Joe Blake of Artomatix: Empowering 3D Artists
Today we meet with Joe Blake, CEO of Artomatix, an Irish based tech company that helps studios create 3D content quicker than ever.
He has always had his eye on the US market and expanded there very early on. However, although they have staff on the ground in America, they do not have a main office there and Joe explains why this is.
He emphasises the importance of knowing your target audience and being able to visit your clients. He explains the high costs involved with opening an office in America, and how often if you have money to invest in your business it can be spent better elsewhere.
We are now in a world where business is global, and through technology and the internet you can still build a solid relationship with many clients without having a physical office where they are.
Finally, Joe talks about the importance of conferences, how they can add an immense amount of value to your business, and provide you with quality time to build relationships with your customers.
“It’s less about the logistics of opening an office, and more about the resources, and the people.”
Time Stamps:
01:52 - Who Artomatix are and what they do.
02:53 - How 3D modelling is moving into other markets other than gaming.
05:22 - Automating 3D modelling and its benefits.
06:08 - The history of Artomatix.
08:43 - The importance of the US market, and how it is Artomatix’s target market.
10:36 - Opening up offices in America.
12:57 - Focusing research on the West Coast.
13:47 - Raising funding and finding investors.
14:25 - Which staff they have based in the US and why.
16:46 - Taking their product to market.
18:15 - The IRS and the importance of doing your taxes properly.
21:27 - Whether you really need an office in the US.
24:35 - The importance of focusing on your target audience.
28:32 - Where sales people aren’t necessarily who you should be using to make sales.
30:05 - How time difference can make offering support more difficult.
32:17 - Questions you should ask yourself when thinking of moving to the US market.
36:14 - How conferences can add an immense amount of value to your business.
Resources:
https://artomatix.com
Nvidia
www.mtbonnell.com
Connect with Joe Blake:
LinkedIn
Info@artomatix.com
Email us at - Info@mtbonnell.com
Twitter - @mtbonnell
Connect with Sebastian Sauerborn: Linkedin
Connect with Nastaran Tavakoli-Far: LinkedIn
Episode Transcript
My name is Joe Blake, I’m the CEO of Artomatix, and I’ve been with the company for, just coming up to two years now.
Joe Blake’s company Artomatix uses AI to help empower artists. This is Move Your Business to the United States from Mount Bonnell Advisors, the consultants who guide you on expanding state side. I’m Nastaran Tavakoli-Far, or Nas in short, and we’re speaking to companies who’ve made the move to find out that pearls of wisdom and any words of caution, Mount Bonnell CEO, Sebastian Sauerborn will also be answering your queries about expanding to the US. So send your questions over to info@mtbonnell.com we’ve also put our email address in the show notes.
There are many conflicting series regarding the importance of learning the basic fundamentals of art. Some feel that an artist should be relatively free from an art training, rules and outside influence. On the other hand, there are those who are very academic and technical in their approach. They feel that everything should be done according to a certain predetermined rules. Regardless of this basic different lines of thoughts, there is one basic step that is important to both, the learning of fundamentals that help one to express graphically his ideas and emotions.
Nas: Sebastian, our producer Emmett Glynn and myself recently went to Dublin to speak to Irish companies who’ve expanded to America. Now this week’s guest is interesting, because Artomatix have a lot of clients in America but our guest cautions against opening an office there. Artomatix uses AI to help artists to create 3D content, and they are being used by major gaming studios. We caught up with CEO Joe Blake to find out more.
Joe: Artomatix is a software company that provides solutions to anybody who is creating 3D content. Our primary market over years has been essentially entertainment based. So that would be typically video games and VFX. Those industries have gone through dramatic transformation at the moment in that, it simply cost too much and takes too long to create content, and it’s an industry that is ripe for transformation, so, Artomatix has set about automating large parts of the 3D content creation process, using AI machine learning and other technical approaches. So we see how can dramatically change, how content is created going forward.
Sebastian: So content for example, is a game, and then you would be able to create a lot of the 3D content within the game through your engine.
Joe: That’s right. Yeah, so, traditionally most people would probably viewing the video games as being the leading age of 3D content and where 3D is used and that’s a massive industry. You know, it’s a hundred billion dollar plus industry and 60% of their costs relate to the creation of content. So that’s a big, bug number and that’s a big issue for the industry. But moving into the kind of the modern day, 3D content is no longer just the domain of entertainment, 3D content is the corner stone of how products are visualized and promoted across multiple media. So, going forward is lightly, you know, within the next two or three years, if you’re doing a Power Point presentation, it would be in 3D, it won’t be in 2D. Today if you’re going online to shop for textiles, fashion, you know, if you’re picking up to a new car, you’re using 3D assets, 3D materials that have been created using technologies and approaches that have been pioneered within the gaming space. So, within the next kind of year or so, probably 40% of our business would be outside the entertainment sector.
Sebastian: Interesting, so this for example, when I shop online for clothes then I have 3D model of the person, of that particular piece of clothes, on a model on a dummy that would be an application for that.
Joe: That’s exactly right, so today you launch your online shopping experience to be as close to reality as possible, you want to be able to really zoom in, and see the fine grain detail of the fabric, of the textile, of the color, and modern screens now enable you to do that, so that you can make an informed buying decision online. Most online retailers in furniture, in fashion and so on, will tell you that their conversion rates go up by anything from 10 to 20% if they are able to provide high quality, high fidelity 3D experience online.
Sebastian: Amazing, and your technology, sort of automates and thus increases the speed of producing those materials?
Joe: That’s exactly right. So, there’s simply aren’t enough 3D artists in the world today to meet demand, so, for that reason, you know, putting in place what we sometimes call a suite of kind of artist assistant tool set, to work alongside artists to take away and automate a lot of the more painstaking, the more time consuming, the more expensive stuff that simply gets in the way, and automate that, just dramatically increases the productivity and reduces costs.
Sebastian: Amazing.
Nas: So Joe, can you give a little bit of the history of the company, so when you started and also when you decided to go into the US?
Joe: So the company is almost five years old now, and it was founded by a guy called Dr. Eric Risser, he’s originally from the US, from Florida, he was very bright kid who loved games, loved gaming, started to focus more and more on math, physics and got a scholarship to Columbia University New York, where he started, that’s where the genesis of Artomatix really came about, so he started focusing on an increasingly narrow space which he termed, he coined “Creative AI” and that’s really where Artomatix started.
He found his way to Dublin, and, in order to complete his PHD in Trinity College Dublin, and at that age he was more focused on a very narrow space, of creative AI and was probably one of the five leaders globally in this sector today. The timing was very good for him in that, and for AI generally I suppose in that computing power has now almost caught up with the idea that he had originally seven years ago which was utterly impractical at the time, but now with the power of GPU technology and the affordability of GPU technology, largely to companies like Envidia, you know, the availability of data through the internet, the time is right now for AI to take off across the outer fields but particularly this one.
So, arguably the product is a lot more than five years old cause Eric has been working on it essentially his all adult life, the company is five years old, the first two years, two and a half years we’re getting together, some seed funding in order to develop a very small but highly skilled team to complete the research that Eric was leading, the second half of the company was about when I joined, we then started to raise more money to put in place in engineering team, in a commercial team in order to go to market. And I suppose that’s a part of the history.
Nas: And the company, it was founded here in Dublin?
Joe: It was, yeah.
Nas: And when did the company decide to open an office in the US?
Joe: Our focus on the US has been there since day one, you know, you don’t set up a company to sell to at the time the gaming industry without absolutely focusing on the West Coast of the US where are many, many of these large publishers are based. So, since the very early stages we set about to speak to industry very, very closely, to tell them about what was at the time an idea, a vision, to share with them some of the approaches we were taking and we attended- so, there is two main conferences every year that are kind of most for us, one is GDC which is Game Developers Conference, in March, and the second one is SIGGRAPH which is for the, adding new research in this space gets published.
And for five, six years Eric has attended those conferences more laterally and we as a company were attending those conferences. And what we view us to do is to reach out to, and speak directly to our target audience. So before, you know, arguably we wrote a line of production called, many of those large publishers knew exactly what we were doing felt as though they were importing into our plans and felt very much a part of the Artomatix story. So, I’d argue that’s when we’ve had our first presence in the US. We’re based in Ireland, but Ireland is absolutely not our target market.
Nas: Can you tell us a little bit about opening up in the US cause you have an office out there now.
Joe: We have a number of offices cause we’re only a small team, and it didn’t make sense to have one office particularly in the West Coast, because it’s highly expensive to be honest, so what we have is, as we’ve grown as a team generally, we’ve selectively handpicked key people to put in the US.
So, for example, we’ve hired one guy who is principal researcher for us who’s got 25 year experience specifically in related field to Eric’s field, and there isn’t somebody like him anywhere in Europe, so we’ve deliberately handpicked people like that who can do two things; one who can contribute directly to product, but also who can inform us about particular industry verticals and niche markets and what feature said needs to be to take us there.
So they give us that instant credibility and so on. So, for us and for me it’s absolutely not about opening an office in the US, frankly if I never had to do that, it wouldn’t bother me so much, because frankly it’s too expensive, what it is about is selectively handpicking the right talent to get us to where we need to be. So, the other key resource that actually we currently had hunting for is a product evangelist and so we deliberately want our products to be in North America because we want somebody to have ten to fifteen years of experience working in industry as a technical artist, we probably want that person to come from one of the larger triple A publishers, again, to tell us what else we should be doing with the market being to give us an instant credibility again, to be able to speak up their language and so on. So for me it’s less about the logistics of opening an office and more about the resources and the people. I don’t really care geographically if somebody works from home or works from office.
Sebastian: And is the- your industry or the industry you’re in is that all concentrated on the West Coast, California, Silicon Valley, or is that -?
Joe: Initially for our market research I would say yes, in terms of a goal market in sales traction, no. Because, the market that I’ve just described are global, they are global markets, so automotive is a global market, textile, and furniture, aviation are global industry, so, no. But in terms of having the finger on the pulse of what’s happening in research and being at the forefront of product development, yes, that’s where we want to be. The industries that I’ve mentioned, GDC and SIGGRAPH, are both generally held on the West Coast as well.
Sebastian: And does this also include investors, do you have any investors from there, from the West Coast?
Joe: We do not, so, the stage we’re at the moment is, we’ve raised a seed funding and seed extension funding, the next round will be next year which will be a serious A, and would likely taking money in the States. Up until now we haven’t needed to raise a larger round, we’ve been reasonably sustainable and, but as we go faster and expand team both from an engineering point of view and market point of view next year, yeah, it will make more sense to look at the US.
Sebastian: Yeah, that makes sense.
Nas: So Joe you’ve talked about these key people that you’ve selected across the US, I’m wanted to know how many people are there and why you needed them to be out there on the ground and how is that shaped how you guys do things here in Dublin?
Joe: So, we see Dublin, Dublin is our head office and Dublin is where we lead our research and engineering teams, and that’s unlikely to change, except for exceptional talent like the guy I’ve described early on, who can you know, a, fill a technical hold and a technical gap and it is a scarce resource so therefore we can’t be selecting of other occasion but also by having him based in the US he gives us instant credibility into the industries that he’s worked in.
Nas: And that’s interesting so you mean, having someone on the ground is more likely to get you clients from the US?
Joe: I suppose two things, one, in terms of basic operations, yes, so as managers we need to adapt our management approach in order to cater to the fact that the people are remote in first instance and in a different time zone, secondly so we have demand generation resource based on the East Coast, which means that, you know, simple things like we arrange our team meetings in the afternoon and so on. Typically we would have a morning stand up for engineering teams that have 9 or 10 AM so we have engineering resources on the East Coast we need to make sure that they will stay a part of that, so we would be pushing that to kind of lunch time, you know, practical things like that.
We’ve needed to improve our video conferencing to ensure that it’s high quality, you know and people genuinely feel like they can properly attend meetings and contribute to meetings and not just be listening to a scratchy line with poor audio quality and what not, so we’ve definitely stepped up there.
And, as managers we need to be skilled and tooled in terms of, even just cater to our practices and processes and things in that nature, our contracts need to be compliant with US law and stuff. And, so there’s those practical things, in terms of go to market, we, I would say, as we’ve started to spend more money on sales and marketing, we’ve tried to become more visual in terms of how we tell our story and, as I’ve said we’ve now invested in more expensive experience resources in that sense who’ve dramatically improved our product marketing. And that’s been important because we’re now hiring people from the industry who’ve got many years of experience in the industry and know that what is the right compelling story but tell it in a more visual way.
That’s definitely changed, I think our customers, you know, don’t always expect or even want us to be on site with them, but the fact that we can be and the fact that we can offer to come in and help and do face to face training and offer face to face support, particularly for initial roles and so on, you know, it’s just, it’s just, it’s a nice experience for them it’s builds credibility. And as I say very often [smiling] they actually don’t want us on site for confidentiality reasons and so on, but the fact that we can offer helps.
Nas: So we’ve been taking questions all season send them in, it’s info@mtbonnell.com so Sebastian we’ve had a question, David from London, he wants to know about IRS, he says that, I always hear about people getting into trouble with the IRS, that’s the tax authority in the US, and then never be able to open a company again, is this true?
Sebastian: Yes, it’s a very good question, I think a lot of our listeners would fear that, if they get into trouble with IRS they will go into prison states or their bank accounts are frozen, that’s it, so they are afraid that even if they make an honest mistake which can always happen, in business taxes, you’re ruined, your personal property is on the line, and you know, maybe you go to jail.
So on my experience that’s certainly not the case, as with any tax authorities I would be extremely careful and do everything properly and of course I would always communicate swiftly, openly and professionally with the IRS in any matter, but it’s my experience that dealing with the IRS although it can take a lot of time, sometimes, you know, I mean, they take the time to respond, often times things can be solved quite easily, and even if there is for example a fine, I’m just thinking about one particular fine now, as a company that’s owned by a foreign individual, not US resident, you have to file a particular form that US residents don’t have to file and so, a lot of US accountants don’t know that, anyway, if you file that form only one day late, there is a $10 000 penalty straight away, for every case.
And you may need to be obligated to file three forms, so there is $30 000 straight away, one day late. So in my experience very often the IRS waves these fines if you give a good enough reason why that happened because you didn’t know about it, you know, because you had the wrong advice, so I think it’s definitely possible to talk with them, I would definitely be extremely cautious about dealing with them, in a very reliable and professional manner so get professional advice that helps you writing those letters, but other than that I don’t think you have to worry about anything.
Nas: Does this for the IRS put any of your clients off from wanting to expand to the US?
Sebastian: Well, it certainly makes them hesitate, I don’t think it put them off, but again, they think they need maybe lots of lawyers, the insurance policy they think they need to make in a really complicated, they need to do the things in a very complicated fashion- I don’t think that’s the case, but it’s important to know what you have to do, to know your obligations, to know the law, to have proper advisors, and get it done properly and don’t worry about it too much.
Nas: Great, thanks Sebastian, so send us your questions at info@mtbonnell.com we’ve put that in the show notes we’re going to be taking questions every episode in this season.
Art is an individual creative experience. The greater the knowledge one possesses, the greater will be the experience. It is hope that this motion picture will help to start you to a great fun in a wonderfully exciting deed of art.
Nas: And so a couple of times you’ve said that you aren’t interested in opening an office out in the US, and you’d rather not do that, and so this is quite interesting point cause a lot of companies we’ve talked to, they really want to have a presence and have people on the ground. So there’s a lot of people who are listening who are in that stage of deciding whether they should move their company. What would be the question you think they should ask for themselves, about whether they actually need to do that at all?
Joe: Yes, so, I would say the decision to go to any new market, geography, particularly in North America, being as large as it is, the one thing you should get it right, is focus, so, who are your target audience, exactly, who are your target audience, now, we have been able to get that down to 25 names, 25 brands, 25 global publishers, who we want to talk to, who we absolutely need to understand what we do and to get our message in front of them.
Having an office in New York or Boston or San Francisco is not going to help us to do that. So what we need is first class marketing, what we need is to be where they hang out, and they most definitely hang out at the two conferences that I’ve mentioned previously, and that gives us a nice opportunity to meet with their senior team and their artists and their technical directors twice a year.
And we absolutely making our mission to do that, we travel as a team, we plan for a certain leap, you know, a month or two months in advance to make sure that we execute like crazy against those two conferences.
And if we need to spend more time over there and visit them onsite absolutely we can do that, that’s not an issue, when we go to GDC we would generally tend to spend at least two weeks over there. In terms of the consumption of your software, so how they use that and how they consume your software, in our case, again, it’s desktop software, we make it easy for people to test, we make it easily downloadable, we make sure there’s a lot of supporting documentation, we double down on our proactive support, so our support isn’t reactive at all it’s very proactive, we would monitor the metrics, we monitor usage data and we reach out to people directly if we think they are having problems or we think they’re not using it as they should be, so we’re trying to be on the front of mind all the time. And, again, having a physical office doesn’t help us to do that.
Nas: What would be the advice you’d give to companies who are in that decision making process, should we go out there, should we not, what would be your dos and don’ts?
Joe: So, I would obsess on product market fit as I’ve said before. So, go out of your way to spend quality time almost in workshop mode with that target audience, spend a lot of time white boarding your ideas, explaining what you’re building why you’re building, what problems it solves, and make sure they validate that every step of the way. As soon as you can put an early Alfa of a product into their hands, do it, and you’re starting to build up a trusted partner relationship with them, even if you’ve gone through those two steps.
People are telling you, yeah, this is great, this is great stuff, and they’re not prepared to take the next step to test your software, even that itself is telling you something, that they are not prepared to put the time into evaluating your software, if that is the case well then your software is clearly missing something, it’s not compelling enough for them to want to do that.
That’s a hugely valuable cycle, and that’s where I would be spending any precious resources that we have rather than in bricks and mortar offices, rather than in expensive field sales or marketing, because as I’ve said earlier, every dollar you spend there is probably worth a hundred dollars in sales and marketing.
So absolutely obsess in getting that market field right by speaking directly to the target audience and by all means do that by face to face, if you can at all, over there. Focus on exactly who is your target market, what companies, if you get attend to companies and who within those companies are the right buyers. They are the two things that you absolutely must get right.
Sebastian: I think it’s very interesting, the analysis you’re making because I know we have a lot of listeners who are in that tech industry and enterprise software, and I think a little bit maybe there is the perception that you need to be in a country particularly in the US, somebody said, nothing beats boots on the ground, which in a way you say too but in a different way, right, you essentially say there’s no point to having a presence somewhere permanently, focus on the important moments, be at trade show, be at personal meetings, focus the resources there and make them more intense, better rather than having over heads there, that are expensive and essentially don’t lead to anything.
And I think what you are saying, in your industry, those potential clients, they don’t mind that, because everyone is so global and cosmopolitan today that they don’t mind working with you through Zoom or WebEx, communicating with you, and that is nowadays if I understand you, the accepted stand or even the preferred method because they don’t want you to have inside, you said they have, you know, fears of confidentiality and everything. So I think that’s interesting for many European startups in that industry, that it might be better not to do, or it might be better to do something that’s counterintuitive, at least, when you follow advice it is given a lot.
Joe: Yeah, and I’m also conscious that maybe some of these advice, some of it might be particular to our sector, but frankly I don’t think so.
Sebastian: Good point, yeah.
Joe: I’m not sure that too many buyers out there want to spend lots of time with sales guys or sales people anymore, they want to meet people who are at value, who understand their business, understand the pain points they are going through that can actually add value, real value. So, I don’t really want some of the large triple A publishers in the world meeting people from Artomatix who are purely sales people, that’s not going to happen I don’t believe, unless it’s designed contract.
What I do want at meeting are folks from the industry who understand our software who are going to apply our software to their business and relate it specifically to how they can create more content more quickly to how they can declutter existing workflows, take other technologies or tools out of the workflow to make it smoother who can help them to understand how to apply artificial intelligence and often times for the first time within their business and we see ourselves very much as- we hope our customers also are seeing us not just as vendors but as strategic partners taking them on a journey to leverage AI machine learning often for the first time within their business to dramatically change their business. That’s who I want our customers to meet.
Sebastian: How does it work then, with support that you have these offices opened twenty four hours so you can do round the clock support for West Coast, United States?
Joe: Yeah, so at the moment it has been a little tricky for the first few customers, but we would absolutely see any engineers that were hiring in the States and also into Asia later, being able to provide at least second line support if not first line support, so that we can continue to work on issues sort of 24/7 so, yeah, that is often kind of, not quite fond of mine, but not very far behind that, as we look at hiring, yeah.
Sebastian: Because before we’ve had a client they are like a- they are like a marketing agency here in Dublin and so they have a lot of clients in Germany, and they have a lot of clients in California, for them, I think the sales isn’t really the problem, but the supporters, right, you know, the client in, wherever, in San Francisco has request, will change that thing in their website, you know, and to respond to that within a few hours and not like, the next day, for 24 hours later, that’s why it’s important for them to have that sort of stuff locally and on site, not for sales but for these ongoing, to maintain the ongoing client relationship, which goes a little bit, in a certain directions as you were saying, so, focus on the things that are important, right, like dealing with helping existing clients so that they don’t get frustrated by this process.
Joe: Yeah, absolutely, so today what we’re focusing on is making sure that our online documentation, our online videos, the tooling that we have around that are quite strong so that artists can help themselves and support themselves and that works quite well, but you’re absolutely right, particularly as we get on to the West Coast and Asia, we’re certainly going to have dedicated support, resources in market, yeah, and for now it’s not a burning issue but it’s certainly in our plans for the new year.
Sebastian: That makes sense.
Nas: So, Joe, just to wrap up, I wanted to know, what questions do you think companies should ask themselves when they’re kind of considering whether they should make this move or not?
Joe: It’s probably not a question of whether they move into the US market, in most cases that’s probably quite clear, it’s a question of how. And as I said, personally I think that, there’s an old school of thought which is, we must put sales resources on the ground, and you know, great sales people make a great company and all that kind of good stuff, which used to be true, you know, ten or fifteen years ago. And that’s my background, I came from sales and marketing, commercial background.
But I really don’t believe that’s true anymore and I struggle to think of an industry where it is true. So, to think really, really smart about how you can be efficient which are dollars and your resources, to think about easier ways to get in front of your customers and in our case we’ve absolutely oriented ourselves around two large conferences every year, and by the way, we don’t take booths at those conferences, we book a room. We have a large meeting room and we invite people to come to our meeting room and spend an hour to two hours with us, in workshop mode, not in sales mode, in workshop mode. And we literally don’t leave that room for twelve hours a day for five or six days in a row.
That’s the highest quality time I can spend, our CTO can spend, our product people can spend with customers, and again, it’s not sales people. It’s me, it’s our CTO, it’s our product people, listening to our customers, telling them what we are doing, telling them our plans, giving them advance warning of where we are going, that’s what you should be doing.
And that’s what builds you credibility and respect with tier one customers rather than willing at traditional sales and marketing agent, so we spend our time and our energy and our money on that rather than bricks and mortar, and we did it very, very early, as I’ve said when we were still a research company, and it’s absolutely paid dividends, hugely paid dividends.
So, for a very small company like Artomatix, it’s only five years old, it’s only launched product this year, we know we can get a meeting in any of the triple A publishers in the world, any time, because they know us. The world at large might not know Artomatix, but our top 25 target audiences around the world absolutely know us, and that’s why.
Nas: So you’re saying focus on making really good product and that would sell itself in a sense?
Joe: Sounds a bit simple, but yeah, that is I guess what I’m saying, yeah, but that needs to start very, very early, very early, and if what you’re building is sufficiently compelling it’ll work, and that has been the recipe for Artomatix, and it has worked.
Sebastian: And I guess, you have involved those companies that you talk about, 25 companies from a very early stage, right? Even before you start write code, they were basically part of the journey so to speak, so it’s a commitment into long term relationships, consistency, and also, I’m sure trust and loyalty then build up, because when they are involved, they are kind of become stakeholders. Even though they are not owners, but they’ve become stakeholders, that they have an interest in the success of the product?
Joe: Yeah, absolutely, I mean, as I’ve said I’ve joined only two years ago at Artomatix and I’ll never forget the first GDC that I went to, first of all I was astounded by the names, the brands that we were meeting, that we’ve had secured meetings with, that they were coming travelling to meet us, you know, leaving the conference facility to come to our meeting suite.
And secondly each and every one of them coming said hey, great to see you guys, how were you doing since last year when I met you last, or, gosh I remember the first time I’ve met you three years ago when you showed me the early demo, they were genuinely on the journey with us and felt as though they were on the journey with us, just to clarify one thing when I said, before we run a code, before we run a line of production code.
So we were able to show early demos, early POC, early concepts of what we were trying to do, that kind of surfaced the research that was happening, the algorithms that we were building underneath, and the deeply technical audience that we were selling to gets excited about that, they’re interested in that, they’re passioned about that and they absolutely now are seeing Artomatix as the leader of the field globally.
Sebastian: They, this is what you’ve said before that they aren’t really interested to talk to sales people anyway? Because it wouldn’t advance their cause at all, because for them to get further and to see their own products moving along to talk to experts like yourself, you know, and not to some sales guy who has his own hidden agenda, or maybe not so hidden agenda [smiling] trying to push some product, right?
Joe: Yeah, everything you do has to be viewed through the lens of how does that add value to our engagement with customers, you know, even your marketing has to be content rich marketing, the days of content free sales people, you know, are dead, they’re over.
We need to be thinking with our solution hats on all the time, what are the issues that we address for you, and if we’re not addressing those issues well then we’re dead, right, end of, so you need to make absolutely sure your messaging is correct, is crisp, you’ve got your value proposition correct because it’s grounded, because it came from your audience, it came from that market.
And your audience as well , when you can get key stakeholders feeling that they’ve almost been part of your journey, and that, you know, can reminisce about your early products and, some comments that they made couple of years ago, and that’s just gold dust, absolutely gold dust.
So if we are focusing on these global publishers, who almost, without exception have a presence in North America, they then, those people become your evangelists internally within global organizations, within, I didn’t name drop here, but you know, the Microsofts, Sony or Act Division or the Ubisofts of this world, they talk internally amongst themselves obviously and share their practice and want to be the ones bringing the best practice internally into their teams. So they actually become your sales people, if we can put it that way.
Nas: That sounds like a good place to wrap up, could you let us more about where we can find out more about what you do?
Joe: Well, online is Artomatix.com email us at info@artomatix.com any time and we’d be delighted to help.
