We started a new series, Digithy talks - about real business stories - where we’ll be talking to other entrepreneurs and business owners about the reality of business, exploring business ideas, challenges, strategies, and solutions that you can use to implement yourself or just learn something from other entrepreneurs.
A couple of days ago we had a chat with Reema and Sania, founders of Luminoustudios, a video production company that helps businesses stand out through video.
Before Luminoustudios, Reema and Sania have been producing feature films for independent cinemas in NYC and for festivals. It was just 5 years ago when they saw a need for content and video production for smaller screens like social media, and they started Luminoustudios.
Luminoustudios is a bootstrapped company, meaning that Reema and Sania didn’t want to raise any funds for their company. One of the main strategies in the beginning of their journey was making free videos for some clients in order to get known and gain some momentum from the projects during the first year.
The biggest challenge when running a business
Being an entrepreneur means also facing different challenges on the way, that can evolve and change in time. Most of all, customer acquisition seems to be the biggest challenge for companies and startups.
As Reema says, one challenging task would be finding that sweet spot that allows them to produce something valuable to the brand, for a price that works for the client at the same time. This is meant not only to make the client happy but also to ensure an ongoing relationship.
How Social media and the pandemic shifted the production focus
Reema and Sania experienced a shift in the demand for their video production. Reema says that with social media they had a spike in the demand of animation requirements and content that is post-production focused, for social media or advertising use.
Now with Covid-19, there was further change, where the demand for video content for virtual events increased. Before the pandemic the events were live, but now that people can’t meet, event organizers need to provide recorded content for their audience, as well as create videos to advertise the events.
What’s one of the things you would eliminate from your business process?
We all have that one thing in the business process that we’d like to eliminate completely from our to-do list.
We asked Reema and Sania what’s that one thing they’d like to eliminate from their list, and they agreed that the sales and acquisition part of the process are the ones that consume most of the energy and time in the whole process. As a creative business, Reema and Sania would love to focus less on communications and more of production, also being able to predict the work for every quarter because that would help to have a huge advantage and relief.
Half the work is actually producing the video and the other half is communicating. - Reema
Marketing and strategies evolve all the time so that sort of “challenge or task we want to remove from our to-do list is definitely something that can become an opportunity for us to learn and improve our skills.
Challenges can become opportunities. - Sania
Tips for your video production
When it comes to video production for your business content, either speaking in front of a camera or creating compelling video content, businesses tend to wait and keep postponing. The reason can be that they’re camera-shy or that they think it’s something that takes a lot of time and energy.
We asked Sania and Reema what they think about this and if they have some suggestions when it comes to “convincing” someone that video is the way to go. Among the different options, they believe one way to convince someone to use video is by showing them the ROI results - of a landing page with and without video, for example.
Creating compelling content, either of you speaking or if you’re showing a product that is aesthetically pleasing, is a great way to reach your audience. If you don’t want to ask someone to produce a video, there are plenty of websites now where you can easily get your video production from pictures, with preset templates. So it’s all about starting and testing how that works.
Once you start creating video and testing the results, then it’s inevitable that you’re going to use video more and more on your website and social media platforms. - Sania
We definitely agree with Sania, the best way to start something is by putting your fears aside, starting and testing how that works. People nowadays like to consume video and audio content much more than written content.
If you’re trying to produce video content production and think you don’t know what’s the best way to go about it, reach out to Reema and Sania on luminoustudios.com and you’ll be sure to get the right quality video content in place.