Howdy
Continuing with the tradition of writing my monthly emails on significant dates, this one is sent on 24 June on purpose. The night of 23/24 June is the Midsummer Festival in my native Estonia – after Christmas, the most important day in the calendar! And with rivers of beer, BBQ and jumping over fires – a lot more fun than all the other annual celebrations combined!
1) ZOOM / Recent Update:
(A) The last few weeks have been absolutely incredible. In terms of revenue, we had the best week, the best month and the best quarter.
Just last week alone, we delivered over 60,000 photos (including those of Rebecca Adlington and Theresa May) and handled in excess of 2TB of data. It may seem trivial, but when you learn that all of that was uploaded, edited and delivered to clients within 24 hours and the vast majority of images were delivered the same day, you will see why I’m so proud of our team.
So what? We are built to scale.
(B) Our French competitor has just raised $230m, becoming the first unicorn (private company with $1b+ valuation) in our industry. We are super happy for them and for the industry.
Our industry is getting hotter by the day and in the next 5-10 years we predict there will be 3-5 more unicorns in our space, all of whom will become #VisualFuel Majors controlling 80% of this $100b industry, replacing the old way of working with small studios and freelancers.
So what? It’s not a winner takes all market and there is plenty of room for several large players to prosper.
2) FOCUS / Looking Ahead:
When you are not the biggest in the visual content industry, you cannot afford not to be nice. So we always try harder than our competition and it brings immediate results.
Two large enterprise clients have recently switched from our competitors to us precisely because of our try harder approach, so until my next letter we will be focusing on flawlessly delivering hundreds of sessions for them.
So what? Ideas are worthless, execution is everything.
3) EXPOSURE / Ask:
Unusually, I’ve got two asks for you, please:
(1) We are urgently looking for a VP of Operations. Someone who has unlimited stores of energy, laser focus, experience in building and running fast growing teams and ambition to build a service that will help millions of businesses around the world.
Someone who can take over all the exciting bits of our business to let me concentrate on fundraising, finding the best senior talent and setting the strategy.
(2) To raise $230m, our competitor must have spoken to hundreds of VCs. Only a small number of them invested – the rest may now be thinking about backing another strong player in the industry. Please introduce us to VCs, who understand that visual content is a fast growing industry in need of standardisation, professionalisation and globalisation.
So what? I know these asks are working, because we got a recommendation of a wonderful HR Manager from my last email, so thank you for that and thank you in advance for the two asks above.
Enjoy your Midsummer Day festivities if you are from Estonia, and I wish you all a very productive week!
Kind regards,
Splento – The Visual Tech Company
P.S. You can find all previous updates from 2019 HERE
Contact Splento if you are in need of:
