Distilling Complex Content into Infographics with Nick Grant, Co-founder of Killer Infographics

From Silicon Valley to all around the world, I meet with startup founders to hear their powerful stories of failure, obstacles and success. I am your host Luke Baird and this is the Cult of Startup Podcast. This episode is brought to you by Audible. I am one who struggles to pay enough attention to lengthy books, even when I'm extremely passionate about the subject.

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Information can tell a story, but without structure that story remains incomplete. Today's guest, Nick Grant is completing that story with eye dropping designs created by his agency, Killer Infographics. Nick's business evolved from several fledgling ideas that earned their wings but never really took flight, and it's interesting to hear how he talks about your first business idea not always being your best, not your last. We also discuss the struggles a startup must face in growing, including things like office space that fits your team but also has enough wiggle room for new hires to properly invoicing clients to make sure that they are paying on time.

We also dive into different types of freedom allowed to somebody who owns their own business. I hope you all enjoyed this interview as much as I did. Thank you so much for listening and enjoy. I'm super stoked actually in this interview because I know you have a very unique entrepreneurial background and I'd love to hear what that is.

Yeah, I was lucky enough to have a dad that owned his own trucking business when I was a small child about 3 and 4 years old. So I have early memories of that and always was something that really was inspiring to me. And then when I was about 1213 I would frequently go to my grandparents in the Summer and he owned a painting business and therefore I was a painter. And so I got to get hands on and experience his business, talk to the customers he had.

He also owned a apartment complex and the painting was a great way for him to maintain it and also great revenue stream and so got experienced the real estate side of things. So it was always in the back of my head as I went to high school and then began college when I tried my first entrepreneurial venture and failed, as many people do. So I got to get out of the way in college and learn. Learn what worked and what didn't and how important business partners are and use that for later when I try to really get things going.

Definitely, definitely. Do you have any particular moments that you can remember that your parents or your grandfather influenced you in being an entrepreneur? Any particular moments? I don't know if it was a particular moment.

I think it was just seeing the lifestyle that entrepreneur could have, the fact that at times it was work, work, nothing but work. Maybe all week was work, but at other times things were leisure, which not many other jobs or career paths have the opportunity to. You kind of get to choose your own destiny, even though sometimes that involves working crazy hours. But on the flip side, you have your opportunities to choose your own vacations and things like that.

And so seeing my grandpa have that flexibility growing up, which is always very puzzling on one side to me as a kid. You're like, how does this exactly work? He's not at work, but he's making money and he seems to be doing very, very well. And so I think I was just fascinated with how people made money from there.

And it was always something I was curious about. And it's why monetization has been a thing that I've probably spent the most time learning and mastering as I've been a entrepreneur and been in the startup world. Interesting, interesting. I've always thought there's essentially two types of freedom.

There's freedom in being entrepreneur, meaning that you create your own destiny. However, in creating your destiny, you actually are significantly more busy in doing your own company. So it's I'm doing whatever I want, but I'm a slave to whatever I want or the company. If you work with somebody else, you do have weekends off, you do have a 9 to 5.

So freedom has a broad definition for yeah. And I think it's just, you know, freedom to not have to deal with some of the other bureaucratic stuff you might have to deal with when you work for somebody else. And the ability to really Push on things as quick as you want or as slow as you want. Something that in some starters should get the opportunity and other times you don't.

So you have that type of personality or that type of just entrepreneurial spirit. It's very tough to work at a pace that's too slow. And so I think that's another great thing. You can kind of work at a pace that suits your skill set.

Definitely, definitely. I completely agree with that principle. Entrepreneurs are very self motivated, want to do their own thing. So if they're going 10 times faster than their normal job, they're cool with that.

That's their normal speed for them. So I really like how you talked about for your family. I want to maybe jump ahead in time to go into college. And your experience of being entrepreneur while you're in college.

Absolutely. My venture in college was very short lived. The idea was to have an influencer platform where could connect emerging athletes in the action sports field with brands. And I had a business partner, we had the idea, it was very early stage, but we had the fight early on and didn't see eye to eye on things and couldn't really come to terms with how we were going to be partners, how we were going to grow the business.

And so it never really took off outside of him designing the website, us getting a base up, but we never really got to take it to the next step. So it was always in the back of my head, it was always like a bug I had and I never got to really pursue it until after college again. Yeah. And it's interesting that you had this background in that that bug never really left you.

So I remember you started CivicArt, which you had for a couple years, but that kind of got canned eventually. What was the cartoon? Yeah. So the idea behind that was we had an opportunity to purchase this domain that was a very old domain.

So it had great history with Google, had great established SEO already. But the nature of the site was a very simplistic PayPal driven shopping cart. Something that in 2009 we started the site was very outdated. Not many people were using PayPal driven shopping carts anymore.

I had seen this emergence of software as a service coming into the e commerce world. So people that were savvy marketers who knew absolutely nothing about coding could pay a monthly fee and basically have a plug and play e commerce website. So I saw this opportunity where we thought, well, we don't want to have zippy cart and continue to have it, a PayPal driven shopping cart. We could make this the go to site for e commerce software comparison.

So the idea was to have a rich content site of unbiased information where they could compare brands such as Shopify and BigCommerce, learn their feature sets, how they differed, how their pricing differed. We also had a really extensive e commerce blog. So we were just trying to be a dominant player in a very niche space and we were doing that through content, through SEO and other things that led to the business falling apart. I guess it's funny that a lot of people say that those are things to do, but it kind of was your demise to some degree.

Yeah, demise in a positive pivot way, I guess you could say. We put tons of effort into the site and seemed to hit sort of a plateau in terms of what we could do for revenue. Just because the site was SEO based, we were reliant on organic traffic. So we couldn't really do too much about that unless we could increase our rankings.

And that's a long term play. And so through that and through us doing content, one of our very early tactics to generate that SEO traffic was infographics. And they started to do really well because at the time in 2009, 2010, nobody was really doing e commerce infographics. Infographics themselves were an emerging thing online.

There was a few companies in the space that were doing them for themselves. There was a handful of companies that were doing them for the brands. I'm essentially an agency designing them. And so we kind of just fell into this right time, right place and saw this big opportunity with infographics that was much bigger than what zippy cards seemed to be.

Yeah. So you saw, okay, zippy cards can, it's not going to work out. But infographics could be a big thing and they were hot at the time. Could you tell me the story of how you came up with your name?

Yeah. So the name killer infographics, Most people seem to love that and I'm happy with that since I thought of the name. So what happened was as continued to do These infographics for ZippyCart, my business partner Amy was point to really get the infographics created, get the content behind them. And my part in that was really to promote the infographics, to market them, to try to get other websites to post them on their site, ideally giving us a link back to our site to therefore increase our SEO.

And so sometimes that was pretty successful. Other times it was like hitting your head against the wall and couldn't get a lot of places to post your infographic. But many Times they would post your infographic, but unfortunately they wouldn't post it correctly. They wouldn't attribute it back to you correctly.

They wouldn't do like the backlink correctly. Correct. They wouldn't do a backlink. And the other frustrating thing is they wouldn't even really tell you anything about the infographic, whether they liked it, whether they hated it, whether it was informative.

And so it was always a bit frustrating because you put a lot of effort into something, you think they might give you a little bit info about it. And so that frustration kind of led to an idea to help further promote our infographics. And that idea was to create a directory where others could submit their infographics and we would review them and give them feedback on them. But at the same time, it was a great way for us to showcase our infographics, give it another website, another platform to be shown off.

And while that was happening, when I was buying that domain, and that domain is submit infographics. And the reason behind that was because I'd seen a few other sites that were somewhat like this, they were somewhat like an infographic directory and they had anchor text and links that said submit infographic. So I thought, I wonder if that domain name's available. It was available.

So paid the just as well it was available. Yeah, so paid the whatever, $10 price, that domain. And simultaneously when I was thinking about that domain and buying that domain, the idea of killer infographics popped into my head. I'd always loved that word killer and not ever seen it attached to many businesses.

And that thought just occurred and I thought, let's see if that's available too. So at the time we purchased killer infographics, we purchased submit Infographics and really Killer Infographics sat around for almost six months, something like that. And we actually didn't do anything with it. Interesting.

So your current business, essentially your brand, was not being used for six months. Correct. The brand really evolved once Submit infographics was running. So as we were running submit infographics and people were getting these critiques on their infographics, we started to get a lot of ask to create their next infographic.

That wasn't really what we ever intended to do. We weren't really infographic designers, but yet we knew designers that could probably do this very well and we thought we could facilitate. So the initial thought was just to be the middleman to have contractors to just find the right clients who needed the infographics and handle the behind the scenes stuff, partner with the designer, get the infographic to them and collect money. Simple as that.

Take commission at the top. Yeah, that's what we thought. We thought we wouldn't have in house employees, we wouldn't have to really do too much crazy stuff like that. But what happened was that just kept growing and growing and we saw that it was really tough to find the right designers and to be able to do this really well.

And if we wanted to do it really well, that's what we need to do. It sounds like there's a consistency issue. Absolutely. It was one of those things where if some client came to us and they said, hey, we have this ongoing niche for infographics, we're going to want one a month if we were to start them with a certain freelance contracted designer we have, and then the next month that designer had some other project somewhere else to go.

We were in a stuck and we couldn't really do anything about that. And no art's going to be like, correct. And we found that to be a really big issue because once you establish an aesthetic and you get brand particulars down, you don't want to deviate from that. It's very hard to plug a new designer into the application.

So we started having all these thoughts about how do we, what are we going to do? How do we do this better? And the thought was to take killer infographics and really make it the agency side of things while submit infographics continue to just be a traffic vehicle. And some of that traffic that we got was then being converted into the agency base.

And so we were gaining these clients from there. And that's how we started to pivot and formally do killer infographics as an agency. I like that. I like that.

So can you tell me about your first hire? My first hire is somebody who's still on the team today, which is quite impressive to say. The first hire was Charlie, who's still on our team. And that was to allow me to not do marketing anymore so that I could continue to get clients and focus on sales.

Because at the time, one of the services that was very critical to our clients was not only designing the infographics, but it was promoting the infographics. So we would design their infographic and then do an outreach to relevant sites to try to get them to post the infographic. Because many of our early clients were small. They were 12 person operations, 10 person operations with the one marketing person trying to do four jobs.

And so then we were a great partner was if we could do the content, do the design and Promoted, basically, soup to nuts, full service. And so that's where we saw a need to bring somebody in. And he started with us as an intern, moved on to help out with marketing, evolved to help out with sales, and now he oversees marketing and sales and has a couple people on his team and was really lucked out. Yeah, and how many years ago was that?

That was in 2010, at the very end, the intern. And in 2011, in January was really when we went full force with killer infographics. And that year he became a full time employee. Love it.

I love it. So how big is the company today? We do have a couple interns, but roughly we hover about 25 people. And that's what our office is made for and where we try to stay.

So I would like to maybe know a little bit about how. What would be a time that was probably very difficult for you guys because I know you bring on hire, but work's gonna go up and down. Yeah, I mean, some of the toughest times were the first couple years because we didn't understand if the business had seasonality, if there was a rhythm to it. And so we didn't really know how to staff accordingly at the beginning because it was completely new to us and very new to everyone, really.

It was a brand new thing. And you can look at Google and see the search history for the word infographics. Around 2010, it was pretty flat. And ever since then it's been a complete upward spike.

And so it's like the last five to six years, everybody found out about it. Interesting. Right time, right place. Yeah, absolutely.

So any other difficult times you experienced? Yeah, some of the early times were pretty tough. We didn't pay ourselves at first, so it was definitely tough then. Getting a $0 paycheck every month is very tough.

But some of the early things that we found were actually difficult were just having office space. It seems like a very simple thing, but we started the business in my townhouse where office space was free. And then once we had a business and really needed a couple people to work with us, we realized we had to have an actual office. And being a startup, being a bootstrap startup, you don't really know how long things are going to last.

And most commercial leases tend to be one year, if not two, three, four years. And so we were in a really odd predicament where we wanted the shortest lease possible, but we didn't want a terrible office. So it was really difficult and I didn't know what we were going to do to Afford an office and get a six month lease and we were able to do it and then get another office with a six month lease and another office with a six month lease. And it took us about two years before we actually signed, I think a one year lease on a place because we were just so worried about things.

Even we signed a one year lease on a place, the rent was so dirt cheap that we were happy we could do it. But that was very stressful because you want to have a decent office, you want to be able to leverage it, hire people, but at the same time, you can't really do much. We don't have cash, you don't have a credit history as a business and you don't want to sign yourself up for something you can't pay. Yeah, definitely.

I completely agree with that as well. Tell me a bit more about why you guys decided to bootstrap even though you possibly came across tough times. Yeah, we did talk to angel investors in Seattle after we'd been around for about a year because we were having some cash flow issues. We thought that might be a great way to go to take a small angel round.

Nothing, nothing crazy, but something that could really just give us the boost we needed to get cash flow moving in the right direction. It's not that we weren't making money. We weren't really doing a great job at collecting it in a timely fashion. Okay, that's definitely a difficult thing.

Definitely a difficult thing. Something we got smart about improved. But when we looked to raise money, it just didn't really seem like it was going to be a great fit either. From one a strategic perspective, we thought we could maybe find somebody who had a great agency background, somebody was going to be more of a strategic agent investor and really couldn't find the right fit and so weren't really looking for just a paycheck.

We were looking for something that could potentially be a little bit more substantial than just cash. And since we couldn't really find that, we figured out that we would just deal with it and suffer. It wasn't the best thing, but we found ways to improve our cash flow. We found ways to increase our prices, we found ways to get our process better so we could be more efficient and make more revenue with the few people we had.

And so it was just really tough for the next year after that because we didn't raise money. And it took a long time before we started to feel okay that we were gonna always have cash in the bank and never miss a paycheck, which we still haven't missed. But at the time when you have a lot of accounts receivable, that's the first thing in your head is like, if we don't get this money, we'll miss paychecks. And so we definitely got on it, turned things around, but it was pretty scary there for a bit.

Would you any recommendations to a company on how to collect money on time? With the agency world, it's a bit different versus a SaaS solution where they essentially have to pay when they sign up on their credit card or something like that. Correct. So we moved to doing anything we could to get form of payment, to get 50% down, to get 100% down, if you could, with the right type of client, to just have stricter payment terms or to actually get a bookkeeper, which was our early solution until we made some of those rules stricter and really clamped down on things.

Because you're already wearing so many hats as a startup entrepreneur as it is, we never thought about how to also fit in the accounting hat. On top of that, without we could do our own accounting, but then we didn't realize the volume of accounting we would have because of the number of projects we were doing. Because at the time we would do anywhere from we started, some months were 10, 20 projects wasn't bad. But at one point we were doing about 100 projects a month.

And so to invoice 100 projects across different clients, keep track of all these people, it was just daunting. So the bookkeeper was great. And then changing all those rules were another great thing as well. Were you doing bookkeeping?

My business partner was primarily doing the bookkeeping. And then we hired a bookkeeper and then we got more serious and got CPA and did things right. Because it's just one of those things that we wanted to do well and it wasn't our expertise. Yeah.

What kind of accountant really makes a big difference? Because bookkeeper, I think, keeps track of stuff and can follow up and kind of make sure that you are within your legal bounds on everything you're doing. Absolutely. And we realized that limitation quite quick.

Like the bookkeeper is good for a very fixed amount of things, but they're not your CPA and that is not what they should be used for. So that was a great help too. But again, it's one of those things that's very difficult to do and very difficult to afford when your bootstrapping is precious. Now, in my experience in the last year, I tried to do all the accounting for my business and I eventually Just hired an accountant from online, paid him a certain amount, and he solved everything for me.

It was great. Yeah. Having somebody that just lives and breathes a county because the rules change every year and it's so nuanced. It's like a different language.

Unless you live and breathe that, it's very tough to keep up on all the changes every year. I presented him with my situation, he was like, yep, done. Got it. No worries.

Perfect. Let's put it on here. Yeah, it's been a game changer for sure. Definitely.

All right, let's. Let's talk a little bit about how you are working remote from the office, because these are the offices in Seattle and you're here, located in California. How does that actually work with the team? Yeah, so it was one of those things that seemed like it was going to be a bit challenging at first, but we saw it as a really positive challenge because startups do have that opportunity to really create their own destiny, and many people told us that doesn't seem like a good idea.

How are you going to make that work if he's not in the same location? But what I do is primarily business development, sales. I help with our hiring, so there are things I can do remotely. And even when I was in Seattle, the nature of our offices were completely full of desks.

So there was never really a great spot for me to talk on the phone. Because you need the privacy, essentially. Yeah, exactly. Granted, now our office has many spots talk on the phone, but when we were bootstrapping and coming up in the world, it was an office, full desk.

And so it was a great opportunity where I could move back to California. And I saw that I could figure out a way to do it where I could be on the computer more, I could work more hours, I could have the quiet time and just really put a lot of effort into to make it work. I mean, we do regular calls with the team. Slack's been a big lifesaver just to have that frequent conversation with everybody doing video chats.

So we've been able to make it work. And I do travel to Seattle to see the team. I get to travel throughout California, Vegas to see different clients. So we found ways to make it work.

But it was a little bit of learning curve, for sure. So you technically, like, check in at 9 o' clock in the morning and work throughout the day while everybody else is in the office. Or are you more nimble with your schedule? Definitely not that nimble.

I'm pretty much a workaholic, so I usually start work sometimes before 6 in the morning, sometimes about 6:30. We do have a lot of east coast clients. We get cake so many times I'll wake up at 5:15 and I have emails already from east coast clients that existing ones as well as new ones. And I don't want to wait three hours to get back to a potential lead.

So I'm pretty much up and on it right away and tend to work till five or six every day. So it's pretty consistent every day. Not a lot of fluctuation unless I'm traveling or something like that. Typically try to put as many hours as soon as I can because they're are a lot of clients and a lot of people to talk to.

I'm usually trying to be on the phone and build those relationships. Every day translates to more business for you. But you got to be up early and be attended to, those clients. Absolutely.

I mean, historically we found that that's always been a point in our favor to be one of the first, if not the first person who gets back to somebody who's interested in the type of services we do because it's fairly common for them to potentially look at a few different people that do what we do. And so I always want to be the first person to get back, get that conversation started right away. That's interesting. So shopping around, your clients are shopping around.

So knowing that thing, you know, their customer building on that side. So you try to get back right away. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, granted we do have a large number of existing clients that are very happy, but every week we're getting brand new leads from clients we've never worked with.

And yeah, I would say that almost all the time they're considering a few different places. Yeah. And this last week I actually bought a car and the dealership that communicated with the most was the dealership I bought a car from. Yep, I would agree with that.

And I worked at a company where we did lead generation and we passed leads to prospective schools that the students were interested in. And we heard that feedback time and time again into the school. They got back to the student the fastest to start engaging them. And having those conversations was almost always the one that ended up closing the deal.

And that's where the student ended up going. So they tried to build that relationship right away. That's so interesting. I love how there is a psychological side to that, that if you're attended and willing to serve your customers, they'll pay.

It's like, it seems stupid, but I don't think everybody follows It. No, they don't. Because many times I'll be that one to talk to the client and I'll ask them, who else did you reach out to? And many times they'll say that those other people might even not got back to them right away, or it took them two days to get back to them.

So it's always nice to hear that it took other people they were considering five times, 10 times the time to get me to get back to them. Yeah, There's a CEO that I know up in the Bay Area. I can't recall name of the company. I do love Xbox.

And he said that he hired somebody simply because he was always replying to his emails within five minutes. And that guy's like a VP of marketing now. It probably demonstrated a work ethic he was excited to have on his team, knew something he could count on something he was gonna be on top of things when there was an email. And he'd even say things like, and I've even adopted this.

And what I do occasionally is if somebody emails me and I can't answer it right away, I'll actually email them going, hey, I got email. I noted it, but I can't answer it till tomorrow morning. I'm a big fan of that as well. I don't like to really let things hang, even if it is just as simple as that.

I think it's nice to know that even if it will take a day or two days after that for you actually give back to that person, they at least know that their email was read and it's being worked on. Yeah, exactly. I think it's a perceived value of, like, oh, they're courteous to what I'm doing because I feel like if I send out emails, like, urgent, why the hell the issue now? Yeah.

And email etiquette is just so huge because it's so hard to read tone in email. It doesn't come across unless you do some of these extra things to make your email sound a little bit more fun and exciting. And so I think that helps as well. But you gotta be a creative writer as well.

It's a weird table to work with and not everybody can do it. I'm a fan of the shorter email. It works better for me unless there's a purpose to have a longer email. Right, Absolutely.

Awesome. So I got a question from a listener, actually. His name is Jake Disraeli. What is the methodology that you use to spark and organize the creative process at Killer Infographics?

Yeah, that's a really good Question. I don't know if we really have a set process because we get so many different types of clients with different types of objectives, that I think it is really, at least with us, with most of the creative stuff we get to do, it is very much so a client by client thing, where it's just building that understanding of the client and the world they live in and the challenges they're facing. And I think that often sparks the creativity. I'm typically always the first point of contact when new clients coming on and trying to understand these things.

So many times I start to get those creative ideas going and think, oh, the team's gonna be able to do so much good stuff with this. But I think secondarily, once the team starts to talk to somebody and have these kickoff calls where they're really getting in depth about all these goals and objectives and how and where the content's going to be used, that their will starts spinning in their head and they start to be able to think of the best ways to achieve these goals. The most creative way to visualize this content, that's extremely difficult to understand. So our designers on these kickoff calls will start to get really excited because the content will start to make sense to them.

So they're already starting to visualize how things are going to be wireframe, types of. Excuse me, types of potential illustration styles, ways that they're going to be able to attack the heading, the fonts. So I think they just really got understanding. Kind of sparks creativity for us.

Does this client get some sort of sample before they actually make the purchase? Do you. How do you work that edge? Yeah, I mean, really, our website is our sample, I guess, and we've built up a reputation where luckily clients just trust us now they know the kind of work we produce.

And so there's not really a sample prior, but we make sure that what we're delivering to them is something that is what they're envisioning. So there is a whole step, and we're wireframing and we're giving them some insight into the vision that the designer sees. So they definitely have that opportunity so they can kind of experiment with it. Because I would say if I was a client, I'd want to get a taste of what you guys are kind of going to do.

So there's sort of a conversation that occurs beforehand with the art director at an that might be titled that, and they vet out, okay, well, we know it's going to be these colors, and we know it's going to be this kind of style. Yeah, absolutely. They're trying to get some directional information. It's not trying to put them in a box so they don't get to be creative.

But they need to understand because big brands do have some restrictions. They do have some brand guidelines that we have to adhere to, but many times they're. They're quite minimal. They're things like fonts, color, color palettes, logo usages.

So most of the time they have quite an open field outside of that to be able to use their creative juices, I guess, to do unique things. But some clients are a little picky. So sometimes we do have to do things like two wireframe options. Three wireframe options.

Just because you get those clients that it works better for them to see some options. It works better for them to see what's possible, maybe mix and match things. But we. If we're not doing that, we're trying to always put our best foot forward.

So there might only be one example we're giving a client that might have took an entire day to develop. Yeah. So I can see that there are potential problems that could occur that the client might be like, well, I want five samples. We can't do five samples.

How do you, as a team lead do that? Yeah, we try to figure out a way if we can meet in the middle. 5 is definitely pretty excessive. But you do get some big brands where three samples or three options is really preferred.

So many times it's just an educational process where you need to enlighten the client that the team we have is very experienced in what they do. We've done somewhere over 5,000 projects by now. So when we're making these recommendations, they're not quickly decided. They're things that have come with experience and forethought to really make the best recommendations.

So many times they're able to see that. But I think it takes a little bit of understanding because what we do is so niche and so specialty that they're not really able to have a point of reference to what we do. So they often might compare it to web design and think, oh, if I'm going to do a new web page, it's really easy for somebody to give me a bunch of options about how to move these boxes around. Whereas the type of work we do, it's typically not that easy.

Just a box. It's a piece of art, essentially. You can't alter art that easily, especially in infographic and especially when they have a goal in mind. There's not always five different ways to visualize A narrative.

It's many times there's one or two good ways to do it, and the designer wants to try to come up with the best way and make that recommendation. And so as we try to do many times, but we do have a couple clients, and they're great clients, but it just works better for their process to have two or three options early on. I like that. So I also see sort of another hiccup, and I'm curious as to this one.

Like, how do you distill this information down into a piece of art? Are there any taxes that you currently use that help enable the team to create art right away? We can't really create art right away, for the most part, with what we do, because the basis of it is always content. And so without getting the content vetted and getting the content in a workable state, it's extremely difficult for the designer to do anything because most of the time what we get is double the amount of content or like 10 times the amount of content that's needed for something.

And so what we found to be extremely critical are people on our team that have appropriate backgrounds to distill massive amounts of content down into digestible information. So we found that these are individuals with English degrees writing backgrounds. They're able to be that layman and get into the mindset of this very technical content and break it down and make it something that the average person would be able to understand, because many times that is the goal. We work with a lot of technology companies.

For example, you go to their website, it's full of text. It's very difficult to understand their value proposition. It's very difficult to understand why you should actually pay money for their product. And so that's a great example of where we bridge that gap, because the people on our team with these English degrees, these writing backgrounds, can take this content and just find a way to get it into the most essential bits of information so that when the designer does get it, they're not limited by the amount of content, essentially meaning that they can spend more time visualizing things and not have to make it a reading assignment, not have to focus on where am I going to put these massive blocks of content they can more so focus on.

Let me figure out where I put these visualizations and then complement it with the respective text or data that needs to go with it. Interesting. Sounds like you possibly discovered this part way down the line that these English majors are much better at distilling this information. Because if I got.

If I'm the designer I get this. I don't know, a PhD writes a biology paper, something like that, I'm not gonna know what the heck it's really about. And I can't simplify it enough to understand it, to put it into a piece of art. Yeah, that's absolutely correct.

Our thought early on was, well, the designer is the one that's really getting into how this information is gonna be visualized. So they would probably want some say so in terms of what content's gonna be included. But we quickly found out that that might be true for some designer out there, but not any designers we ever found. So we found this great compliment where we started to do a lot of the content work ourselves, my business partner and I, before we would actually get it into the designer's hands.

And we found that process to be so critical and save us so much time down the line because it didn't result in a client getting a first draft and. And thinking, what the heck is this? This is not on point. And so there's always a lot of cleanup and things that had to be fixed in a visual format, which is extremely time consuming.

So we found out that if we can put the brakes on a little bit, just get clients to understand that we can put a little more emphasis on the content, getting the content down, that everything else is gonna go extremely smooth after that, because we can remove content all day and add content all day and edit grammar and things like that, but once you fully design something, it's just gonna cost a lot more and take a lot more time. We wanna do things well, do them in efficient time. And, yeah, we found that to be a key to the solution. I love that.

That's like pure entrepreneurship. English majors have to be able to dissect this way better than we can. Yeah. And I think the people we have on our team that do this job, typically they're called a senior content editor.

They really love the job because I think that English majors sometimes think they might only have so many options once they get out of the career field. And I think the option we give them is so unique because every week they're typically diving into 5, 6, 7, 8 completely different things, almost having to become something like a mini subject matter expert, and then the next week, flip and do some completely different things. And then the week after that, they might have to come back and do some of the same things that they did a month ago. So I think that their brain is constantly being stimulated and challenged by all these topics.

They have to learn, master, and figure out how to get into the right voice, the right tone for. And that's awesome because they become the experts eventually in that subject matter by really interesting people to talk to. Yeah, they're going to know so much random things, so many random things. And I hear that many times like at the end of a week, like, oh, I've learned way too much about XYZ this week.

Like I think it just starts to spew out of them. They start to share information because they're learning so many random things. So it's often a frequently shared thing in Slack throughout the week. Like, oh my gosh, look what you guys know.

Yeah, exactly, exactly. Like look what I found out in my research. You might walk by and see their computers and you think, what are these people doing? Mis research.

Yes, it's legit. Interesting, interesting. I'm gonna see them being the ideal Jeopardy Guest in a few more years. I probably will be.

Yeah, I know they know a lot of things. For sure. For sure. Could you maybe go over what your, your day to day routine is?

Any kind of touch. You got up early and you do emails and calls, but maybe walk me through. You get up early, do you run, do you shower? What is the top to bottom day?

Yeah, definitely try to get some of the breakfast exercise done early in the day, try to get some of that stuff knocked out because once I start work it's typically hard to do anything else but that until I finish the day. So you know, try to get that stuff knocked out so that when I can jump into work I got a really clear head. And primarily if I don't get sidetracked with the early morning call, I like to get all my email done in the morning. And that's partially why I get up so early because it is quite, quite rare that somebody wants to talk to me at 7am Pacific or 8am Pacific.

So usually I have a good one to two hour window in there to get a lot of emails done and get a lot of things situated for the day before the team starts to get in, before I start to get bombarded on Slack with questions about projects and things going on. So it's really good quiet time to get email knocked out, get my schedule mapped out for the day, anything that might come up. And usually the day is just a lot of client calls, coordination on things, meetings with the team. It's a little bit of that every day.

There's not really too many changes unless I'm doing hiring or something like that. That's always kind of a twist in my schedule. But luckily now, in the last couple years, we've been able to have some people on our team really help me coordinate projects. And that's been a game changer because for the first three years I was really a one stop shop.

So not only did I have to find the clients, I had to sell the projects, I had to do all the paperwork, I had to coordinate it to get started on our team. And once we started getting this higher caliber of clients, I really couldn't get caught up doing all that because it's such a time suck. And so now it's been great because once I get these projects locked down, I'm able to really get them over the team quite quickly and they're able to get them set up, get them into the queue. And so really I'm able to luckily get back to prospecting, get back to emailing, get back to having conversations.

And a lot of these conversations are throughout the week where I need to talk to somebody on Monday and they need to send me something, I need to look at it with the team, I need to get back to him on Wednesday with some feedback, I need to look at it with the team again, get back to him on Friday. Because what we do is so unique that it can be dangerous to jump into something too quickly with somebody and not really vet out the project because we've done that in the past and learned what works and what doesn't. So a lot of my efforts are just spent making sure that I'm almost like a gatekeeper. Before iq, you filter all the clients that are coming in and make sure, well, this client's gonna take six weeks.

We want only two week clients or something like that. Essentially, yeah. But more so just trying to figure out if the client is ready to jump in and do a project. Going back to the content side of things.

Many times the content's in progress, but the project needs to start. And that's a very tricky one because as we discussed, there's not a whole lot that can be done until the content's properly completed. And so we have a lot of those situations where it's just a little chaotic and they're trying to control the chaos and figure out a way to get things where they actually make sense to start and they actually make sense in the for sure. So I want to move this conversation into what is your prospecting process, because I know that you go talk at conventions every now and then, I know that you go south by Southwest.

What is maybe your big one that works the most or what do you do on the day to day basis? But yeah, it's evolved over the years as our client base has evolved. When we first started it was the scrappy mass volume contact. I was just trying to more play the numbers game because I was still not sure who was going to be a fit for our service, how I was going to try to build this business.

So early on it was a lot of agencies that we worked with, they were really easy, low hanging fruit to get in, had a lot of established relationships with their clients already. We were a nice behind the scenes provider, but we saw that that wasn't really where we wanted to focus most of our time. We wanted to have those direct relationships with clients and so we moved and flipped it where we now work with very few agencies and primarily direct with clients. And through that my prospecting had to change.

The ways in which we tried to attract these types of clients had to change because there's such another echelon of client that you can't really just spam them and email them and cold call them. So we found two things to be very successful. One was having strategic partnerships with different events. There's some guys in Seattle that have a company called GeekWire and it's a tech news site.

It covers everything in the Pacific Northwest. We've been friends with them since they first started their business. One of their cores to their business is having tech events in the Northwest. And so early on we started to be a partner with them and it was what allowed us to actually start to get Seattle clients.

Funny enough, our first year we didn't really have any Seattle clients because we were an unknown entity and we were just trying to get clients from any work. And we started to partner with GeekWire, do some design work for their events, partner with some other organizations, do events and just strategically do that. And we saw it'd be a really good success. So that has led to clients and we continue to do that to this day, even doing it with like you were mentioning south by Southwest.

So earlier this year we did some design work for the interactive portion of their brochure and we also went to booth at south by and it was a great way to attract clients. But the other thing that's been a great tool for us has been public speaking. I do it a little bit. I've been a speaker at the Adobe Max conference for the last three years and I will be doing it again this year with my business partner, but she's primarily been the public speaker for and she now speaks about one Time a month.

And it's been. Yeah, and it's been a great vehicle for us to not only get clients, but to just get our name out there, further our brand and awareness of what we do in the visual communication space. So where does she usually speak? Like what kind of events besides.

Yeah. So just recently she spoke at SMX Advanced in Seattle, which is a search marketing conference in Seattle. She's also speaking in October at the Seattle Interactive Conference. And she was recently in Puerto Rico for a.

I believe it was a global PR conference. It was the largest public relations conference in the world. I know. And she was asked to come speak down there.

So a lot of things that either relate to design, relate to public relations, relate to communication. She's been asked to speak at those types of events. I read the book Traction recently and that book's all about what are ways that you can gain traction for your company, Ie, getting client sales or maybe. And one of the recommendations is public speaking.

And I think that's possibly an underutilized resource for some of these companies. Yeah, it's one of those things that it is a little tricky to break into because when you go to submit speaking sessions at places until you have a track record of speaking, it's hard to get your foot in the door. Places like south by Southwest now prefer you to send a video of you speaking publicly somewhere else so that they know the type of speaker you are and so that they can see that you're actually a proven entity they can speak. And so I think it's a little tough to get your foot in the door.

But it's absolutely a great way to gain clients. And I think it's funny because you could go to that same conference as an attendee and it's a completely different experience. They don't know you. Even if you meet somebody and you tell them what you do, you don't have that same credibility.

That's just instant because you're a speaker. So yeah, you're held on a whole different level. Whole different level. You are elevated above the bar because you're speaking.

Yeah. So it's nice because you don't have to play that dance or that game. You can just really have a great conversation with somebody because they already trust that you know what you're doing to prove yourself. You just have to have a great conversation and see if you can help them with what they need for sure.

So what are the ways you guys being clients? So you said speaking. Is it a lot referral based now? Yeah, I mean, it's been really great the last couple years because of the time and effort we put into getting the right people in the right places, to getting our process to a more successful place, that our clients are much happier so we don't have to put so much effort into even asking them to be return clients.

It's just they start to see how well the work we do performs for them and how well it helps them achieve the things that they're trying to achieve so that they just come back the next quarter, the next year with new budget, with new projects in mind. So it's been a great way to continue to see that grow. But in addition, we've started to experiment, do some other things with social media. That's always been a great way for us to get traffic and get people to our site.

And so at south by Southwest back in March, we did a series called the Visual Minute. We interviewed about a dozen or so very well known influencers and still right now running a series on our website where we have a video of them. We do a small infographic about them and gotten some really good feedback about that so far. I like that.

So leveraging other people's networks to your benefit? Absolutely. Almost everybody that we spoke with at south by had at least 10,000 social media followers. I believe a couple of them are more than six figures in terms of their social media following.

So yeah, it was a great way to leverage their network and potentially get some exposure with some clients that might not know about us. And that's interesting because in my head I said that's kind of like free marketing. Yeah, to a degree, because it was more a mutual agreement because we're also going to share them in our social channels. But we also volunteered our time to do a small little custom infographic all about them.

So they not only could have that for their site, but we were able to show that off. So yeah, we were able to get a nice win win with everybody there. I love that. I love that.

All right, so as we sort of move into the conclusion of our interview here, I've got a handful of rapid fire questions for you. All right, let's go. So what advice would you have for an entrepreneur who's looking to get into the agency industry industry? I would say you need to study it extremely well because it is not like other startup industries.

I had worked in traditional startups before and an agency is a completely different beast and it doesn't have the same rules and the same things don't work that work in traditional startups. So I think it's a lot of research and education before you're going to do an agency and do it right. Yeah. I often viewed agency work as you eat what you kill.

Yeah. It's not something where you just get somebody to sign up and they pay every month and you hope they never cancel. You're really, as you say, you're out there, you're hunting it. And even when you're getting them in, you're still trying to win their business all the way through because you want them to come back.

You want them to refer other people to you. So it's. You're constantly fighting for business. Oh, yeah, I'm sure.

Sure. Follow up question or next question? Actually, anybody that you look up to as an entrepreneur? There is a guy that I look up to as an entrepreneur.

He might not be that well known in California, but in Seattle he's pretty well known. His name is Joe Heitzberg and he has started, I'm gonna say about three companies now and sold them. Just a very smart guy who knows how to put startups together very well, very efficiently, with an end goal in mind. And he's just always been a very impressive guy to me and he's been helpful when I've asked for feedback on things.

And so he's just one of those guys that always stood out in my mind and kind of impressed with what he did, what he does. Sort of semi quasi mentor, a little bit of a mentor, but he's such a busy guy that not too much time before him, but the times I've actually asked him for advice, the advice has been very great. That's awesome. And I think that's super valuable to interviews on.

Find somebody who can give you the right advice. I think all too often you are the wrong people or you're attached to the wrong person that should give you advice. Yeah, I agree. I think that there's a lot of advice given in the startup world.

Not all of it is great. So finding somebody that really has a history or a track record that you respect and somebody that's done startups that you actually admire, I think is ideally the person you want to try to get some advice from. Oh, I completely agree. Heck, yeah.

So where can people possibly connect with you? Or killer infographics. Definitely. Graphics.com we are on Twitter opinfographics.com because unfortunately killer infographics is too long of a domain, but I'd say those are probably two best places to get a hold of us and our Facebook as well.

Awesome. Awesome. Well, thank you so much Nick for coming on the show. I sincerely appreciate it as always.

Cold startup fans, you live. There you have it folks. That was Nick Grant, co founder of Killer Infographics. I highly recommend checking out their website killer infographics.com it is mind blowingly beautiful if that even is a word.

And another somewhat related recommendation, if you are enjoying the show, please subscribe and leave us a review on itunes. Your feedback is what helps us keep going and direct it towards your startup's needs. We love you all and never forget, tomorrow is a new day with zero mistakes in it yet. So go make happy people.

Sam.