncertainty

Going Pro: Doomsday

Day 1 (December 24^th, Christmas Eve):

The decision:  become a filmmaker in 180 days.  I didn’t reach this decision lightly—wait, did I say 180 days? 

 I did.  

A New World in 180 Days

Initially, I planned to do this in just six months-- though in truth my goal was to land my first truly professional job... something that paid close to a living wage.  The gulf between one gig and sustained income is enormous. however, I wrestled with the wisdom and practicality of making this career change at my stage in life. I didn’t reach it of my own volition—I was driven to it. 

My wife was ten days pregnant when my boss sat me down and explained that my job would be ending.  I was grant-funded, and the opportunities had dried up. They could keep me on at 30% time for the next ten months, or 60% time for six months.  After that was a mystery. 

Currently, I was a 70% time employee, filling the rest of my work-week with either theatre production (which I had done part-time and for peanuts for decades) or photography.  I had done a smattering of video work on top of my new part-time career of photography… just enough to wet my interest and make it clear that I did not have the skills to create video at a professional, competitive level.  My videos were muddy, ungraded, with mediocre sound, and choppy edits.  Luckily, they had been created for an organization with even lower standards (and a greater sense of pleasant surprise) than I, so at least the customer was happy.  But they wouldn’t have passed any reasonable critique from even a film student, let alone professional.  I was fifty-one years old, a ridiculous age to start a new career.  I had a mortgage and a child on the way.  I was also tired of getting close to the work and security I wanted from my job only to have it shaken up by outside forces.  

"Showing irritation is rarely 

to your advantage."

Sitting across the table from my boss, I sighed inwardly.  We'd faced lean times before.  I believe that showing irritation or unhappiness is rarely to your advantage.  I knew the real difference between ten months at 30% and six months at 60% was insurance.  At 60% I would have health insurance.  For a new family that would be $800 a month on the open market.  But I also knew that in my particular field—environmental health education-- ten months had the possibility of stretching longer; we were constantly searching for new opportunities.  

I told him six months at 60%.  One hundred and eighty days of guaranteed employment, and then….

And then.  Before the clock ran out I needed to develop not just a plan for my new company, but book enough production jobs to accumulate the working capital needed to support a mortgage and a child.  In (what later became) 40 weeks, I needed to almost double my monthly income so that I could not only walk away from the day job but have the resources to sustain a new business.  And last week I did just that—walked away.

This is precisely how I did it.

Next post: picking your poison-- the art of the super-niche.

Going Pro: A New Series

This series is about how to start a successful video production company in 40 weeks.  Forty seems like an odd number in this situation.  Sure, it’s four groups of ten and there are plenty of lists of 10—ten best, ten worst, ten tips, ten commandments….  Groupings of ten just work.  But that’s not why I picked 40 weeks.  It’s the length of a human pregnancy, the ultimate metaphor of creation.  And that was one of the little earthquakes that rattled my world: my wife had just gotten pregnant.  (Okay, that sounds like she did it all by herself when in reality I’m at least 50 percent responsible—50… 50… hmm, that’s a good number.)  

 

In 40 weeks I had to not only start a company, but make it successful.

"Let go of your day job; 

live off your videography"

What do I mean by successful? I believe that anyone who makes money at their craft—whether it’s $25 a shoot or $2500—has earned the right to call themselves a professional. But I’m setting the bar higher for this series.   By successful I mean you’re positioned to let go of your day job and live off your videography work. 

This Going Pro series outlines the steps, theories, and practical bits that went into my 40-week evolution from part-time photographer to full-time videographer/photographer.  It's not a road map, precisely, because there are many ways to make this journey. It's more like a suitcase for the journey.  A suitcase that someone else has packed for your journey, full of surprises-- and hopefully vitally useful items.  The series will spread out over the next three months or so.

To accomplish this in 40 weeks you must have some knowledge of videography.  If you don’t, you better add another “pregnancy” to your timeline in order to get up to speed on the technical aspects., because this isn’t for absolute beginners.

Nor is this for established cinematographers (in fact, I hope some of them chip in to make this series more useful). This is designed for skilled crafts-people who are planning to make the leap into a professional career.  This includes the business structures, strategies for reaching clients, the products I use the most, and advanced techniques that will help separate you from the hobbyist.

"Nuts and bolts of business and art"

So I won’t write about 3 point lighting; but I’ll may discuss 4-point lighting, which is the difference between an amateur lighting design and a beginning professional.  I won’t talk about how set up a website; but I may write about what should be included and how to coordinate across web platforms.  I’ll dig into the nuts and bolts of contracts; I’ll balance production approaches with business methodology.  But mostly—and I hope most usefully—I’ll give a blow-by-blow account of the steps I took to establish a production company. I believe a honest personal account can yield more gems than a dry instructional guide… and is harder to come by even in these days of self-promotion.

I’ll post at several times a week.  It may take a few entries before the meat and potatoes of “how to” start to appear.  But trust me, there’s a method to the madness of going pro. 

Next post: we’ll get in the time machine. We’re story-tellers; we need to start at the beginning.

Aputure VS-5 Monitor - 180 Review

These days I feel that most of my video errors in the field are due to the small screen on the A7sii. Under intense working conditions it’s impossible to see everything you need to in the viewfinder (my preferred method) or LCD.  Back home scrubbing the footage on the computer I suddenly discover tangles of wires, a passerby in the distance-- or worst of all, a piece of my own equipment in the background....

The Aputure VS-5 is a 7” monitor that’s designed to solve that problem.  How well does it do?

First off, any many have noted it’s packed with professional tools like Zebras, Vectorscope,  Peaking, Histogram, Monochrome, Waveform, and False Colors.  The 1920 x1200 HD display is beautifully sharp for a 7-inch screen.  And it’s plenty bright to my eye.  It has both HDMI and SDI inputs, making it functional for professional cameras.  Aputure is known for being customer centric, and they don’t disappoint here.  They provide everything you need to maximize your experience: sun hood, carry bag, and a variety of cords.  Everything except batteries, which I find a bit odd.  But! it uses the omnipresent Sony NP-F/FM/QM Series type batteries, so they’re cheap and you may have a few of them lying around anyway.  I did.

The unit is surrounded by vents around the side, and I was surprised to find it gets a little warm.  Not hot, mind you, so it’s not a problem-- but warm.  The menus are easy to use and navigate.  The unit feels reasonably sturdy.

For all those pluses, there are some drawbacks and considerations.  While some of the tools-- Zebras, Peaking, and Histogram-- I find to be incredibly useful in the field; others like Vectorscope and Waveform are tools I traditionally use in post.  The way I shoot, I don’t expect to use those two in the field.  It takes a very controlled environment to adjust for waveforms.  Because I shoot with a Sony A7sii which has zebras, peaking, and histogram functions built in, my monitor is most useful for seeing the big picture and sharing with the producer. In other words, the "non-professional" tools.

The Aputure doesn’t have built-in LUTs for SLOG, so if that’s something you rely on you’ll be frustrated.  Even worse, SLOG footage becomes unsuitable for the producer’s eyes.  The unit also suffers from a slight lag.  It’s more of an occasional distraction than debilitation, so some folks may not be bothered by it. 

Should You Get One?

As always, the answer to that question has a lot to do with how you shoot.  For $500, the Aputure has a lot of professional features and is well-built and well-designed.   If you want those features it's a great unit and a bargain.  I like that it provides a well-designed sunscreen... one of those equipment bits that are frustratingly expensive when bought separately. 

If you shoot in less controlled environments however-- weddings, events, or just in situations where there isn’t a lot of time (which is typically the case for me)-- you probably won’t use those features.  And your camera may already have them built in.  It’s definitely an investment, and to me it feels like the VS5 falls uncomfortably between a $200 budget monitor and a $1200 monitor/recorder that also give you better footage (rather than better viewing).  I’m not sold on it, but that doesn’t mean it’s not right for some people.

180 Review: Redragon Gaming Mouse for Video Editing

Video editor controllers like the Shuttle Pro 2 and the Palette are designed to speed up your work by putting all your short cuts, macros, and controls at your fingertips.  I recently upgraded by laptop editing system, which is a vast improvement in every department except the touchpad and mouse.  The Left-Right buttons are stiff and overly specific.  Working on a budget, I decided to get the Redragon Perdition gaming mouse a go.

What I like:

• All the controls are in my right hand.
• 16 programmable buttons.  That’s pretty much all you need.  I can “Control + Click + Drag” all in one motion.
• Five profiles, which means I can have one profile for my editor, a second with shortcuts programmed for After Effects, and another for daily computer use.  I don’t know what I’ll use the other two profiles for.
• Good cheap entry into video controllers
• Color-coded profiles help you keep track

What’s less than perfect:

• Most of the buttons are under my thumb, which makes my forefinger tense up for control-- which sometimes results in an unplanned left-click.
• I wish it had a second scroll wheel for scrubbing through the timeline 

What’s up for grabs:

• I can edit more quickly and fluidly on the Redragon mouse than I can on my stiff-moused laptop, but the jury is still out on how it compares to a well-designed laptop. 

Final thoughts:

The Redragon Perdition mouse is a great entry point into the controller world, and I’ll definitely be using mine.  I’d prefer having most of the buttons on a finger keypad rather than under the thumb, so I may explore some other options after I’ve mastered this.  It’s great for learning your shortcuts and macros.