The Secret To Success Through Storytelling
In this episode:
Stories are the most powerful way to put ideas into the world.
When it comes to business, storytelling is what brands are made of.
Storytelling expert and entrepreneur, Kyle Shannon, is an owner of many award-winning agencies and a firm believer in the power of stories. From selling the idea of your brand to win over customers to establishing a connection, stories are the foundation for reaching your audience! His business helps small businesses to figure out what story they want to tell and what kind of image they want to build.
We are all in the business of storytelling. No marketing effort or social media buzzword can be a substitute for a good story.
Start writing yours today.
TOPICS DISCUSSED:
What is Storyvine? (2:27)
Art and Science of Communication (8:45)
Intent Matters (12:40)
Sales Done Well (14:00)
Where to Start (16:12)
Using Storyvine (17:51)
How Kyle Can Help You (21:35)
Thought Leadership (24:28)
Storyvine’s Services Breakdown (27:47)
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Max Gerson (00:00):
Welcome to Branding For The Rest Of Us, the Brand Wolfe podcast, where we promise to deliver big ideas to small business owners. It is currently September 14th. We are in week, whatever of quarantine and today on the show, we have
Kyle Shannon (00:17):
183
Max Gerson (00:19):
Day, 183.
Kyle Shannon (00:21):
I know that because I'm doing a daily video diary, which I thought would be about a month or two max, we're at day 183. So six months and change.
Max Gerson (00:31):
That makes sense because quarantine has been long enough for me to get into good shape, not great shape, but good shape. And then for me to be in really bad shape all over again, trying to get back into good shapes, still in quarantine today on the show, we have our guest Kyle Shannon of story fine. Kyle is an expert storyteller. He's an innovator. He is a future seer. He is owned award-winning agencies that have won lots and lots of awards. He has done many things. So today, dear listeners, if you're here on the podcast, I hope that you're curious about what the future of video marketing looks like for you and your business. I hope you're curious about why you might need video for your podcast. And I hope you're curious to learn from a man who has been to every facet of the internet, every facet of the agency life. And he has come back to create Storyvine, and he's gonna have some great stories about how to do it, how to not do it and what to look for in your marketing. So without further ado, Kyle, welcome to the show.
Kyle Shannon (01:42):
Thank you so much, really glad to be here and excited to, to talk about it. I, I don't know that I'm so much a future seer as maybe I impatient with the present <laugh>
Max Gerson (01:55):
Well, I think we both have that in common, and I'm gonna challenge you on that. Kyle, I'm gonna, I do believe that you can see the future, not perfectly, but maybe you can smell it. Maybe you can't see it. I don't know. We'll find out. We'll find out. So the first thing that I'm really excited to share with our guests and the big reason you're on the show is that your brand Storyvine is really cool. It's really helpful. And it's really valuable. So what I understand about Storyvine, it is that it is a guided video automation platform that allows you to produce authentic, but professional videos at scale. Is that correct?
Kyle Shannon (02:41):
Yeah, that, that pretty much captures it. The U is an interesting word in that sentence allows you to produce content. So, so what ends up happening? You, you very much described it, right? Storyline lives in the space between professional video and user generated content very often with UGC, it's just kind of the end user, the video and it's, they're sort of making it on their terms and they share it with their friends and their networks with professional video, it's the organization telling their story. And it's sort of this single point of view. What actually ends up happening with story V is it's a platform and a framework that allows an organization to say, I want to tell these kind of stories. I want my people to tell these kind of stories about my business. So, you know, if it's a small business, it might be a customer testimonial, right?
Kyle Shannon (03:25):
If it's a campaign, it might be a grassroots supporter template. So the organization gets to set the story framework and they, they effectively make an invitation to their people to say, Hey, would you be willing to tell, you know, your story, your experience on our behalf and when they do, it's kind of this collaborative thing that happens. And it's actually pretty magical because it's, it's a co-created piece of media. It's not from a single point of view. It's actually from two points of view, which it took me a, a lot of years to figure out that there was something unique about storyline that I couldn't quite put my finger on, cuz it looked professional and it looked UGC and it was both and it was neither <laugh> and I think that's what it is. Is that, that it's actually, co-created,
Max Gerson (04:06):
That's really cool. If you guys are listening at home UGC user generated content, what we're talking about is the problem that Storyvine solves. If you're a small business owner, you probably feel the same way I do. I know more than what I'm saying. I need to create content. I need to communicate with my audience. I need to improve the quality and the frequency in which I do it. But for my perception, for most people's perception, there's like two ways to do video. As you just mentioned, one is you hire a media production firm to come in and, and create content for you. And that's great. Big shout out to old saw media. They, they were my media partners early on. We spent seven to 10 grand on maybe four videos and they're unbelievable. Yeah. And they paid for themself. I can track sales to those videos, but it's just a fact that they were a lot of work. They took a lot of time and they took a lot of money and I just can't be shooting video like that all the time. So what's the alternative. The alternative is talking into your phone shooting from your phone, creating your own content. Why don't we do more of that? We don't feel comfortable. We don't feel like it's the right thing. It's not our native genius. Are we saying the right things? We don't know, we get in this analysis paralysis. So I think Kyle has found a way to solve for this, correct?
Kyle Shannon (05:45):
Yeah. And, and it's, it's the guidance, you know, it's, it's funny, a lot of times when I, when I, you know, someone will say, oh, what do you do? And I, I say some version I've, I've got an automated video platform and you know, very often the, the kind of comeback is, oh, do you use a lot of AI? Do you use a lot of artificial intelligence? And the answer is actually no story V is much more Aristotle than AI. So the, the basic idea with Storyvine is that actually the Genesis of it was when YouTube first came out in 2005, most of the content on it was horrible. It was just objectively bad. Like you, you couldn't watch it. And what, what I recognized, I have a writing background, so I've written seven screenplays. And when I did agency.com sort of learned about brand storytelling at a, at a really large level, so sort of storytelling and structured storytelling was a big part of what I did and what I, what I recognized about early YouTube was that a lot of the content people were mistaking hitting the record button for storytelling.
Kyle Shannon (06:48):
And so the kind of the, the, the DNA of, of Storyvine is provide guidance. That's really just narrative guardrails. It's kind of like karaoke for storytelling. You know, in elementary school, we learned that every story has a beginning, a middle and an end. And so effectively what the Storyvine app does is it walks that end user step by step through telling a specific story. So we're not just saying hit the record button and tell us what you think we're saying, you know, hit the record button and introduce yourself and the city you live in. Oh, okay. I'm Kyle from Denver, Colorado. I can do that. And then the next step, you know, what was the problem that you were trying to solve? Okay. I can answer that. So the end, user's literally just answering a series of questions. The real secret sitting underneath it is that those questions are crafted in such a way that they're the story framework so that when you stitch those answers together, it actually creates that little narrative arc. So the, the end user doesn't experience, I'm storytelling, the end user, just experiences. I'm answering a series of questions. They just happen to be in a particular order.
Max Gerson (07:54):
It's a brilliant point. People come to us at brand wealth. And, you know, they're asking for a website, they're asking for this, or they're asking for that, building a website, creating a video. These are not hard things to do. In fact, they're easier than they ever have been in the history of time and will continue to be that way. The one thing that remains true about the work that I believe we both do, Kyle, is understanding how to communicate with the other person. The biggest fallacy of communication is that it actually happened. So I wanna jump into this because this is really your native genius, as far as I'm concerned.
Kyle Shannon (08:33):
Thanks. I love that term by the way, native genius.
Max Gerson (08:37):
It's all about native genius, all about superpowers. Talk to me about the art and science of communication. What does it, what does it mean to you?
Kyle Shannon (08:46):
At the, at the, at the heart of, at the heart of communication is empathy. Everything. It's all about empathy, we're human beings. And we have language language by definition. You know, we, we are story making machines. So I think to communicate effectively, you need to understand your intent. What are you trying to communicate? And you need to understand your audience. And I think the latter is actually the, the more important who are you trying to communicate with? And if you've done a lot of self-help, you might, you know, hear a phrase, like where is their listening? Like what, you know, how are they hearing the world? If you don't understand the framework that your audience is kind of processing information through, you can have all the intent in the world, but they won't ever hear it. So a big part of the work that we do has nothing to do with technology.
Kyle Shannon (09:40):
And it even has nothing to do with our technology and, you know, building templates and how do they look? And the fact that the video gets automatically, or as we call it automatically edited. Like all of that is kind of, you know, subservient to who story do you wanna tell? Why would they tell it is, is actually an interesting question. And then who do you want to hear that story? And why would they care? And, and again, that last one, like, who do you wanna hear this story? And why would they care? That's the really critical one because when our clients understand that one, right, what story needs to be told is much more clear. And you also now have a filter to understand, does the story that was told actually feel like it's gonna resonate because I understand who my audience is. I can look at a video that comes in that might actually be really interesting and, and like compelling as a video, but it's not gonna communicate with my audience.
Kyle Shannon (10:36):
Then I might curate that one out and not use that video. So, so it's possible that you can get content in. That's absolutely usable, but if it doesn't communicate with your audience, you might not use it, or it might be appropriate for one audience and not the other, but you need to understand your audiences well enough to know that. So I, I, I think empathy is at, at the it's, it's at the foundation of everything and then the art and science of the work, you and I both do. Our organizations, both do is getting out of empathy as a soft and mushy. Oh, it's a touch and feely concept. No, it's actually quite specific. And, and the art and science is, you know, how do you understand it? How do you have tools that allow your client to understand it, allow you to understand it, your team, to understand it in a way that we can now craft messages that resonate with those people like that. That to me is everything.
Max Gerson (11:27):
This is why I'm so fond of you and so fond of your brand. Right?
Kyle Shannon (11:31):
Well, thank you.
Max Gerson (11:32):
You can't have great video if you don't have someone at the top that understands communication, marketing, branding, video, these are no different than communicating with my wife and children. This is no different than dating at the heart of communication. I love the concept of empathy. And to me, you're right, it's not touchy feely. It's just understanding what the other person is going through. It is understanding what their perceptions are, paying attention to what they know don't know and how they want to be communicated with. So, you know, I say this quite often, but communicating with my wife or my clients, isn't about managing our sameness. It's about managing our difference, right? We have to communicate to our audience in a way that they can understand and they care about, if you show up talking about me, me, me, and a language only, you understand, you're not getting a second date. You're not swiping. Right. Well,
Kyle Shannon (12:34):
And, and, you know, that's one of the challenges of being in a business and having a sales organization, for example, that, what is your goal in business? Oh, to sell more stuff. Right. And how do we sell more stuff? Well, we tell our story, right? So I think it's very, very easy to get trapped in. You and I were talking before we hit the record button about the, the results follow other things, right. But as a business owner, you wanna make sure you can hit payroll. So the focus it's very easy to fall into the trap of, we need to sell more stuff. And how I sell more stuff is to talk about what we do more and more and more. And I think post COVID, I think in this COVID environment, like you see it on LinkedIn all the time where people are just like, Hey, I saw your profile.
Kyle Shannon (13:15):
And I think you might be interested in it services based on what we haven't had a conversation. You know, you seem like you might be the right person for accounting, you know, services really BA you know, so I think that, you know, as business owners and as brands, and, and to your point as people, I think you need to know your intent and your goals, and then kind of set them to the side. Right. And actually answer the question, who am I talking to and what do they need? And in, in the most pure kind of conversation, if what they need is what you have to offer, that's a match made in heaven, right? It's not about convincing them that what you have is what they need. I mean, a lot of sales is that, and that's why sales sometimes gets kind of this, you know, sleazy reputation, but sales done well is a conversation. And sales done really well is a conversation where you lead with listening. And, you know, again, it goes back to empathy, you know, what is, where's your wife right now? You know, where's her head. And if you're in a different place than that, then it's, it's not gonna be a good conversation, no matter what your intent is.
Max Gerson (14:20):
If you're a business owner and you serve other business owners, this is really important. Lesson, business owners, aren't looking to buy products. We're not looking to add another service. We're not looking to pay another person on the team. We have problems and we need someone to help us with our problems. Yeah. I think one of the challenges, a lot of business owners have, especially small business owners that have never created professional media before. They don't know where to start. They don't know how to do it. Right. It seems like this big, scary thing.
Kyle Shannon (14:58):
It is a big, scary thing. I mean, that's part of the reason Storyvine exists, you know, I've written feature, length, screenplay, like I've, I, I've done kind of the big media thing. Like I understand it well, but if let's just say you want to make a simple two minute video, right. Of like a customer talking about how awesome your business is. I've got the customer, they always talk about how awesome we are. Anyway, let me just make that video. Well, what do I need to learn to make that video? You need to learn lighting, sound, sound, engineering, sound, mixing, editing, storytelling, script, writing, visual design, cuz you gotta get your logo represented. Like the amount of disciplines that is required to be some level of competent at, to make a crappy two minute video is ridiculous. And, and you know, the, the kind of snarky value proposition of Storyvine is kind of what if a two minute video weren't an abject nightmare to make because they are like E every time it is, even when you know what you're doing, it's incredibly complicated and incredibly time consuming.
Kyle Shannon (16:01):
And if you want, you know, kind of the Emmy award-winning version of it, then, then that's gonna be a lot more time and a lot more money, cuz it requires a lot more expertise. So I sorry to interrupt you. But, but that thing of an entrepreneur or a business owner, not knowing where to start, if they haven't had that background, why would they know where to start? It is so complicated. So anyway, that's, you know, even though, you know, there's billions of these devices with these high quality cameras and there's, you know, 87,000 different video editing apps that make it easy to edit, it doesn't mean that you still don't need all those different skills. And that's, that's part of what we're trying to hedge against and you know, solve for. So
Max Gerson (16:41):
That the, the first problem, that Storyvine solves is how do you do it? Right? You have a solution for how to do it. What Kyle was just talking about is the fact that in 2020 creative tools are abundant and easy to use. And the it's not the tool. That's hard. We're touching on this again. It's not the tool. That's hard, right? Nope. It's knowing what to say.
Kyle Shannon (17:10):
It's the why,
Max Gerson (17:11):
If you know what to say, and that's clear, you're probably out there saying it, it might be clumsy, right? The reason Photoshop, isn't hard. It's not hard to learn Lightroom. Isn't hard to learn Canada. Isn't hard to learn. The thing that is hard to learn is to see it in your mind and to know what the, the story is, what the piece is. You have to see it in your mind and then you, you translate that. And that's really the thing that Storyvine does. And that's the way that I think you help business owners create content.
Kyle Shannon (17:51):
Yeah. And, and you know, I think part of what we do is what, what storyline is effectively done. If you think of a storyline guided template as kind of Madlibs, if you remember what Madlibs are, a Madlib is a little story. That's well written where the nouns and adjectives are removed and you can put in your own, right? So you kind of personalize the story. So what they've effectively done, if they they've let a professional writer create the story framework and then you personalize it with who you are and what you think is funny or interesting. That's very much Storyvine where professionals are putting together the framework they're putting together. Those narrative guardrails they're putting together look and feel so that the only responsibility of the person sharing their story is to share their story. They don't have to figure out where to start.
Kyle Shannon (18:39):
They don't have to learn how to write. They don't have to learn how to edit. They just, their, their only job is answer these questions and those questions walk them through telling their story. And they might not even be cognizant of that. And that's perfect. Like the perfect thing is what, what, what often ends up happening with storyline is someone will use the app and they answer these series of questions in the app and they get done. And they're like, oh, that was, that was easier than I thought it would be. And then they get the video back and they see themselves telling a well constructed story. And we sometimes call it the happy maker because when people see themselves being decently articulate, talking about anything from like a disease diagnosis to why they support a candidate very often their response is I look better than I thought I would.
Kyle Shannon (19:22):
And I sound smarter than I felt or than I feel. And that isn't because they're not smart. It's because they have so much anxiety about, I don't wanna look bad. I don't wanna feel stupid. I don't know where to start. I don't know what to say. So part of the, the magic here is professionals have put together the little path for them to walk down. Their only job is to walk down the path. And then what comes out is this thing that is surprisingly better on a lot of different levels than what they were expecting. And that for me is really exciting. When you, when you see that look in someone's face where they, you actually see a little bit of their chest pumps up and they have a little bit of pride about like, yeah, I look better than I thought. I, I, I don't sound so bad. Okay. Yeah. I'm good with that. And that's, that's really exciting to me.
Max Gerson (20:06):
Thanks for tuning in today on Branding For The Rest Of Us, we've been chatting with my friend, Kyle Shannon of story. Vine Storyvine is a digital platform that provides guided video automation that allows you a business owner to produce authentic, but professional videos at scale, meaning lots and lots of content. The reason that Kyle was able to bring this to market was not only because he saw a gap in the marketplace and he is really good at tech, but also because he's an expert storyteller. And if you're a business owner and you're feeling like man getting started on, on video just seems so dauntless. How do I tell my story? Well, Kyle's brand and product solves for that because you give people entryway. You give them doors to open. Don't focus on telling this big brand story. If you know, you don't have it, let your customers tell your story for you in the form of testimonials, let your team and the workers tell your story by talking about the process, because actually process is more important than product. I believe Kyle, how dare you? How dare you think now? How, how dare you think that you're better at storytelling than the rest of us?
Kyle Shannon (21:29):
I, I appreciate the sentiment, but, but in a lot of ways, you know, story V all that we're doing is getting out of the way of someone telling their story. You know? So, so to a great degree, we, we are not telling stories. What we're doing is we're creating simple frameworks that allow someone to be free in telling their story. You know, there's in, in the creative arts, you know, sometimes creative people are like, I need freedom. I need creative freedom, but actually structure and constraints are, you can be much more free within the constraints sometimes than if you just have the, the big open field. There's, there's a thing called I think it's called white page paralysis or something like that. But basically someone sticks a piece of blank paper in front of you and says, you know, write something interesting. And you know, your vocabulary immediately escapes your head and you, you don't know where to start.
Kyle Shannon (22:22):
So, so in total freedom, there's kind of panic. All we're really doing is saying, you know, here's some stepping stones for, for you to walk down. And it, it is very much to say that we are not the expert storytellers, that each person has their own story. They just might not know where to start. So all we're doing is providing that guidance. That's why it's a guided, not a scripted platform. A lot of times we'll have clients say, well, can I do teleprompters? Technically we could build that in. But, but what, what we've found is that every time someone writes a script and tries to read it, rather than just telling their story, it looks forced. The videos look like hostage videos. The authenticity gets bled out of them again, unless, you know, if you've got a CEO who's gone through years of media training and they can read a teleprompter naturally great. But most people they're very much in their head trying to figure out what am I supposed to say? Or I, I didn't say that in the right order. Like they, they, it totally takes them out of just them being. So if Storyvine is anything, it's an authenticity machine that allows someone, the freedom to tell their story without having to think about it.
Max Gerson (23:25):
That's so cool. The other thing, what I'm hearing is Storyvine solves for psychological hurdles that all business owners have
Kyle Shannon (23:34):
Totally.
Max Gerson (23:35):
We leverage this too, right? We all know that we need to be, you know, cold calling, more cold, emailing, more, doing more outreach. Why don't we do it? It's because of psychology. Mm-Hmm, <affirmative>, there's a hurdle. It's not fun. I'm annoying this other person. Yep. It's not fun for me. It's not fun for them. So we put it off. We put it off, we don't do it. We all know we need to be creating more content telling our story in a better way. What Storyvine does, is it removes your psychology as being the hurdle for content creation?
Kyle Shannon (24:16):
I think that's right. I think that, I think that's psychology is still there. Especially the first time you'd go to do a Storyvine, cuz it's it's, it's not just hit the record button and talk. You're you're actually doing something very intentionally. Let's take thought leadership, for example, like business owners, a good way to create content is to establish, you know, trust, you know, in the marketplace and how you do that is through thought leadership. But even the term thought leadership, that's kind of an intimidating term. Well, who am I to be a leader? Or like, I don't know if my thoughts matter or not, but I'll give you a very simple thought leadership recipe that, that we've used successfully. And it's the first question is what's the problem. Okay. I can talk about a problem. What's your solution. And then what's the result or what's the anticipated result.
Kyle Shannon (25:04):
So if I say to you, Hey, you know, max, make me a thought leadership video, couple of months from now, you may or may not make it cuz you like, you don't even necessarily know what that means. But if I say to you, Hey, could you answer these three questions on this topic? You know, the topic is everybody's working from home now, you know, that's the problem, you know, what do you think the solution is? And what do you think the implications are of that? You can answer those questions because you've probably answered them three or four times this week just naturally. Right? So if you're a business owner, you're already doing thought leadership or you wouldn't have started a business, right? You started a business to solve a problem, right? So you already have lots of thoughts you're already leading, but you may not have the recipe on how to do that in a consistent way.
Kyle Shannon (25:45):
And to generate content that communicates those ideas concisely and you know, consistently that's what storyline does. So, so I think, I think the psychology of, I don't wanna look stupid is always there. I think once you do one, you go, oh, that wasn't so bad. Then you do another one. You're like, oh, okay, I get it by the third time, you're like, I can knock these things out. I mentioned earlier, I'm doing these daily video diaries about what it's like to be an extrovert, you know, in lockdown, working out of this silly office every day. And I follow a recipe. Like I use a Storyvine template, I'm literally just answering what was the best part of the day? What was the worst part of the day? What's next? You know, looking ahead, I don't have to think about that anymore. Cuz it's always the same.
Kyle Shannon (26:27):
You know, you talked about scale. How, how we're, how we're producing content at scale is we're figuring out there are some archetypal stories in every business and if we can figure out what those are, we can create the recipes for those. So a customer testimonial is one of those, an employee talking about how awesome it is to work. There is one of those, you know, thought leadership is one of those. So, so you can just sort of go down the list and go, here's the kind of stories I want to tell over and over again. Replicable stories where Storyvine is masterful is in replicable stories, not the one master brand video, like spend the money with a good production company or an agency on a master brand video. Absolutely. If you wanna tell one story, well that's traditional production, but if you wanna tell these same stories over and over and over again, that's where story vs. Great. And that's, that's kind of the recipe to scale that's cuz you're not reinventing the framework. You're just telling a new story inside the same framework,
Max Gerson (27:24):
But this has gotta cost millions of dollars, right? I'm just sitting here envisioning my, our listeners like this is great. Okay. I kind of get it. I kind of don't you'll have to forgive me, but I presume people are finger tapping, wanting to know how much it costs.
Kyle Shannon (27:43):
So, so like any good business, there are many answers to that, but, but basically it, it comes down to this. The level of customization required, you know, we, we have different products that are different levels of customization. So we're an eight year old company. Our first target market was healthcare and pharma. So when we're doing, you know, when, when Pfizer wants their patients to tell their story about a diagnosis journey with condition X, that's a really complicated conversation. It's a regulated environment. So there's a lot of legal and regulatory and there's all sorts of rules. So, so that is sort of this fully customized version of story. Vine, lots of conversation, lots of interaction. We then have a version of Storyvine called Storyvine complete, which is if you're in corporate coms, you work for a big organization that basically has brand guidelines. And you know, you're, you're a decent sized organization.
Kyle Shannon (28:32):
That's called Storyvine complete. It's still fully customized creative. It's just not as complicated as, as healthcare. That's about 40 grand for the year. It includes two fully custom templates. A template is that combination of those guided questions and the output graphics. And then it's unlimited videos within that. So that's the kind of fully custom product. We have a product called Storyvine quick, which is the semi custom product. And that's anywhere from 10 to 20 grand a year. And that's give us your logo in two colors, we'll provide the design, but it's still very customized. What's the story you were telling. Who's the audience, things like that. Last Thursday, we launched the beta version of story V now, which is our first self-service product. The difference between story V now and, and all of the other stuff, all of the other products are very much enterprise things that that require interaction.
Kyle Shannon (29:21):
What Storyvine now is, is pre-built template kits. So we basically take what we learned doing the customized projects. And, and we said, for example, for a political campaign, there are some core stories that they need to tell that if they could tell them really easily, we could build a kit for that. So one of them is a grassroots supporter template. One of them is like a campaign update, like here's what's going on with the campaign. And one of them is let's have the candidate talk about an issue and where they stand on it. You know, here's where I stand on climate change. So storyline now is a set of prebuilt kits where you log in, swipe your credit card, upload your logos and go make as many videos as you want within those templates. And that's 500 bucks a month. So what we're doing is taking what was a very bespoke, very, you know, customized product and we're automating it down and figuring out what are the next things.
Kyle Shannon (30:12):
So after the first two kits that we launched were political campaigns and ballot initiatives. So if anyone out there is in politics, those exist there, you can go purchase them now. And then the next series of kits that we're going to create are gonna be in the small business space, in the craft food and beverage space. So craft beer, craft, wine, craft, distillery, craft food, small batch manufacturers. And then we're probably going to do something around small business, maybe tech, startups, something like that, where it's a customer testimonial template, a staff profile template, and then a talk about the product or service template, right? So again, kind of the core archetypal stories that a business might need to be able to do video marketing really easily. It won't hit a hundred percent of your needs, but it might hit 80. And that's, you know, to be able to, you know, for 500 bucks a month, go make unlimited customer testimonial videos that are on brand on message, you know, have sort of all the wisdom that we've leaned over the years built into them. That's, that's what that product's all about. So that I'm pretty excited about.
Max Gerson (31:13):
So if you're a small business owner, you stayed with us on the podcast, cuz you know, you need some more media. You're curious story by now is a tool for you to create a video a day for $500 a month in a professional way. And not only that, but if, if we have to remove the business owner as the psychological hurdle to content creation, you don't have to write a script. You don't have to figure it all out. Storyline is gonna ask you a couple questions, which you know how to answer and you're off and running. It is that cool. Kyle, where can people find story? Vine
Kyle Shannon (31:56):
Storyvine.com. Vine is with a V as in Victor and Storyvine. Now, if you go to now dot story, vine.com, that's the Storyvine now product. And like I said, right now, we're in beta. There are two kits there in the political space, there are more coming in the small business space. And then the vision over the years is there will be dozens of dozens. And ultimately storyline now will become a marketplace, kinda like WordPress, where you've got, you know, a community out there creating templates that other people can use for their websites. We're gonna have the same kind of thing with storyline where the creative community can be creating these kits. And then as a business owner, you'll just be able to log in and go, okay, I'm a dentist and I want patient stories and this and that. And you know, here's your kit. You buy it, upload your logos and you're off to the races.
Max Gerson (32:41):
Thanks everyone for listening today, we've been chatting with Kyle Shannon of Storyvine. This is not a sales pitch. It might sound like one
Max Gerson (32:52):
And, and maybe it is. I don't know. I think the fact is that I'm so infatuated with this type of a product, because this is not a product. This is a solution. This helps. We all need to be telling a better story. And story V is a tool that can do that. Any parting shots for our listeners before they, they head out today. Kyle,
Kyle Shannon (33:19):
No, I mean, this has been really fascinating. I appreciate being on, you know, I, I would go back to kind of where we started, that, that, you know, especially in the environment we're in right now with, with so much going on and so many challenges think more about what your customer needs than what you need. And if you can understand their needs, then you'll be able to communicate with them better and you'll be able to tell better. It will be clear what stories you need to tell if you understand your customer and what their needs are better. So I would go back to empathy, lead with empathy and it, it will, it's not soft and mushy. It will drive business results.
Max Gerson (33:59):
It's a brilliant lesson. Don't think about video today. Maybe videos, a bridge too far for where you are, but the, the thing that we can all do and I'll do more of and do a better job of is paying attention to what our clients need from us and how we can be in their service. The more you think about that, the more you'll understand them. The better you'll do by communicating, supporting, and selling into them, which is at the end of the day, what we all have to do it.
Max Gerson (34:32):
Well, Kyle, thanks so much for being here. You guys go check out Storyvine. It's an amazing product. It's homegrown here in Denver, Colorado. Don't be one of the people putting noise out into the universe. Tell your story, tell it right. Tell it at scale.