Reviewing creative work should be the easy part. Wipster streamlines review cycles so creative teams can deliver better work faster. Is Wipster the right fit for you or your team? We invited the Co-founder & CEO of Wipster to help answer this question and to discuss the future of their platform. As always please bring your questions so that we can all learn together.
Panelists
Transcripts from talk
Sarah Marince:
Hello everyone. Happy Wednesday. Welcome to crew talk brought to you by shoots.video today we will be talking to Rollo. Hey, Rolo I’m great. How are you?
Rollo Wenlock:
Very good. I’m over in New Zealand and there’s no COVID yet. So I’m enjoying it.
Sarah Marince:
No, COVID no masks. So we’ll be talking about Wipster. He’s the CEO and founder of Wipster. So thank you everyone for tuning in and a few house rules before we get started. If you are tuning in, if you have questions throughout our talk tonight, you can drop them in the chat box and we definitely will get to them or the Q and a box. I’m sorry, drop them in the Q and a box and we will get to them as we can. And I’m just going to go through right now and have everyone kind of introduce themselves. So kind of say who you are, where you are and what you do. So Rollo again, we’ll start with you. And we know you’re in New Zealand. Sounds super fun.
Rollo Wenlock:
Name is Rollo. And I founded the company called Wipster, which is a video review and approval product, which is used by tons of people across the world to, to try and figure out how they can work with customers and do notes and everything. As you say, I’m in New Zealand. I’ve actually just come back from the States. I lived up there for a few years as we, as we would try to do business, but we thought, why not just go to the country that hasn’t got? COVID so sorry to break.
Sarah Marince:
I’m sure you guys are maskless. Well, it’s great to have you here. What time is it in New Zealand right now?
Rollo Wenlock:
Live in Oh 2:00 AM.
Sarah Marince:
Okay. Now. Oh, so you were already in tomorrow. You are. Okay. Cool. Awesome. All right. And next we have Jake. Hey Jake.
Jake Roorda:
Hey there I’m Jake, jealous of New Zealand and I worked for a project management platform called video pipeline. So I’m just here to ask some more questions, so, okay, cool.
Sarah Marince:
Very cool. And Blake, Hey Blake.
Blake Barnett:
Hey everybody. I run a production company called BLARE MEDIA with my business partner, Justin, who is actually co headed your way, Sarah. I think he’s already there. Well, he’s not quite your waist. He’s headed to Houston. You, I took him to the airport. Like I woke up at four 30 this morning. It’s like last night, he was like, Hey, can you give me a ride in the morning? I’m like, eh, fourth, third. And then we also run a production community called shoot stop video. If you haven’t already please check it out and add yourself as a resource completely free. Well, I shouldn’t say it’s free. It’s freemium. We, we do have some other additional things, but for the most part completely
Rollo Wenlock:
Free. Yeah,
Sarah Marince:
Very cool. Awesome. And I’m Sara voice actor and your host for tonight. So I guess we’ll get started Rollo with how you created Webster and why you want to just tell us a little bit about that.
Rollo Wenlock:
Absolutely cool. So a few years back I was a full-time video producer. I had production company doing all sorts of videos and a lot of my clients were out of town. So we were having to share edits with them on Dropbox or Dimeo behind a password or something. And these products they didn’t really allow for any sort of collaboration at that point. So people would be downloading. I wouldn’t know what they’re doing days would pass. And then that email you back a whole lot of notes with the wrong time code about the wrong video. And then you’re like, Oh my God, what am I supposed to do with this? And it’s always on fixed budget. So you’ve got, you know, XYZ dollars. You have to do it within this timeframe. And then it just slips it slips and slips. And I was just like, Oh my God, this is ridiculous.
Rollo Wenlock:
And I didn’t have a background in software, but I’ve always been interested in products. I’ve always loved you know, hardware products, software products. And and so I was I was at Dawn. I was holding my new baby. You know, the sun’s coming up, looking out the window week. We actually had a view of the sunrise, which was nice and big old Villa. So had these huge windows covenant dust, because it’s so high up, you can’t clean it from the outside. So I’m holding this little baby, which is a month old and I’m looking out and then the sun comes out and it hits the dust. And my eyes rack focus from the view to the dust. And then I go, Oh my God, why don’t we review videos on videos? Just like this dust is in front of the view.
Rollo Wenlock:
And so I threw the baby aside quickly started to do some drawings and make notes and called a couple of buddies who make videos and said, Hey, you know how excited they couldn’t understand what the hell I was saying? And I say, you know, with this kind of solve your problem, you know, is this something that you had actually used? And they were like, Jesus, how did you think of that? It’s so bloody obvious. And I go, yes, yes. That’s potentially what a good idea is, is that it’s so obvious afterwards, people are like, I could’ve come over there. And you’re like, yeah, but you didn’t. And so then it was just a very quick fire may trying to go into the like tech startup community, find people who know how to do real software stuff, like write code and everything found some Dodes found some girls. We got together, we went through a tech accelerator. We did pitching, we raised a whole lot of money. And then we started building this product and getting customers. So that’s how we, that’s how we got off the ground.
Sarah Marince:
How long was that process from like tossing the baby to launching?
Rollo Wenlock:
So launching it was so toss the baby in November, launched in August the year after that sort of time frame. Yeah. Nice. I did since the baby up again, like I know where she is now. Yeah.
Sarah Marince:
Perfect. Okay, awesome. So what are some of the advantages to using your platform versus like a Vimeo?
Rollo Wenlock:
Yeah, sure. So the, I think the key difference that we’ve, that we’ve found with how we’ve approached the product and it was kind of a float is that my obsession is with user experiences, not so much like features and like, it can do this, I can do this it’s that you, you intuitively just know what to do with the product. And it just becomes a part of how you operate. It becomes an extension of a person. So for us, we wanted it to feel completely natural that you would have a video, it would be the center of your experience in a browser. And that you would then just start talking through the video to other people. So the, so the commenting feels very organic. It’s right there. It’s in real time. So other people can reply to it. And it creates this brand new experience where you are with other people inside an asset, you’re inside a video with them and you’re scrolling through time and the chat pops up and it pops up again.
Rollo Wenlock:
And on the backend of that, we’ve credited entire cyclical workflow, which is that all the comments become to do list items immediately that can be assigned to people. They start doing the changes and taking them off. They upload a new version and it comes up behind the current version. And then you can look at them side by side and watch them play. See what changed? You can look at comments from old ones, and then you can assign tasks to people. Like I need this person to approve. I need these people to only review, and then you can start to track all the different assets you’ve got and what stage they’re at of review. So we’ve really created an entire review and approval process instead of just some notes on a video, which is what you find with a lot of products. There’s no back into it. They don’t go anywhere.
Sarah Marince:
Very cool. Now, like I know you said that you use Webster quite often. So do you have anything you want to add about the user experience?
Blake Barnett:
Well, I was going to back up a little bit. I was like curious, when did, what was the year that you guys launched? I’m curious when we started in, when you guys actually launched.
Rollo Wenlock:
Yeah, so we, we launched the beta in August of 2013 and then we launched out of beta. When was it? I think it was maybe November, 2014. So it took just over a year of being in beta, where we had paid customers and everything to then properly launch. And then straight after that, we actually did a partnership with them where we became the review side of their product. We did that for a while, then they decided to compete with us. And so we decided to go and work with some other companies.
Blake Barnett:
Well, that’s true. That’s when we started, because we got an email from Vimeo promoting you guys, and you’re in the middle of, we were using the service. There was a service before it called takeoff video.com. That is basically the similar to what’s out here today. But I think it was just like two dudes and like during, on their spare time, because they weren’t making any updates. And so we were using it like, Hey, can you add this? Like, it would be great if you could do like, and we wouldn’t get response. And then when we finally, we w like, when we found Webster, like, okay, this is a good tool. We’ll use this. And then when we canceled, we’re like, okay, well, we’ll keep our subscription for a little bit with them, just so we have our assets there. And then and we’ll, we’ll do a quick call. We want to make sure that we, everything good, you know, good set up with Wipster. But as soon as we canceled the site went down, they’re done. I think that we were like there.
Rollo Wenlock:
Yeah. You were the only customer.
Blake Barnett:
Yeah. I think at some point that’s what we’re getting zero response. Like, what do you want from us for like an hour of our time per month? There’s something, you know, whatever it is, God, you know, it’s pretty funny. Yeah. But that was when we saw that. And then when we knew about a frame IO at the same time, but like when we looked at pricing, the pricing model for your, for Webster was just a better pricing model and the reason we liked it and you might’ve switched it since then, I’m not sure. We, we didn’t have to worry about taking down videos once we uploaded them, because it seems like run out of storage with the other ones, or, I mean, you have it there, you just have, but in order you have to go to the next, you keep on moving up the payments to the next one.
Blake Barnett:
And I think the way you guys did, and I have to revisit what you’re doing now, but like, it was beautiful. I was like, Oh, we have this many uploads and we can keep our videos there. We don’t have to worry about taking, like, it made sense to us. And so we, we looked at those 2016 and only reason why I saw that is because I saw an email from you back in 2016. So I was like, Oh, Hey, that was nice. And we rolled out the email, email us a welcoming message and, and ask us if we need anything else. Cool.
Rollo Wenlock:
Yeah. Nice. Yeah. Well, I mean, I think part of the user experience is not just the software, but it’s the experience with the company, you know, and we’ve had ups and downs in that era. You know, we haven’t done everything really, really well, but we do try and make it feel really personal that you’re, you’re, you’re not emailed by [email protected] or info. It works that it’s, you know, it’s Rollo or it’s Ana it works. And that it’s a real person and it literally is a person behind it. It’s not automated, you know? And, and I really think that that’s, that’s very important. And some companies do scale to like unbelievable sizes where that becomes very hard, but you do have some companies that keep it going. So there’s a really cool company called Intercom and they still have personal communication with every single customer and they’ve got millions of users. So they just have lots and lots of people because they know that part of their offering has to be that there are people behind the software. And I think that’s fabulous.
Blake Barnett:
Oh, that’s key. I mean, because as companies get too big, then you kind of lose that. And then like you kinda like about small companies cause you have that human touch, I think as companies get really big, they kind of lose perspective on that sometimes.
Rollo Wenlock:
Yeah. I think, I think so too. Yeah, so that’s, that’s kind of what we try and do is that as we’re going forward expanding what the product can do but also expanding different types of customers that we get is always thinking about the customer experience as a full three 60. And again, you know, we don’t always get it right.
Sarah Marince:
Jake, do you want to pop in with any I know I kind of want to introduce you to in general, and I thought that you guys would be a good fit, but I’ll let Jake take it from here.
Jake Roorda:
Yeah. I my project management platform, we are competing with another project management platform that has a review tool built in. And we’re trying to figure out whether we build our own or integrate. And I saw that yours was very, it seems very open integration. How does your, and this probably will bore everybody else on the call, but are you open up as like the comments passing back and forth in your API? Or what kind of information do you share in your API?
Rollo Wenlock:
Yeah, sure. So we’ve got an API, which is to be Frank is really bad. Like it’s not a good piece of coding. It’s like it’s a real shocker and any dam and the team over here, we’ll be, you know, embarrassed to hear that, but also like totally agree. And, and at the moment they’re building a new API, which is much simpler. Like the one we’ve got now is just all complicated and some things don’t work. So the new one is going to be really, really simple and completely open. Like the current one we have is like public private, so you can access it, but you have to be given a key. Whereas the next one is like Dropbox or someone, you know, you just go in and get the div information and you just build your integration. And it’s going to be, the API is going to be viewed as review as a service. So instead of us with our products and where people use our products, you’ll be able to add review to your product. And so the review becomes your product without it really being that obvious that it’s someone else who build the review tool and you’ll be able to use components. So if you want to use the player or you want to use the commenting box or the version switcher, all those components will be able to be used. And also all of the API end points for, for different, different things like comments or people or stages or any of those things that will be available as well. And if you are about to ask me when’s that available, I cannot tell you, cause I just don’t know. Okay. Mysterious creatures. I totally get you. I couldn’t tell you when we were going to be coming out with but I’ll definitely reach out to you once once we’re closer on that and see. Cool. Yeah, no worries.
Sarah Marince:
So one of the questions I have here is if you’re already using frame IO or Vimeo or another service, how easy it to make the transition to Wipster?
Rollo Wenlock:
Yeah. Well, it’s, it’s a really interesting thing because I’ve been talking, talking with Emory Wells, who’s the CEO of frame and Angelina said, who’s the CEO of DELMIA. So we’re all kind of vague buddies, but also competitors. So it’s a bit weird. And, and the, what each of us is trying to do is create some form of lock-in to the product, you know, so, Oh, you’ll build some sort of library. So, you know, if you leave, then you can take it with you. But if you make that happen, then people like, but that’s my data. So you should give it to me. And so these kinds of like old fashioned lock-ins that you, that you try and build where you’ve built some stuff on the software, so you can’t leave. Those don’t really work anymore because people just, they’re just cynical about it.
Rollo Wenlock:
If you did that, they’d give you bad word of mouth and that’s where your company starts to suffer. So in terms of being able to switch between any of these products, we actually have customers who use all three at the same time because their clients like to use different ones because they’ve just adopted them. So some people do that in terms of moving from a frame IO to us, which is what we see happening once in awhile, we don’t really see anything happening with Vimeo and Vimeo kind of targets the freelancer and we’re kind of a business up to enterprise. So with frame IO people have sometimes built a bit of a library on frame, but they discovered that they also have the library built internally. So it really doesn’t matter if you, if you have it up there or not.
Rollo Wenlock:
And the only, the only difference about switching is that you just have to get your team to understand a new product because they all work slightly differently. And because what I was saying before is that we focus so heavily on the user experience, not so much feature parody and everything else. What you discover is that people adopt our product like immediately. So somebody who says, Hey, you can’t swim anymore. You have to log into this. They’re a bit annoyed. And they’re like, Oh man, I could use an, a product. And then they login super easy and they go, Oh my God. I just know exactly what to do. And they then see, and, you know, Emory is going to go whatever, but they see that the adoption of the reviewer is higher as well. So the reviewer understands how to use our product more than competitors. Very cool.
Blake Barnett:
I wasn’t really sure if that was a yes or no, it seems like a, maybe like like it’s hard to, is it hard? Like yeah, well maybe it probably is. I don’t know how it’s probably is hard. But like if, I mean, we have no plans on moving, but like, see if we’re like, Hey, we want to use frame, frame IO. Like we wanna switch over. I don’t, I don’t, I don’t know how to do that. I don’t, I think that we would just start clean. Cause I don’t think it’d be worth it to upload old videos to it. And we would just probably keep a Wipster account open and then kind of gradually transition mean, cause we have everything backed up. Like don’t worry, it’s just, it’s harder to access it. So it’s really convenient like for now, like right now we’re not using Wipster.
Blake Barnett:
We have a client emails from like six months or a year ago and they’re like, Hey, I want to get this video. I’m like, sure. Here’s the link. And it’s like super quick. Cause I haven’t. Yeah, that’s cool. Yeah. And so I wouldn’t want to, and that’s why I was always worried about some of the platforms. Like if you get, if you like, I’m scared to move to another platform to be like really, you know, transparent because I don’t want to have to like delete files down to make room for new files. I don’t like that process once it’s there. I like that. It just stays there. And like, I mean after maybe five years, like it’s, you know, we will probably never use anything from five years ago anyways. Yeah, but like, well
Rollo Wenlock:
We’ve got, we’ve got a pretty cool partnership and integration with Dropbox. They’re, they’re a pretty cool company. They’re really trying to figure out collaboration beyond storage, but we haven’t integration, which allows you to upload all of your stuff in Webster into Dropbox because we don’t really want to be a storage company going forward. We want to let best in breed storage companies have really good integrations. And then we’re hopefully best of breed review that is then used by the customers of those storage products. You know? So what you, what you could see is that going forward, you could just move all your stuff across to a Dropbox account. If you have one and then in a very depressing way, of course you could stop using our product and then adopt any other product. You know, of course, why would I say that?
Rollo Wenlock:
But I say that because I don’t, I don’t think any company should be trying to like keep a customer in a negative way for the customer. It should be that you retain a customer because they are having a better experience with your company than another company. Right. And so it should be, you should be able to just wander around and do whatever you want as a customer. You give us some money, you don’t give us some money with someone else’s money and we should just be trying to do the best we can to service the customer, not lock them in.
Blake Barnett:
Sure. Well, and I noticed, I think that’s what you, what people are using your platform now we’re probably doing is cause they, they get to their maximum limit. Well, maybe it’s a terabyte. I’m not sure what the, you know, maybe they’re planning is a terabyte and they’re at, you know, 900 and you know, you know, they’re getting really close and so like we need to move some files off. And so the move old files over to Dropbox or whatever place for storage or maybe it’s even a short-term storage. Cause like we have, we have all the same files like on tape. We still, we, we, we store all of our files to backup tape just, just in case you never know in our industry, what happens, you might need some footage. And so it’s better to be safe than sorry. So we don’t, we already have it. It’s just really convenient to have it ready to go.
Rollo Wenlock:
Yeah, wait, wait, we have a really cool feature to just talk about features for a second called space over. And I really liked the concept behind it because what it does, you upload whatever you upload and we encode a smaller version to play on line. And what we found over time is that people were completely happy to deliver that version to a customer because it’s an aged two 64, 10 80 at a fairly high, but right. You know, 4,000 or so. And so with that, they didn’t really use the original file anymore. And that could be eight gigabytes, four gigabytes, but this nuance like 500 megabytes, you know, so we’ve got this feature where you can turn on space over and after a certain period of time, I think it was a few days or a month or something. It deletes the original content of everything, but keeps the encoded version and all the comments and all the collaboration.
Rollo Wenlock:
So it means that you’ve got relatively small files. You don’t have to think about deleting. And it means that people really don’t hit storage limits very often at all. Because it’s really just a, a capture of the collaboration and a pretty high res resolution for if you want to share it with someone at the end. And so this is something that’s a feature now in Webster or is this a thing? Yeah, it was edited probably a year ago. Okay. Well, so yeah, and all you have to do is switch it on and it happens. It’s so cool. Did not know that I learned something. Hey Sarah, Sarah, can I ask you a question? In the world of voiceovers and and I don’t know if you’re doing acting things. I didn’t, I haven’t really learned a lot. You just said voiceovers. So I’m like, okay, voice actor, cool. Might do films and things as well. Very, very cool. In the world of doing that work, how much review do you go through about doing the work or is it all kind of live in the studio? They say, do another take, do another take and then it’s kind of over or do you go through cycles?
Sarah Marince:
So there’s a few different ways. So if there is a live session, just like, so this is my studio, it’s my house. And I use source connect. So I’m able to connect in with a lot of other studios, no matter where they are. And so when they live direct me, I mean, that’s pretty easy. I said, we’ll just, you know, hop on. And then they’re recording me right in their studio via source connect. And it’s kind of like for those who don’t, it’s like a bridge, you know, between studios. And when that’s not happening and somebody hands me a script or emails me a script and says Hey, we have this 32nd. Can you send us, you know, a read for it? You know, usually put two reads on it or some alt result lines, a few different ways and send it back. And if they have any changes, usually if people have changes or you know, say, Oh, can you read it this way? It’s like one or two times, you know, emailing back and forth. So
Rollo Wenlock:
Yeah. Cause with recently added audio review, which lets you upload. So that’s kind of why I was interested in the idea of voice work of going. If it’s live, then you really don’t need to do review because they’re kind of reviewing in real time. Right. But if you’re doing, if you’re doing recordings and sending them over and you’ve got these few emails coming backwards and forwards, you’re just able to upload these audio files and then share the link and they can comment on the audio file. Hey, can you say it like this? Can you say it like this?
Sarah Marince:
Yeah, no, it is. Yeah. That actually is very helpful. And I mean, even I, because you deal with so many different people in production companies, you know, people send things so many different ways and like even today I was sent a file that just like wouldn’t open. So I couldn’t even see how, how, what the video we’re talking about. So you know, before we go in and do the next session for that, like, you know, we had to figure out a way that I can even see what they want me to read. So yeah. That actually would be really helpful.
Blake Barnett:
Yeah. Oh, well this is why I’m sorry to mean to cut you off for real. I thought you were stopping. And then I kind of like jumped in, you know, prematurely. What I like about that features cause what we normally do now in order to get a client to sign off on it, if we know that there could be issues with the voice read, we’re like, we’ll do a directed session, but we’ll have him sit in and sign off on it as we go. Like, does that sound good? Does elastic sound good? Do I? Yeah, it sounds good. So that way we don’t have to do another read and if we do, then we’re charging them to do another read because it would be the voice challenge. Like, Hey, this is not included in what originally coded you. You’re, you know, we have to do another reread.
Blake Barnett:
There’s going to be this much cost. And so we typically try to get the client to sign off, but I liked the idea of not having them on the read, but we can still do a directed edit as this like an almost like as a scratch track, like we could kind of break it down if we already knew the voice sound is going to be. And like here, just do a quick read window, scratch track, and then we do the edit and then, then they can give notes on just the audio portion of what they’re. And then we give that to do an actual like more of a directed read, but with their notes, like I think that can be a really good workflow and I think that’s a good direction, but yeah, I would say continue on with your messaging.
Rollo Wenlock:
Yeah, so, so just just to tie into what Sarah, Sarah was saying about a workflow that she might have when we’ve opened up to audio, we’ve seen a lot of podcasts, you know, jumping in and they do the show and then they want different people to give feedback and they do a little updates and they go version of division. That’s cool. But this, this idea of like workflows outside of just the very standard thing that we started with, which is where the data to the thing. Can you give us some notes and we’ll change it. This idea of actually like collaborating whilst making stuff is kind of new, new to us, you know, so doing a voice track that then gets used in a native, but also reviewing the boy strikes separately from the edit is kind of this cool expansion of the use case, which is, you know, which is jazzy.
Rollo Wenlock:
And, and so we’ve also added image review in PDF review. And what we’ve found pretty cool with the PDF review is somebody will upload a script that somebody like yourself, Sarah would have to record and they’ll upload and they’ll put notes on the script about how they would like different things said. And so you, you can see them and then you do your record. You upload it to the same folder. They look at it, they make notes, the changes you hear that you see that, and then you do the change, put it up and they go approved. It’s all just done in one spot.
Sarah Marince:
It’s nice when everything is just like stays in one place. And you know, you’re not sending the audio through Dropbox, but then they change it for email and then the script is coming in through, you know, a word. And so it’s, it’s nice when everything could be all in one place like that. For sure.
Rollo Wenlock:
Cool. Cool. Well please feel free to experiment. Absolutely.
Blake Barnett:
Jake only if there’s like someone working on this solution to do that,
Jake Roorda:
If only there was one, all one place
Blake Barnett:
Where he could that’s, I mean, that’s basically what Jake’s trying or I’m working on it, say try and he’s doing a complete, it’s like a work in progress to get, you know, start to finish, you know a video of pipeline is the name of it, but it’s a project management tool. And so, and they’re all kind of seemed to be missing something to be like, perfect. Cause it’s a lot of work to get all these schools and all these places. And that’s why we have like studio minor and Webster and like all these separate tools, but it’d be great if we could kind of get them all together in one place. So we’re not like logging in different places and, Oh, my file is over on this. Where do I put this? You know, so the more I liked this kind of like coming together with these tools and I, and I like, I liked what you mentioned that, and I’m hoping that you and Jake could find a solution so that he has a good tool for his users. And then you don’t and then maybe even, maybe, maybe it would be a good tool to incorporate with Wipster to have these project management tools. So it’s all one place. I don’t know. What’s it going to be? That’d be great to have one hub to go to. Yeah,
Rollo Wenlock:
I like this. It’s always a thousand hopes. Everyone wants to be the King, right? Yeah.
Sarah Marince:
We do have two questions. The first one is from Frank. Hey Frank, thanks for joining us. He said, how could this new platform benefit videographers and content creators who are still getting their footing,
Rollo Wenlock:
Still getting their footing? So you’re, semi-professional I guess like the idea that you’re coming into the scene and you might have some clients and you’re not charging too much or doing a couple of free projects. They show real well, joyously, Webster we’ll say has a free plan for just that case. We’ve got a limited product where you can create your project folders. You can upload the assets and bite your collaborators and reviewers and do the work on like quite compressed content and, and within a small amount of storage so that we can offer it for free. Otherwise it’s too much. Then it costs us too much and we can’t do it. So that product is available for people just starting out so they can look a bit more professional when they’re sharing work with clients, not like a weird Dropbox link, but sometimes it doesn’t work. And and you know, start to get into that idea of pro professional tooling and and working with customers in a way that they now kind of expecting, you know, they expect somebody to have a review product, whether it’s us or others, it doesn’t matter, but they expect it. So if you’re just starting out and you don’t want to spend money because you haven’t got anything, he just starting out jump into the free product, just go to our site and you’ll find it right there.
Sarah Marince:
Awesome. Thanks. Thanks for the question. And thanks for that answer. And Rollo, I know you were talking about a few things that were new like this past year, and I didn’t know if there were any new like cool new features being added in the next month or so in the next year that you can talk about.
Rollo Wenlock:
Yeah, well this there’s something which I’ll talk about a little bit and it’s kind of, when you think about a product with innovated a lot on the collaboration side, which is people having a shared space, uploading things, and then sharing them out to reveal others who are not in the project, like a, client’s not in your project. But we haven’t really innovated a lot for these people out here to do a lot of reviews at the very, very beginning. It was like, I get shared a link. I click on it. It opens, it knows who I am. And I just make comments. What we’re finding now is that there’s a lot of reviewers. We had to look at the analytics and the some reviewers who are so busy, that they are looking at over a thousand different assets in a month. And they’re making over 1700 different notes across those assets every month, just constantly.
Rollo Wenlock:
And it’s all separate shillings. And we’re like, Oh my God, what have we done? We’ve just made their life absolute hell. So as you can imagine, we’ve built and it’s currently being built a product called review inbox. And what that is, is that when anything gets shared with you, it turns up in an inbox. It’s a little bit like the pictures a little bit like it’s Slack meets Instagram and the sense of you’ve got project folders and you’ve got like an Instagram feed of all the stuff you’re supposed to review. And when somebody has made some changes, like, sorry, some comments, it pops up to the top and you can see the comments you can reply. You can approve, you can say no. And so you’re in this like really, really quick collaborative space. And it’s been designed to feel like other products you already use. Like everyone uses Instagram. Lots of people use Slack. So they understand the concept of channels and assets coming from certain people and updates and everything else. So it’s kind of a private social network for review. And that’s, that’s coming up at some point again. I, I don’t know when
Sarah Marince:
That sounds really cool. That’s awesome. What’s your favorite feature overall on Webster
Rollo Wenlock:
Favorite feature? I still, you know, it’s kind of nerdy, but I still love the fact that every comment is automatically a to do item that can then get ticked off. And there’s no administration between any of it. You know, that I don’t have to set something up and then check it off myself. Somebody over there makes a call comment. Somebody replies to it. Somebody agrees the pops up. I agree with the change I do the change I say done. I upload the next version. There’s no administration. It’s just, you’re doing exactly what you need to do and you get it done. So I just love that. It’s so simple, easy,
Blake Barnett:
Quick question for you Rollo. Like and I’m curious so like say we put up a, you know, we put up a video for client review. And so we, we typically what I, I typically just copy and paste a link on there and I’ll email them the link and like, Hey, please provide some feedback. But see, when we, when after we do that, or is there a way to, for those same people who have already reviewed it on version two to when we put up version two to automatically get notified, a new version is up there. Does that happen? Or did we have the some invite each time? Or is there a way to do that? I was just curious. I mean, maybe we don’t want to, sometimes we do. And sometimes you don’t.
Rollo Wenlock:
Yeah. Currently you, you have to share each version with people because we’ve had feedback that cause early on you, you had a thing where, when you shared yourself to an asset that person could just see everything that happened with NSA and people were really against that. They were like, look, I upload version one. I show the client who makes notes. I upload version two and it’s an internal review to make sure that we’ve covered everything. And then we upload version three and then it’s back to the client. So with that workflow, it meant that that was broken. And people discovered that stuff was going to the client that they didn’t know. It was like they’d lost control. So it’s now that you have to share everything, but now we’re getting the reverse, which is,
Blake Barnett:
Well, we have, it’s a lot like a love/hate. Right? Right. Now we want to be able to do that. Yeah.
Rollo Wenlock:
Yes. I know people are saying, look, we work with them all the time. You know, we’re really close. They can see everything. It doesn’t matter. And so we have a new thing that will come out again at some point where you can add a reviewer to a project. So anything that’s uploaded goes to the inbox. So you don’t have to share links. You don’t have to write their name, blah, blah, blah. It’s just instant. And it goes up at pops, they do the notes, they turn up, you do the, to do list. So that’s, that’s going to be pretty cool. And that means that people have the, have the choice, add them to the project or share an asset. And that’ll give you both lines.
Blake Barnett:
Yeah. a story for when this was actually for takeoff video, and I can see that as an issue is we would upload a video and have only invited the client at this point. But then when we would go to share it for broadcast, and this was when we were doing a lot more broadcasts, we don’t really seem to be doing the file delivery to broadcast anymore, but we’d be sending them a link for the, you know, their station reps to get this video. So we basically add them to the project. So since they’re added to the project, the next time we do a campaign with them and we upload a video, they get notified. And our client was getting really mad, mad at me personally, because she was like, Hey, I don’t want to advertise on that station. Don’t let them know that we have a new video cause they’re bugging the heck out of me. And so that was the only problem that we had because they didn’t want to do their station rep because they didn’t want to advertise in that particular station for this, for this new campaign anyway.
Rollo Wenlock:
Well, that’s, that’s that whole thing of software not letting you be in control, you know? So as soon as you feel like you’ve lost the strengths, you lose confidence. And that’s of course why we first did that change, but yeah. And with this new way of doing it is that it’s a project. You add them to the project and then when the project is over, you close it, you don’t close that client account, you just close that project. And so there is no other update for anyone to see.
Blake Barnett:
Yeah. I do like the update you’re talking about to be able to make them basically kind of our level of what we see when it gets updated, you know? Just because it’s certain clients we are super close with, we’ve worked with them for years. If it gets on, if it’s on there, if it’s our project, we’re fine with them seeing it, but they’ve already, they’ve already been around.
Rollo Wenlock:
Yeah. The really cool thing is that when you add them as a reviewer, they are tagged and the product as a reviewer. So when they look at an asset that you’ve uploaded, if you look at it, it doesn’t say it’s held for review, but as soon as this person has a look, it says it’s in review because it knows who it is. And then it says, you know, do you want to say that you’re done with the review, whereas for yourself, it wouldn’t turn up in your inbox because you’re not assigned as a reviewer to the project. You’re a collaborator. Hmm. Nice. I like that. Yeah. Really smooth
Blake Barnett:
The next month. Right. It’s going to be launching that feature.
Rollo Wenlock:
And like, you know, what is it 20 to 12? Probably help us one half second.
Sarah Marince:
We did have Richard asked in the chat about pricing. If you were able to talk about pricing a little bit
Rollo Wenlock:
Pricing. So Richard pricing, well, it ranges from free to you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars. And, and it depends how you’re trying to solve a problem. So the frame which I was talking about earlier is that, is that you’re, you’re essentially a a very small beginning type of group. You can have up to two people in the account and share it with everyone. And you’re just trying to get off the ground and you can’t add your own branding. You can’t do full HD. You, you can’t build a library, but it’s free. So you, you can start. Then you go to the paid account, $25 a month per user, per team member, all review as a pre. And that gives you a lot more storage HD. It gives you video workflows behind the scenes, which is, you know, the review and approval and everything.
Rollo Wenlock:
And every team member that you add, it goes up by $25 a month. So if you have a team of 10, it’s only 250 bucks a month, I mean, team of 10, that’s a lot of people. And so that works where it’s, self-service, you have to use credit card you have access to our customer support, but you have an account rep. Then you go to enterprise and that’s that’s where it starts to become a lot more expensive because they want a lot more concierge. So they get assigned an account manager. We go through security reviews, pen tests, we go through procurements. We, we put up their accounts. So it’s organizational structured first, which means that, you know, you’re a huge company and you’ve got multiple divisions. So we build that for them. Whereas the other accounts, like one team.
Rollo Wenlock:
So you’ve got that as you go along. And it’s really cool because just anecdotally, we find a lot of people who start on the free account. They may not be completely like new to the industry, but they just want to try it inside their huge company. So they play around, they invite the head of marketing to look at something he, or she goes, Oh my God, this is amazing. And then they go to procurement and then they adopt the enterprise version. So for us, it’s like a really nice way of getting into big companies as well.
Sarah Marince:
Very cool. Thank you, Richard. I hope that answers the questions that you had. Jake, did you want to add anything?
Jake Roorda:
I have two quick questions. Hopefully they’re quick. One is about the reviewers. How does a reviewer leave their name and Mark that they are the person reviewing without being logged in? Do they enter their Hey every time? And it just shows that this is the person that’s reviewing.
Rollo Wenlock:
So theres a couple of things there. One is that if you share it with just a generic link it doesn’t know who the person is. So they do have to put in their name and email address. If they want to get notifications, they, they, they can just put in a name and just make comments that they won’t get any updates. The next level is that you invite them by email. So you, you open up the sharing dialogue and it has you can add email addresses, write them a note, and it shares a separate link to each person.
Rollo Wenlock:
So when they click open from the email, it already has their name assigned. It’s already got the security that they opened it from the email address. So it can’t really be anyone else unless they forward it to someone. And and from that point on it, it knows who they are through IP tracking. And so when they come back to it, it’s like, Oh, hello, Ana. And, and off it goes, then the third level is enterprise, which is they have to go through single sign-on, which is often through SAML. And it means that only people inside that organization are able to access anything. And it means that when you’re sent a link, it can be any type of link. But when you click on it, it asks you to log in through your internal service provider at the company, and then it instantly knows who you are, and then it starts tracking your activity at the enterprise level.
Rollo Wenlock:
So it knows that you’re using the product. And so those are kind of the three layers of it. Okay. That makes sense. That makes sense. I like that. You still have that way that you send a generic link and one client just pops in their name and not with anything else required at that school. Yeah. Some, some people just upload a link to Twitter and say, Hey guys, what do you think? Yeah. And then, you know, you’ll just have some, but if you’re an account holder, it instantly knows who you are, so you don’t have to do anything, you just click on it and it goes, you know, to that makes sense. And then my other question was about your versioning. Is it when, when you upload a new version of a video does it automatically assign the next version number for you?
Jake Roorda:
Okay. I know that sometimes it, at least the way my workflow at my production company, we wouldn’t have version one version two version three, and I, they might be a week apart, but then inside of each one of those versions, we would have like three or four sub versions where first we send it to the director and then we send it to the creative director. And those are almost like sub versions of their own. So I was just curious how you, if you allowed that kind of version 1.1, 1.2, that yeah. Yes.
Rollo Wenlock:
We’ve had requests for that. And then we go through a design thinking process with the people and it generally ends up, you know, this is like over 60%, which is kind of where you have to make the decision. It turns out, ends up that the people editing the numbers over time makes their work process more complicated.
Rollo Wenlock:
So it’s, they, they find over time is that if they shared with the customer version three, and then the next share is version 14 and the customers like the last one was, so was three. You, you just say, we ha we’ve done a whole lot of internal work, so all of those exist, so we could do a better job for you. And now you’re singing this one and it actually makes the customer go, Oh man, there’s so much cool going on here, you know? So that, that actually works out well. And, and I know we, we do have people who say, Oh, but I just want to call it something else. And then you just go, but then the system is broken because you have version one in division eight, and then someone else who doesn’t know that you did that, it’s like, where’s version two to seven and they go, they don’t exist. And I go, well, how am I supposed to know that? And so on, it goes, you know, you can get into making it too, too specific to me. One person’s needs that doesn’t leave as it goes crazy. Yeah. Yeah.
Sarah Marince:
Awesome. So do you have any plans on adding pre-production or production type of project management tools?
Rollo Wenlock:
Absolutely not. No. They, they I think, I think with software, it’s really, it’s really important to keep really narrow on what you try and solve. Because software is, is as complicated as you want it to be like, you, you can go into one small feature and you can dig for 200 years and he never really gets to the bottom of it. As soon as you add whole other workflows around it, you’ve now got this hugely complex thing. And now this hugely complex thing. And so there’s really no point in going beyond, so us we’ll only ever be review and approval. But as we grow, it will be review and approve everything, you know, so upload whatever you want, share it to people, to the inbox and they can all review everything. But with this new API was talking about whenever that shows up that means that integrations to those products that live in the pre and the post will be relatively easy to do.
Sarah Marince:
Cool. Well, we just had an interesting question from Donald, with the Adobe extension. Can a client actually sit in during an editing session?
Rollo Wenlock:
No. No. I, I think what you mean Donald is can they see you in a sing live through the panel and know that the answer’s no, but what the panel, what the panel does for the editor is that they don’t have to export from premier and then upload it to Webster and then try and get the comments back. The panel just means that you click share and it automatically encodes, uploads, shares it. You go off and have a cup of tea. And when you come back, all the comments are already in the timeline of the edit suite. So you don’t have a real time. You know, it, it changes with the customer, but every time you hit share the changes that you’ve done go to that person. So some people had shared every 15 minutes, some people had shared the two days, you know, it just depends how quickly you want to go out.
Sarah Marince:
Hope that answers your question, Donald. Okay. So one of the last questions I have here what are your thoughts on the future of Wipster and the landscape of our industry?
Rollo Wenlock:
So if you mean our industry as being video then I’ve got a view of that. But if you may not industry as like creative work, then I have a view on that. Okay. Let’s say there’s an intersection and there’s somebody. So the future of video as an industry, if you look at graphic design, for example, it’s probably 10 years ahead of video in terms of people being able to do it themselves in a desktop publishing came out and now you’ve got products like Canva, where you can go in, there’s a level of templating and colors and stuff, and you can do stuff and kind of get away with it with video. It hasn’t quite got there. Lots of products have come out where they say, Hey, upload some stuff to your iPhone and we’ll automate it, get it to end. You have a look at it.
Rolo Wenlock:
And it’s nonsensical like video in terms of time-based is quite difficult to get, right? Because even if you’re not trying to, it has to tell a story and to template stories is not a simple thing. It’s a really complex thing. So as we move towards much better utilization of machine learning and AI, that is where we’re going to start to be able to build some AI models that will essentially recreate the editing style of editors that are really good, because it will know why they’ve made decisions and be able to make them at the same at the same time. So that will come along. And that will mean there’s a lot of, a lot of work at the moment. That’s kind of mechanical editing. I would say like you know, shortlist, blah, blah, blah, all that, that will go away. And then there’s other pieces in post production around color grading, sound mixing.
Rollo Wenlock:
Well, those pieces they’ll go away as well, because that’ll be automatic. And you won’t be able to tell the difference between if somebody’s done it or the software that, so a lot of this stuff, we’ll go, we’ll name the people who are doing those tasks, won’t do them anymore. And sometimes that’s scary because they’re like, Oh, but my career is being a color collaborator and you go, well, it’s not, but what are the skills that you’ve learned being a collector or a color grader you know, in terms of not just playing with pixels, but how do you think, and how can you apply that thinking to something else? Humans will always be trying to stay on the highest order that the machines can’t. And so automation of car building, for example, people were outraged back in the day. Oh my God. What about all these people doing these manual tasks?
Rollo Wenlock:
And you’re like, do you actually want to do them, not really, you know, so that’s kind of where I see that going. But in terms of the whole creative industry, across everything, there’s going to be this beautiful layer of automation that allows people to iterate quicker. And I think everything’s got a level of design to it, whether it’s video making or fashion or something, there’ll be a level of automation from software that will be like when Michelangelo, Michelangelo was doing paintings and they, and he had all these other people who actually did the painting forum. He could experiment much quicker because there’s lots of hands up. Yeah. The walls. And so in the future, you’ll have software doing that for you. So you can rapidly experiment with ideas without having to do stuff for seven days to see if it works or not. Let’s try this thing.
Rollo Wenlock:
And then within 10 minutes, it’s rendered and you’re having a look and you’re like, ah, it doesn’t quite work. I’ll try this. And so I think the quality of content will go up. And the, the number of people being able to work at a high level will go up. That doesn’t necessarily mean there’ll be more good people. They’ll just be more people doing it. And it, it, it allows people to focus much more on iteration, which is the place, the only place that I think anything ever gets any good. The, there is no golden sickle or something it’s like, you may have spent 20 years getting really good at one thing. So the first time you do it on this next thing, it’s pretty good. But if you think it’s good then, and you’ve kind of given up because, you know, it’s the teen version that’s really good, which means you’ve actually got a career.
Rollo Wenlock:
And when you’re new, you’re sort of excited because you created anything like something exists, somebody’s got to make something, but people they know what’s up, have a look at it and go, yeah, you made something now, you know, you’ve got longevity until let’s actually any good. And so I think people will be able to go through that much more succinctly with a lot of machine operations around them. And, and it should it should allow more people to be able to express themselves in some way. It doesn’t always have to be commercial work. You know, people being able to write a book in five minutes, you know, they come up with this idea with characters and they say, go, and it writes itself, you know, things like that. I think it will be, I think it will be exciting. Sounds exciting. Yeah. Ryan wants to know, he said, I may have missed this, but does it work with the Vinci? Absolutely not.
Rollo Wenlock:
There you go. Right. Yeah, they, they got Ryan so sorry. No, we’ve, we’ve doubled down on Adobe because Adobe is cool. We’ve got really good connections with them. Good partnership and Adobe. I mean, when you look at what they’re doing in terms of innovation of the underlying piece of what I was just talking about, about machine learning, AI, they’re on the way. I don’t see other people doing that at this point, you know, black magic and evidence stuff. I don’t, I don’t see them doing that. So we double down on Adobe, Adobe user.
Blake Barnett:
I have a question probably more for Justin than myself, but he’s real app heavy. Like every time we use software and he’s like, ah, one of the things and update their app, we need this and which I don’t work from my phone cause I’m normally in the office and like I have a computer at my desk. And so it’s just easier. So where are you on making like the next iPhone update? And also I think, I don’t know if you’ve already done this. Like when you, when you use the app on your phone, I don’t think I could make it horizontal and you’d see the video, but maybe I just haven’t updated it. Or maybe it’s not like that going to be a thing
Rollo Wenlock:
We have, we have the worst mobile app on the app store, like by fast Emery. Well, it’s when he saw it come out, he just said, that’s embarrassing. You know, he’s, he’s a guy runs frame and I’m like, it is embarrassing. Like we, we did what we could, man. Jesus. and so for quite a long time, we’ve been, re-imagining what review and things mean on the phone. And that’s kind of what I was saying about slate meets Instagram. That’s what we’re doing under the hood. And it’s kind of depressing because it means you don’t see any change for a long time until all of a sudden that’s everything and that’s kind of bad, but stuff software, you want to give people incremental change, but because we’re building it all on brand new platforms, software platform, we can’t build the old one up and then switch. We have to just do nothing and build over here and then switch. So it’s kind of depressing for the customers, but you know, hold strong, but it’s going to be a pretty amazing experience come out sometime this year, I would say.
Blake Barnett:
Okay. And is that specifically like the app or is that wipster like on like on both platforms, like on desktop and on phone, on phone, you’re launching updates.
Rollo Wenlock:
Every everything it’s going to be one, one product that breaks to every screen size and it’s also native apps with push notifications and everything, and you’ll be able to turn and it plays full screen. It’s gonna be cool. I, it
Blake Barnett:
So I, I like the feature that we can automatically add to Vimeo. Can you add, can you add YouTube,
Rollo Wenlock:
Youtube? We already do. You can already it’s straight to YouTube. Youtube. Yeah. You, you can’t pull down from it, but you can send it to them.
Blake Barnett:
We can post to our YouTube cause like we rent, we still, I think till this day we manually download from Webster, then upload back to YouTube and so
Rollo Wenlock:
Go into you know, up at the top, we’ve got an extensions or app store or something go in there and then turn on the integration and we’ll get you to log into your account. And then they’re connected.
Blake Barnett:
Hear that Corbin. I don’t know if you’re doing that today, but this sort of same time. Okay. last question from me is like, you mentioned that you’re, you’re no longer going to be CEO and you’re going to have Amy step in. And so I was curious, what does that mean for you? Like, are, are you just kind of taking like you just like taking a step back cause you want to enjoy your family life? Like what’s, what’s, what’s what’s going on.
Rollo Wenlock:
Oh, it’s nice having a family. No, the, the, I mean, that’s part of everything, of course, but the, the point of moving to a CEO, who’s much more of a professional business CEO person than a guy who’s a founder who makes stuff up and hopes for the best is that the company is at a stage now where it just needs to operate better and bigger. You know, like some customers are getting sad because certain things haven’t been fixed up and, and it’s like, you need to operate the whole thing better. And also as we move more into the enterprise, we need more skills in the team around how to work with really large companies. And I’m just the guy who used to make videos. I came up with an idea and kind of got it off the ground. So it’s kind of a natural thing that you, that you hand over to somebody who can just do this, and then I’m going to go off and start some other stuff. And that’s kind of my sweet spot is coming up with cool ideas, dragging some people along, proving it and then handing it over
Blake Barnett:
And then start then rinse and repeat,
Rollo Wenlock:
Rinse and repeat. That’s it.
Sarah Marince:
Jake, did you have anything else you wanted to add before we close it out?
Jake Roorda:
I don’t think so. I, I found this super helpful and I like it. So thank you. Cool,
Sarah Marince:
Cool beans. Well, I think we’re ready to wrap it up. Blake, what do you think?
Blake Barnett:
I think we can wrap it up. I think he should, we should go around and
Sarah Marince:
We always go around and everyone just kind of says, where are they? Can you just tell everybody where they can find you on social media website, wherever? Yeah. And so we’ll start with you.
Rollo Wenlock:
Sure. Well, the company is called Wipster and that stands for work in progress? W I P so you’re a Wipster when you work on stuff. So just Google that and you’ll find everything. We’ll find a home page. You’ll find Facebook group, you’ll find Twitter, you’ll find YouTube videos, blah, blah. Because it’s a unique name. That means we have everything
Sarah Marince:
Awesome. Jake, what about you?
Rollo Wenlock:
Oh you can find me on LinkedIn as Jake Roorda or Instagram is pipeline.io
Sarah Marince:
Great. Blake
Rollo Wenlock:
Obsolete. Yeah, you can find me on LinkedIn as well. If you type in my name, you’ll find me or visit one of our websites, blaremedia.net, or shoots.video.
Sarah Marince:
Awesome. Yeah. And I’m Sarah Marince. You can find me at Sarahmarince.com and Sarah Marince at Instagram. And thank you. Rollo so much for being here for all the information you gave and you know, just everything. This is super awesome.
Rollo Wenlock:
Awesome. Cool. Well, thank you for having me. It’s been, it’s been fun. Chatting, Sarah and Jake and Blake. It’s nice that everyone’s got their home studios. I’m jealous. I don’t have a home studio, so good luck out there.
Sarah Marince:
Thanks. Have fun in COVID free New Zealand.
Rollo Wenlock:
You know it.
Sarah Marince:
That sounds fun.
Rollo Wenlock:
Yeah, buddy. Every day.
Sarah Marince:
Amazing. Well, thank you guys for anyone who wants to watch it again? You can find it on the YouTube page and make sure to watch Brick Madness. That’s your homework. Had to do it for Justin.
