“Technology companies in China, particularly startups, have no idea how to talk about the cool, magical parts of what they do.” That was the first thing Jim Fields said to me when I spoke with him last week about his new video production startup Relay. And he’s right. I’ve seen hundreds of Chinese tech startups pitch everywhere from live events to Kickstarter. Even when their tech is good, their storytelling can be a real problem.
For example: a couple weeks ago I ran across this Kickstarter campaign from a Shenzhen-based hardware startup. The product itself looks great, but the storytelling is – to be blunt – pretty awful. The video’s voiceover is poorly written and even more poorly delivered. You have to get nearly halfway through it to even learn what the product is. Even the name “Magic Mirror” is misleading, as there’s no mirror involved at all.
That kind of disaster is what Relay is hoping to help China’s tech companies avert.
What is Relay?
Relay is a Beijing-based creative production company that’s focused on video production for tech startups and disruptive brands (much like Sandwich Video, whose founder Jim says is “a friend”). In particular, Relay aims to help Chinese companies communicate effectively with Western audiences, who often play a key role in the success or failure of startup crowdfunding campaigns (for example). (That’s not to say that Relay only works with Chinese clients though; the company is based in Beijing but has connections all over the globe).
But unlike many creative agencies, Relay is just focused on video production. The startup will make your company’s Kickstarter video, launch video, or corporate documentary from start to finish, but they’re not going to promote it on social media for you or design your magazine ads. Relay does one thing – video – with the goal of doing that one thing very well.
As for how that’s going, you can judge for yourself. Here’s a video Relay produced for the Orbit social sharing drone, which recently completed a successful Kickstarter campaign.
Incidentally, Relay also produced the video for Hover Camera, which we wrote about previously:
Relay’s exclusively focused on video because the team thinks that serves startups better. Traditional advertising agencies offer a lot more services than Relay, but consequently they also cost a lot more. Especially for tech companies and startups, whose main goal may just be to effectively communicate what their technology does, the video can be a powerful tool all on its own. Relay offers great video without the “bloat” that comes with big creative agency contracts, said Jim.
Why Relay?
Jim, who is managing director at Relay, worked at creative production agency Studio Output before starting Relay. But time and time again, he said he saw that China’s tech companies were delivering in terms of product but missing wildly when it came to storytelling. “That’s something that just gets missed or omitted or done very poorly,” he said. “That’s where we saw a big opportunity.”
The Relay team was also itching to work more with startups because, as many of them had experienced in previous positions, working with big companies in Beijing can be frustrating. “Working with more traditional industries, things were really political and slow, and there were a lot of middlemen and a lot of barriers,” Jim said. At bigger companies, “you’re seven layers removed from the dalaoban [big boss] and there’s no way to communicate with them.” With startups, he said, Relay can “communicate directly with the CEO and with the person who has the vision, and find a way to explain that vision. We think that’s really exciting.”
Greta Bradford, Relay’s head of accounts and operations, said it’s not just about startups, though. Relay is looking for any clients who have cool products and are open to approaching their videos in a more fun, and creative way. “That makes the whole thing much more interesting for us,” she said. And that’s a big part of why they started Relay, too – the team is genuinely interested in China’s tech industry. Unlike most creative agencies, Relay will be at tech industry events like CES just for the fun of it. “It’s not just for business, it’s because we’re interested,” Greta said.
Surviving a startup
Relay is still in its early days, and the company has started up without any kind of investor capital, counting instead on the team’s experience in the field to help land paying clients quickly. But Relay has also been helped by the kindness of architecture and design firm Ballistic Architecture Machine, which is letting Relay work from their offices for six months in exchange for Relay producing a video for them. “Without that having happened, it would have been a lot harder [for us to get started],” Jim said.
Everybody knows that in China, business is all about guanxi – personal relationships. But that’s often perceived as referring only to the Chinese. “I think a lot of people think guanxi in China is only relevant if it’s with some mysterious Chinese government official. But for us, a lot of our relationships with other foreign businesses have really helped us.” He paused. “I guess maybe that’s a helpful tip for entrepreneurs,” he said. “Leverage whatever relationships you have.”
Another big problem facing any startup is overheads in the early days, where you want to hire the best talent but revenues may be thin. Many try to solve this problem by raising funding rounds, but Jim says that Relay has focused on being “merciless” in terms of cutting costs, and finding creative ways to get the company up and running without spending a lot of money. “I think that’s a big mistake that a lot of startups in China make,” he said. “It has been historically easier to raise funds here, so you see a lot of big fancy office spaces and big budgets for travel and marketing […] There’s a lot of unwise financial decisions that get made in the startup space.”
It probably goes without saying, then, that Relay hasn’t raised any investor capital. “We thought about it,” Jim said, but after consulting with some outsiders, the team decided it wanted to retain the lean startup approach rather than giving itself a safety net of investor cash that might facilitate laziness or wasteful spending. “For us, it didn’t seem like a wise decision unless we absolutely needed the money,” he said.
The Relay team, minus team member Lynn Wong, at CES.
What’s next
One of the issues Relay has encountered is that startups typically only want to make one or two videos a year (if that), and many of them go out of business. That means Relay has to be constantly looking for new clients. That’s the issue that the company is trying to address now, Jim says: how can they continue to serve these cool, disruptive, and innovative companies without marrying themselves to a sales process that he calls “pretty exhausting.” To that end, the company is exploring alternative payment models for startups like revenue-sharing or equity payment, as well as targeting more established (but still interesting and innovative) firms that will be a more reliable source of regular business.
“I don’t think we want to be doing what we’re doing now forever,” Jim said, referring to the constant hustle to track down new startup clients. “But I don’t think that we know exactly what we want to do next yet.”
(In a follow-up email after our interview, Jim added that Relay was also considering an acquisition of some kind as a possible long-term future target, noting that its startup and tech connections and know-how could be valuable to global ad firms. “We have a lot to offer either to a brand who wants an in house team or an advertising or PR agency that wants to take their business to the next level,” he wrote. But acquisition is not something the company is looking for right now, he stressed, just a possible future target.)
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