Getting your message out to a larger audience with Gideon Shalwick EP#065

G', day, guys. And welcome to this episode of the how to Scale a Video Business podcast. This week I'm talking to Gideon Shalwick. Gideon is the CEO and founder of Splashio.com and has been a serial entrepreneur for the last 15, 20 years. And we actually met up for lunch down in Mooloolaba, not far from where I live here in Noosa. And we actually did the interview at the Rusty Batch Cafe, which was really nice to kind of go out and actually do the interview out somewhere other than the studio. Gideon and I talk about the power of video and also how the Splashio service is helping people get their message out to market. Now, where this is particularly relevant to you as a video production company is that this service is, it's a no brainer. I absolutely love it. I've been using it for a little while now and for about 100 bucks a month I can get four videos formatted for social media with subtitles burnt in and it's all done by a human. But Gaddin will tell you more about that during the episode. It is an absolutely diamond service and one that, that you can actually sell to your clients in the sense that you can have that as your secret weapon. You could literally have this as part of your upsell service, offer it to clients and, you know, charge your clients however much you want to charge for the service with videos you've already made for them. It really is one of those great bolt on services that doesn't cost you very much to implement but can add massive value to your clients. Now if you want to try it out, if you go to splashio.com den you can get four free credits just for trying out the service. Now you do have to put your credit card in, but what you can do if you want to is you can put your credit card and start the trial, use the four credits and take your credit card off if that's really what you want to do. But I honestly think that once you've tried this, you won't want to do anything else. So I really hope you enjoy the show. And here's a quick word from our sponsors, then we'll get into the episode. This episode is sponsored by the video business accelerator Mastermind. This is a business coaching and mentoring program exclusively for video production companies. Rather than me tell you about it, let's hear from some of our members.

As far as video business is concerned, it was a no brainer for us. It's the right pain points that we went. These are the things that we need to work on. And these are the solutions that are offered by Den and the Video Business Accelerator. The reason I joined the accelerator was I really wanted someone who could help guide and mentor us through that next level. So we're going through quite a period of change at the moment. Our industry is changing massively and I really wanted that support and mentoring. And that's exactly what Dan provides.

The Video Business Accelerator event has been great so far. Dan always provides a lot of value.

He was really good at communicating with filmmakers as well because he obviously has such a great passion and past working in it. So it was really good to hear somebody talk about business theory and marketing strategies and things. But from a perspective of being a.

Video production company, Quarter three of this calendar year was the biggest year, biggest quarter we've had, and now wrapping up on quarter four towards the end of the calendar year, it's been bigger again. So, yeah, it's obviously working. I'd say the biggest advantage of being part of the Video Business Accelerator group is the group itself. Yes, you've got Den the expert to turn to for advice. But more often than not, when you ask a question of the group, you get a variety of different answers. Everyone's kind of come across the same problems, but everyone has a different approach to solving them. We're all there to help each other. I think that's a big bonus of being part of the group.

So if these case studies sound like they resonate with you and you're ready to take your business to the next level, then head over to Denleny.com and click on Work with Den. There are also a heap of other great resources available on the site now. Enjoy this episode. So we're, we're sitting out here on the true entrepreneur style, just having had a nice lunch in the. What's the cafe called?

The Rusty Batch.

The Rusty Batch in Mooloolaba. Gideon, nice to see you again.

Good to see you too, man. Great location.

It is. And I thought what we'd do is do a location podcast. One of the benefits of going audio only is we can actually go mobile. Gideon, tell me about how you. So Gideon runs splashio. Tell me how you got to splashio. Give me a quick history of Gideon Sharwick in the video space.

Oh, well, I was born.

In 1977. Yeah, look it, it's, it's interesting. I've had this question quite a few times and I never quite know where to start because, you know, was it when I was five when I remember watching a program on tv? It was a News presenter. I was watching and I was going, hey, that's cool. I want to do that one day. I want to be on. Like, I didn't necessarily want to be a TV or news presenter, but I was. The idea of being on screen or being on video was just for some reason really appealing. I don't know where that came from. If I was born into me or if it was later on, more programmed or whatever. I don't know where it came from. But I know from a very young age there's something to do with video that I was just naturally drawn to. So for a very long time after five, I just ignored that. And it wasn't until I became an entrepreneur In 2006, I was 28 years old and at that point I was qualified as an electronic engineer. Studied for four years for that degree. Hated it. Then I did another degree in management and enjoyed that a lot more because it was to do with people. But then I went working and it's like I realized that, hey, this dream that got sold to me was a lie. It's all a big lie. And you know, I stuck out for five years because, you know, I don't like starting things and not finishing it. But that was definitely the wrong decision. I should have stopped that way back. Anyway, I finally quit my job, moved to Australia from New Zealand and I started the business. At that point, I still didn't know that I was gonna do video. So I wrote a book and launched it with a JV partner. Did pretty well. Well, well compared to zero. Right. So it wasn't like a million dollar success or anything like that, but it was enough for me to go, hey, this is cool, this could be a business. But then I ran out of traffic because that, you know, the JV partner, he happened to be the guy also who taught me how to write the book and how to sell it. So he promoted it for me and then. But he didn't teach me how to build traffic and how to build a real business. I mean, an ebook, writing a book and selling it, that's not a business.

No.

So then I started exploring and one of the first things I did was I started, I thought, hey, let's go and ask the experts in know, let's go and interview people who know what they're doing. Back then, it was 2007 or so, everyone was doing audio interviews, kind of. Kind of like what we're doing now.

Yeah.

So I thought, hey, I want to be fancy, let's do video. Why not? Why not? You know, I'VE got a handycam. Actually, I didn't have a handycam. I thought that day, okay, I'm gonna buy a handycam. Because that following weekend, there was an event on where a bunch of the experts in the industry were speaking. And I thought, I've got to get there. So I went there with my brand new little handicap. I didn't know anything. I just, I didn't know where to press record. I hired. I mean, I got a hotel room and the idea was that, you know, I would ask people on stage afterwards if they want to come on an interview. So the person, the first person I asked for the interview says, yeah, let's, let's, let's, let's get going.

And.

And that was the beginning, you know, of me getting into video. So it was a pretty rocky start because back then, you'll probably remember, the files were just huge. Like, was a different thing. Publishing for, you know, offline compared to online. Online was just an absolute nightmare back then because the files were so huge. I ended up killing my PC because the files were too big.

Wow.

And that's when I ended up moving over to Mac, before the era of the iPhone.

And just went from there, you know. So it was a pretty tough start because it was so hard back then to do video online. Just trying to upload your video to YouTube and making it look good was an absolute nightmare. Remember, we used Blip TV back in the day, and the only reason was because the quality was much better than YouTube. Now, you know, I'm not sure if Blip TV still exists, but YouTube is a. The big one now. It's no issues now. You record on your phone and you're like a professional video producer.

But you were one of the very first kind of YouTubers, weren't you?

I wouldn't say I was one of the first YouTubers. YouTube was around for about a year when I started doing video stuff. I was certainly one of the first to start Talking about using YouTube for growing your business because you're being very.

Modest because you had some, like, when was this? 2008, maybe earlier than that.

Yeah, I mean, I.

You had, you had significant views right in the early days?

Well, yeah, I've had lots of views in lots of different places. So my first big success was actually on Blip tv. So me and a friend of mine, Yara Starak, we launched a program called Become a Blogger. This was about 2008, and we decided not to go to YouTube because YouTube's quality was so awful. So we published 10 videos on Blip TV, showing people how to set up their blogs and stuff that run for six months. Within six months, I think we had something like 300,000 downloads of our videos, which is just mind blowing, you know, even before we launched. So after the Become a Blogger project, I thought, hey, this is cool. I would like to teach people how to do the video stuff because I'm really enjoying it and I love teaching. But I felt that I needed more experience, you know, so I could teach from experience. I needed to have some more success under the belt. So then I teamed up with a local magician in Brisbane and we actually met on an acting gig. This is before I really knew whether my, my online business was going to take off or not because I sort of, you know, hedging my bets there, maybe I could do this acting thing. And we were on this acting gig together. He did some magic and I was impressed and, and he knew that I was doing online stuff, had some success with Become a Blogger. And then eventually he approached me, said, gideon, I need some help. Just after, after the gfc, he needed some help for getting more gigs. And I said, because he wanted to hire me. And I said, look, you probably can't afford me because I don't, you know, magicians probably don't make too much money. And I said, why don't we do this thing together? You do the magic and I'll do the video marketing. And so literally we went into the streets of Brisbane. He did the magic, impressed all the pretty girls while I was recording with the handicap and then processing it all afterwards. So yeah, that did pretty well. Eventually that channel became the world's number one free magic channel. It's not anymore, but.

I think within two or three years it was number one. And that was pretty awesome. You know, I don't know how many subscribers it has now. It's over maybe around 400,000 subscribers. I haven't checked for a long time. And I was only there for the first year of the business. But that's really where I.

Got used to the idea of using YouTube as an audience building tool for your business. And.

I was really excited about it back then. Already I are saying to JJ the magician, hey, because he was, he was sort of thinking about going into TV. He's trying to decide should he go into TV, a career and TV or should he just do his own thing on YouTube? And I remember saying to him, look, yeah, TV is probably cool now, but is it going to be cool in 5 years, 10 years time? And yeah, it's More than a decade ago now. That's like 12 years ago. Can you believe it? Oh actually Free Magic Live was 2009 started that. Yeah. And so I mean you look now today at what you can do with yourself on video, you know, online video compared to back in the day if you wanted to be seen, you had to get on TV somehow. You know it's very different game right now, so it's very exciting.

So how did you go from there to running? Is it a software company? I mean Espacio a software company. It's a server. How would you describe it?

It's a service. As a service? Yeah, I guess that's a way you could put it. It's a product. So we've got a productized service where. So the service is where we take your videos and we manually transcribe them and then burn that text into your videos as captions but then also format it in a really nice social media friendly format with a nice headline and nice colors, your brand colors, your logo, logo animation. We make it look really nice. So it allows you to basically get that done really quickly which is normally a really painful process. A painful but very important process if you want to get engagement to now takes you 20 cents to submit. 20 minutes. What am I saying?

20 seconds.

Yeah, I'm getting confused here. 20 seconds to submit your video and you're done. And if you have to do it yourself, you know, like talking.

Look, I, before I kind of went fully into the coaching we were running a kind of subscription type video business production and one of my clients wanted 196 videos and we did them manually. And so I have especially high respect and regard for how simple and easy you've made this process knowing that it's not a simple and easy process to actually do them. And I think what makes Splashio so unique and I've just started using it and it's blown me away. And as a side note, my very first video I put on you on LinkedIn with splash started trending in video production and I've never had that great traction on video on LinkedIn so thank you for that. But, but more so is that it's not a software, it's a physical human being or four human beings doing it and that's what makes it so special. Like that's clearly a more expensive thing to do for you. And yet at the time of recording I think it's $97 a month for four videos up to five minutes. It's an absolute no brainer.

What was it that inspired you to go down the route of human automation rather than just building a software and trying to sell the software?

Great question.

So before this version of splashio, I was actually co founder in a software company. And for that software, we automated the video production for video ads for YouTube and Facebook and Instagram. It was awesome for scaling and stuff like that. But what it wasn't awesome for was for the human touch. And I really missed that. I really missed having the human touch and feeling like I'm really making a difference in people's lives. And so we moved back with splashio when we breathe life back into splashio, because splashio was sort of sitting in the background while I was doing the software company. When I restarted splashio again, I said no software, at least not for our users.

Because we wanted to have that human touch to it. And users love it. They absolutely love being able to speak to someone when they get stuck.

The other thing is, one of our principles in the company now is we don't want our clients, at least for now, to use any software at all. No software, no software approach for our clients. Yeah, for us, yeah, we can use software, we can use whatever, whatever it takes to create an amazing result. But, you know, we found that for us to create the most amazing result for our clients is to use humans.

The other thing that's really interesting and for the video producers listening to this, who is mostly our audience.

When you get like. We tried many different ways to generate subtitle SRT files to then burn them in. And I'm sure you've been through countless iterations. What was interesting was my VA used to upload the video to YouTube, let YouTube do the transcription. Correct the transcription on YouTube. But YouTube would sometimes have like six words on one line and one word on another, and it wouldn't necessarily read as it was said. And when you're doing transcription subtitles, it's not just the words, it's when you put the words on screen and where the intonation happens. And when AI does that, it doesn't get it right. And so there was all this extra work where my VA had to then take the six words on one line and two words on the other and actually chop them up. And then he would download an SRT file, then he would upload it to shop. Put. No, not shot, put. Handbrake. And he would burn it into handbrake and then he would export it and then we'd go, okay, we've now got a square video. Yeah, to make the. So we take a 16x9 video. And then we'd put a bar top and bottom to make the 6, the 6, this 6x6 video, the square video. And then to make the Instagram TV, we'd put it into a 9, 9 x 16 and drop that all in. So it was a bit of a kind of sticking plaster approach. One of the things that I love about Splashio is that you can, you've got different versions, but they're actually designed specifically for the platform. So it's not like you've just taken a rectangular video for 16x9 and shoved it into a square box. I don't have a question because I'm actually quite just thinking about the pain we used to go through.

There's something really interesting you said about.

The captions, which I think is really important, which relates to the human touch, which is another thing. It comes down to the readability of the captions or the subtitles, which is so important a lot of people don't understand how important it is. To give you an example, if you had a three minute video.

Forget the.

Exact numbers, but it's something like 600 words if I remember right now, if you're using automated software for that and it's got a 98, 95% accuracy rate, 5% of the words are wrong. If I did the maths right, I think, sorry, it's been a while since I did the math, but I think it's something like 32 mistakes you have in your captions now sound like a big deal. But think about this. If there's 32 mistakes in your video, people watching it on silent, there's 32 interruptions when people are watching your video. So if you don't remove them, right? So 32 interruptions every single time, it creates an opportunity for them to stop watching your video content or your clients video content. So what does that do to your engagement? It kills it.

Right.

And what does that do then to your rankings and to the algorithm? You know, they're just going to go, nobody's watching this video.

But it just looks like you don't care.

It looks like you don't care. It's almost like applying for a job and you get lots of typos in your, in your application. So that's one thing. Now of course you can check, you can, you can update those, you know, but it's painful, you know, to do that and like you said, to move the text around, blah, blah, blah, it's just a painful process. So that's the other reason why we Said we just, we're just going straight with humans. We don't even automate even the creating the transcriptions. We, we start with humans. And what it does, it creates a very readable transcript and captions which then creates a very engaging experience. When it comes to your videos autoplaying.

On social media, I've done the similar thing when I'm transcribing things with Rev.com so I produce a newsletter every month and what I do is I tend to dictate that newsletter, then get it transcribed by rev. And my VA for a while was like, hey, we can try this new thing called Trint or otter. And it's AI and it's only like this cost like 30 cents to transcribe. But when we got the transcription back, it's like you said, there were so many mistakes, it took longer to edit the bad transcription than it did to just pay the dollar a minute to Rev. And there's another analogy which I love, which is I think as human beings we are 99.99% the same in DNA and a DNA sense. It's the 0.1% of DNA that's different and that's the essence of our personality and who we are. And I think I was talking to someone just today on a call and they said, you know, the AI is very intelligent and they've tried to make AI artificial intelligence pop songs based on all of the recipes of what a great pop song is. And when you play it sounds like a pop song. But something is missing and it's that human interaction, that human element of personality and understanding. And again, it just, I mean the proofs in the pudding. I've done a lot of video content on, on LinkedIn, on social media. We made a hundred videos last year and we pumped them out every single day and they never ever got traction. And yet the very first video I put into stuff Flashio in January starts to trend for the hashtag video production in two days.

Nice. Yeah, it's so interesting. We've seen it with our clients too. They would start using the service and then all of a sudden they get like one of them, for example, got a three times increase in views and other increases in engagement too and click through rates and things like that and you just go, seriously? All they did different was they started using proper captioning and putting it in the right sort of format using our service. And it just sort of boggles the mind a bit to think how something that's so seemingly simple can make such a big difference.

It does it really does. And I've got a whole load of videos now lined up. And I think what's interesting is workflow. As filmmakers we're always looking for efficient workflows. And the workflow I have is I have a studio, so it's all pre lit and the camera's there, so I just go into studio, switch it on. But I was like, how can I make this process even easier? Because I don't want to get up from behind the desk and hit record and then have to take that SD card out the camera and put it into some sort of edit software and send the files. So there's two things to that. One is I found a really cool workflow. But the second thing is I was able to send you guys files that weren't edited. So literally it's one clip, one take. But your guys, because it's manual, because it's human interaction, we're actually able to go, yeah, we'll just trim the beginning and end for you.

Easy.

So good. So anyway, back to my workflow which I want to share with people.

The workflow is awesome because the reason I'm excited about this is because part of our.

One of the things behind Splasho is we really want to enable and help people who are passionate about getting their voice out there to get out there without any restrictions. And so one of the things we're doing at the moment is just taking the captions off people's backs so that they don't have to worry about it. It removes a friction point. That's the point I'm trying to make. It removes a friction point. And what you're talking about now with the workflow thing is another friction point for people. Like if you don't have a good setup and you've got to set up the lights every time and set up your camera and click, you know, plug things in, blah, blah, blah. Every single time you want to create something like it's a friction point, a resistance point, it creates an opportunity for you to not do it.

Exactly, exactly.

Yeah.

And my workflow is really simple. I use loom.com love it. And I have, I mean I use quite a fancy camera because I have it lying around. But I've got a Canon C100 Mark II that comes HDMI of the camera and it goes into the back of a blackmagic design ATEM Mini. Got an Atomos Shogun as my preview monitor. So the HDMI comes out, the camera into the Shogun, out of the Shogun, into the ATEM Mini the mic plugs into the back of the Atem mini and that uses a USB type C into my computer and I record everything live into Loom. And what you and I figured out was I can then simply right click download or copy link to the video, put that into the Splashio link box, and that's the last time I touch it, right?

Yeah. I was so impressed when you showed me that, that you could, you know, I've been using Loom, right, but just for screen recordings and for the team communication, stuff like that. I didn't, I didn't really think that you could record nice looking videos through Loom and then use the Loom platform for submitting your link into Splashio.

Because.

So just for you guys listening, it's not just the copy link button that you click on to get the link, there's a little download button. If you right click on that and you get the download link for the video and you submit that link to splashio. That works. Beautiful.

What's beautiful about that is that you don't, you don't even need to have like a file sharing service like Dropbox or.

I've eliminated taking the file and putting it in Dropbox.

It's just an extra step, right? Which is, you know, it could take, if it's like a longer video, it could take quite a while to upload to Dropbox and get the link ready, blah, blah, blah, it's mucking around. Whereas what you're doing now is like, boom, just turn the camera on, record, done, get the link, publish or send to Splasher, you know, done. Your work is done. It's a really, really nice improvement on.

Well, the other thing. See, I'm always, I'm all about workflow and efficiency. And also, you know, like, there's an expression here in Australia which is, we're not here to fuck spiders. Okay, so like this podcast, as much as I enjoyed that one, as much as I enjoy all the interviews and I do, I want people to get value. I want people to take away opportunities and use them to make money. And one of the things that I see is a massive opportunity because I did this with a client where I produced 16 videos a month and we shot in a studio and then we did all the post production. I used to pay an editor 2 days to come and cut all those videos. So that was like $640 a month to shoot 16 videos. Now.

The advantage of something like Splashio is that you can basically extend your team virtually and all you have to do is take the content and put it in a splasher and they'll put, they'll bring it back to you. It's like 2440 or something. Ridiculous. Really fast, isn't it?

24 hours.

24 hours. So what I want to encourage everyone to do is actually, and I hope you don't mind this, but I want, I want people to go and try it because you guys do this really cool thing where you, you sign up and you get four videos free. You have seven days to use those four videos and if you decide you just don't want to use the service, you cancel and you don't get charged to beat it and you get four videos for free. If you guys go to splashio.com den and try the service out, if you do that using that link, I'll make sure we get some sort of video to show you how to use Loom to download the videos. And I'll do a little kind of demo video because I, I want people to try this, Gideon, because what you've created is an opportunity. It's like cash machine. Because people have. I said this to my coaching group members this week. I said, why don't you go and look at your hard drives and look at what content you have from clients already and do the four free videos.

And take one video for each client and get you guys to do the splash your magic and then send those videos to your clients and say, hey, we just thought we'd do this. What do you think? If you want more, we can help you. Like, it won't cost you a cent, but I am so confident that you'll love it that you'll sign up the $97 a month or $99 a month. It's not, it's not very much. Yeah.

And with those free credits as well, you don't have to actually use them in the first seven days. Like so you, you could, if you wanted to, just sign up. I probably shouldn't say this, but you could, you could sign up for the free trial, get the full credits and then if you want to, you can cancel immediately and then use those credits whenever you want to. I think they last for about six months, so you don't have to use them all in seven days. That's just one thing to note. Of course I'd like you to, you know, love for you to stay on.

But it's certainly, I think if someone gets it, it's a no brainer.

Right? Exactly. And that's why we wanted to do it as well. It's, you know, we have put a gate in front of it. You've got to enter your credit card details or PayPal details for that. But we wanted to give people a good.

A good taste of the service and experience it for themselves, you know, like. And, yeah, we could just do one, but I mean, if we do four, you get a really good experience for the consistency and the quality that our team can offer you. And I mean, we've got, we've got an incredible success rate with our, with the trials coming through, it's higher than anything else I've done. And I think the reason is because. Because the human touch and the quality that we provide and people just, they love it, you know, and so they love it. They. They like staying on.

The other thing that I really like is, and I hope I got this right, but if you're on like four credits a month and you only use three credits, your credits rolled over for up to six months.

Correct.

It's very generous and actually, I'll. Look, guys, I just. I just want to. I don't often promote stuff on this podcast, but having just started using the service, I want to encourage everyone. If anyone likes free, go splashio.com forward/den, D, E, N. Pretty easy. And, and sign up for a trial and try this out. And if you've got no content of your own, get some content up to five minutes from a client. Do it for them. Send them it. They will absolutely love you for it.

Yeah, do it. We're on standby, ready to help you guys. Yeah, I think it's a great opportunity and it's there for the taking. Why not?

I think so, mate. It's been an absolute pleasure. Oh, yeah, it actually has been an absolute pleasure sitting in a beach cafe having a chat.

So, yeah, look, guys. Splashio.com Dan, I guess, Gideon, what's the best way to connect with you if anyone wants to hang out with you on social media?

Yeah, I think the best place at the moment is LinkedIn. Like I told you before this interview, it's my favorite platform at the moment. I've gone a bit quiet on there in terms of publishing for now because I'm going to focus on. I'm thinking about Instagram, but if you want to connect with me on LinkedIn, I'm happy to have a chat there and love to connect.

Cool. Thanks, mate.

You're welcome.

You've been listening to the how to Scale a Video Video Business podcast with me, your host, Dan Lenny. If you're a video business owner who's hit a ceiling and we benefit from mentorship, support and coaching. Then check out how you can work with me over@denleny.com don't forget to subscribe and rate the show over on itunes and we'd really appreciate you taking a few minutes to leave a review. And don't forget to share. If you feel you've gotten value from this episode and you think it would be useful for other films filmmakers you know, then please do me a massive favor and share it on social media and in groups that you might be in. See you next week.