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Hey - I'm Drysen, a content strategist at Made by Things with a deep background in animation and motion graphics. But, video marketing is only a small part of the marketing industry. From email campaigns to digital ads and OOH, there's a ton to learn, and I want to learn it from my marketing peers.
So, I'm determined to have a daily 10-minute conversation to learn everything I can and become a better marketing person, and I'm inviting you to be a fly on the wall to learn alongside me.
Each episode is sponsored by the Made by Things Discovery Workshop—a collaborative workshop where Made by Things designs a custom 'à la carte' style menu of fresh ideas of content and solutions to help you deliver a more robust customer journey and experience.
Learn more at Madebythings.com/discovery.
Drysen Carsten (00:00.81)
Welcome to a brand new podcast. My name is Drysen and this is Drysen Learns Things. And it seems fitting that if we're gonna try a new podcast, I should start with interviewing my boss, Matt Vojacek from Made By Things. It's going. So the point of today is to dive deep into one specific marketing thing that Made By Things as a studio has done. And so we wanna talk about the Things By Things marketing.
Matt Vojacek (00:16.591)
Hey man, how's it going?
Drysen Carsten (00:30.568)
effort. So with that said, why don't you introduce who you are, what is Made by Things, and what is Things by Things.
Matt Vojacek (00:40.084)
So yeah, like I said, my name is Matt Vojak, creative director, founder of Made By Things and you know, really getting into, we get a bunch of different ideas all the time, right? Like we are a company that helps other people with their marketing efforts, but every so often we kind of need to drink our own medicine, right? And really push what we do when it comes to marketing and
And really try, I mean, yeah, just constantly trying things and trying to find ways to find our unique position in the market, basically. And over the years, we've, again, we've done many weird things. Like I've gone as far as auctioning off a completed work that we've done that ended weirdly with a client that kind of ghosted us for the last half of a project.
Matt Vojacek (01:40.073)
And I just, don't know, whenever I have an idea on something, I'm like, all right, let's just try it and see what happens. So a couple years ago,
Drysen Carsten (01:48.414)
out of the sake of just trying new things, this is where Things by Things kind of came from.
Matt Vojacek (01:54.844)
Right. And I guess the story kind of really starts right after COVID, or right during COVID. Once that started, we saw an immediate drop in a lot of the work that was, or lot of the project requests that we were getting. And it was probably a couple months into it. And I'm like, okay, well now we don't have an office anymore. And I have all of our like photo stuff here right before.
we left our office, we started messing around with some stop motion stuff. And I was like, all right, well, what if we make this program where people can sort of sign up for spots in a week long schedule for us. And for one week, we just do nothing but create stop motion animation. I would shoot it. And then I sent it over to Colin to do all the editing and sound design at that point. And we made 15, 30 second clips and we had a set price on them. And basically I launched this out.
hoping that maybe we would get like three or four people signing up for it. And we booked about 20 people in one week. So yeah, so I was like, okay, we are officially back in business, right? Like we have a crazy busy week now, like let's figure this out. Got through it, ended up running it again, probably a month and a half later, but this time with the name of Stop Motion Thing. And...
pretty similar results at that time. Basically, we set the stuff at a price point that was just really too hard for anyone to, yeah, exactly. So it was like, and that was kind of part of the deal is like, what's the bare minimum that we can charge something for and still operate a business, right? And especially, again, if we were able to do four in a day, the deal was, okay, it's basically our day rate divided by four.
Drysen Carsten (03:30.422)
to say no.
Matt Vojacek (03:51.433)
And if we can get people to pay just that, then we were good, right?
Drysen Carsten (03:56.32)
So I'm imagining this has to be like a highly templatized, like you're not getting a lot of customization on this.
Matt Vojacek (04:01.204)
No, so for that, it was you send us your product, we'll have a, I think I said five to 10 minute phone call initially. And I'll just, I'll listen to what you you're saying, but it's very like freestyle, no plan, no storyboards. Like we just go into it and let's just do it, right? So we did that for a little while. It started to like...
started to do really well. The problem became, okay, I can't do all this stuff myself, and we were still during COVID and I just didn't feel like it was a good idea to get a whole studio of people together to do this. So it sort of like fizzled out in a way. But over the years we've done like bunch of stop motion stuff since then. But beginning of this year I felt like we were starting to hit another
little bit of a rut. think especially like as soon as January 1st hit, we saw another little bit of a decline in project requests. So in my head, I was like, let's go back to the formula that works here, right? And I made a site called stop motion thing. And it was basically the same offer, but just a little refined. And I was like, let's do let's do that, right? And
Pretty much the moment that I hit launch on this website, I was like, we can do more than this. Like, what if we had a bunch of things that we're sort of offering, and as long as we can contain the deliverables in it, then the idea is that we can work with people to do a number of different things, right? And...
Drysen Carsten (05:31.86)
You
Drysen Carsten (05:49.344)
So Made By Things being this, know, it's, I know Made By Things as a studio, they're very intentional about making sure that they can use a budget and maximizing the return on value for that budget. But if that's a premium budget up here where it's regularly to work with you, this is almost like the trial sample size to get a taste of what it's like working with a big studio.
Matt Vojacek (06:10.548)
Right, I guess that's the thing is that like, you know, typically we're working with a little bit larger companies, usually like, I don't know, the revenue really ranges. Sometimes they're, I'd say most of them are between 10 and 50 million a year is what they're bringing in. And I love, I love working with smaller companies. The passion that you have when you talk to somebody that's like, yes, I am the founder and I'm the marketing department and I'm HR.
Drysen Carsten (06:25.728)
Yeah.
Drysen Carsten (06:39.615)
Let me put this hat on then this hat.
Matt Vojacek (06:39.966)
There's just, right, right. There's just something special about that and helping people build something really early on. And we've just always been out of the range for stuff like that, usually. So that was kind of another part of it, was it's like, all right, we can do things for less, but we need to have a very, very, very specific outcome or set of deliverables for whatever we do.
So I ended up asking the whole team, like, okay, if you had to choose like three things that you could do within two business days, like, what could you do, right? Like, looking back at all the projects that we've done before, let's try to put a list together of, like, again, for us specifically, two days. That's generally what we're trying to do. Now, some things take a little bit more and some things maybe a little bit less.
I would say more often on the higher side though. So we basically put this list together and we tried to include at least, I think we did three things per person, really. We got to a list of two or three things per person. We got to a list of about 20 different items. So it's like, here are 20 products, air quotes, that we could deliver.
within a set 30 day period of time. Like, yeah, it might take us two days, like, consistently, but these are lower budget things. It's not, you know, it wouldn't be good for somebody in like a rush turnaround or anything like that.
Drysen Carsten (08:11.648)
you're filling in the gaps. Yeah.
Drysen Carsten (08:18.326)
So because we are running out of time because we've got that hard 10 minute conversation, which is the fun part of this conversation piece, I'm curious, things by things to lead and introduce people to made by things, did it work?
Matt Vojacek (08:21.032)
Yep.
Matt Vojacek (08:32.36)
Yeah, so once we put it all together, we basically got the whole team together in one week, built a site, built all the products, launched an e -commerce site. Initially, not anything. I mean, a lot of people were interested in saying it was a great idea and everything, which was pretty cool. But we had probably two to four clients that sort of popped up from that and...
We kind of work with two of them in a little bit of a different way, but it was really cool to be able to at least have that as a jumping off point and then converting that into, how do we need to kind of work through this relationship? And it ended up turning into ongoing work that we do with a couple of our partners. So yes, yes, it worked.
Drysen Carsten (09:15.542)
So you have a product you can actually sell, you can work, it becomes your marketing effort to introduce people to the rest of Made By Things. That's a really cool strategy. And that is our time for today though. So super quick conversation. Today's episode is brought to you by the Discovery Workshop by Made By Things. So Matt, I wanna say thank you for being on the show and thank you for being my test subject for episode 01. Yep, talk to you later.
Matt Vojacek (09:38.6)
You bet man, thank you.