My desire to share information and promote tight nits companies is completely selfish. I want other companies to adopt this philosophy, therefor making marketplace more competitive, therefor delivering higher quality products and companies to work with, therefor making my job easier.
We have had our share of bad relationships that I can look back on and all center around the lack of how “tight nit” that organization is.
The goal of this post isn’t to point out bad instances though, but rather highlight amazing relationships.
Stealing a bit of Gary Vaynerchuksthunder, would say these companies are “crushing it”, with regards to how tight nit they are
Tubemogul
These guys have built an amazing analytics company and someone we work with extensively to power our analytics toolsets. They started out of Cal Berkley and have many incredibly smart people working for them. At around 20+ employees they have been able to rapidly build out the best analytics platform in the online video business.
When working with them, if we have a problem an API here or there, they will work overnight to get us the answer or fix by morning. One evening in particular, we had a problem with our flash player and analytic tracker, with everyone out for the day, and not his responsibility, Jason Lopatecki, Chief Strategy Officer, pulled out flash editor, and put together a fix for us. Who has C level officers that know how to code flash?
Incredibly smart and passionate people that are not afraid to wear multiple hats.
Edgecast
The Content Delivery Network (CDN) business is very competitive right now, and get dozens of vendor emails weekly about new CDN price breaks. Having worked with these guys for over a year now, they listen and deliver. This is extremely important as many larger CDN businesses think they have it figured out, and aren’t invested in innovating and listening to there customer.
We have many business service customers we work with. Each of these customers needs to be tracked individually for bandwidth usage. Edgecast listened to this need and not only delivered reporting functions for us with a UI layer but delivered an API with 20+ functions a few weeks after.
And when someone on the Viddler team may call in because we are having a problem with some reporting tool, or inquiring about new services, the level1 support engineer could be the core architect for all we know because of how well versed he is with the status of features and problems within the company. Transparent organization or talented hire? I would assume all organizations have high level of transparency, just that they find passionate and intelligent people.
To get started over there the man to talk to over there is Duane Sulo.
Google
Due to size of Google don’t want to post anything too confidential here. What I will say is that there account reps and support staff are all on point. When working with individual units of Google, they feel like small startups themselves, proving that you can still be tight nit in one of the largest companies in the world.
In summary it appears that there are a few key factors in running a tight nit organization:
Smart/Passionate People
Ability to Listen and Deliver
Employees not afraid to wear multiple hats.
Please think of these when building a company or working with other companies as it’ll help foster more tight nit companies.
Also, just a small disclaimer, there are a more companies I want to list, but in order for Viddler to attempt to be a tight company, am going to have to cut this off here.
If you know of a tight nit company, let me know what tight nit company you work with, would love to hear your story via comments, blog post, tweet, viddler, or email rob at viddler.
As you may know we relaunched our advertise directory to be completely transparent to help promote content partners that work with us as well as share with advertisers what we are about.
Scrappy is building a video hosting service with 1/10th the investment of your competitors. Scrappy is watching every penny even if it’s $1 beers at local pub. Scrappy is a dot-com in Bethlehem, PA. Scrappy is finding amazing talent regardless of what you can afford to pay. Scrappy is finding top talent wherever it may be located: Poland, Phoenix, Pennsylvania. Scrappy is innovating while balancing cashflow. Scrappy is building a REAL business.
At this moment in time, scrappy is making me and people around us think like a company, one that is going to be around for a very long time.
Viddler just released a new feature primarily requested from video game partners partners like Joystiq, Sony Playstation, Destructoid and VideoGaming247.com. Leave comments if you have suggestions.
If your interested in learning more about howto signup for this feature, please check out our partner and/or our business service program.
If you have noticed my videos, I have taken out the Viddler brand and customized the player to really emphasize our positioning on Viddler. If you haven’t seen branding, check out this page with a few of the branded players.
With our “Brand Yourself” launch we have been switching the way we have been messaging ourselves to be a “Powered By Service” rather then a “Brand Claiming Service”. This is certainly a decentralizing our strategy but we really believe that supporting video podcasters is about taking away friction in this video space.
To point this out, Gary gave us mad props on this at his keynote (video still pending upload) but as Donna Papacosta points out, he was pretty adamant about it:
Our marketing on T-Shirt Distribution has the exact same messaging, check out some nice photo’s I found on Flickr of the shirts we printed out:
I love people using Viddler and cannot wait for all the rollouts we are going to push over the next month that are solving problems in this marketplace.
First of all, if you were even thinking about New Media Expo, you should be going.
If you haven’t introduced yourself yet and are going to New Media Expo, do it via Video. All you have to do is tag your video “newmediaexpo” or “newmediaexpo2008″ and it will go in general category of NewMediaExpo Videos. If you want to do an introduction, tag it as “newmediaexpointroduction” for it to go in introduction section.
This morning, this magazine arrived, and was happy to find an interview with Gary Vaynerchuk. Gary makes an excellent point in Affiliate Summit Magazine, Feed Front. It’s about being Genuine. He calls it being a RAT (real, authentic, and transparent). Now, I wouldn’t be big on this if I wasn’t caught up with all the spamming/real internet marketing occuring on Viddler. Check out Viddler Tag: Marketing, to see how big this has become on Viddler. It’s ugly. Cash gifting, lead generation, real estate marketing all seem to fit into this. Some of this has been brought on from TubeMogul, an amazing tool for podcasters to distribute high quality shows everywhere, but also a lead generators tricks of the trade.
At Viddler, we are a little conflicted with exactly what rules to put in place to prevent this and keep Viddler itself a “RAT”. Real Authentic Transparent.
Hello and welcome to my personal blog. My name is Robert Sandie, a digital entrepreneur, co-founder and President of Viddler. Join me as I update this blog on the daily challenges of startup.
