To launch Capital, a buzzy fintech startup fueling some of the most innovative founders today, we filmed a multi-part docu series spotlighting eight of its customers.
The client wasn’t interested in a traditional B2B marketing approach, which gave us the opportunity to create something more artful, almost moody, set against the backdrop of New York City. Each episode highlights one founder’s journey from their aha moment to development to their first taste of success. The core emotional hook of each video is the unique forces at work in each person’s story, the ones that enabled them to succeed where others haven't.
It’s easy to make bad videos like this, so our first goal was to make something beautiful that people would want to watch an entire series of. Our second goal was to motivate the viewer, to encourage them to capitalize on their own ideas, to humanize the founders and thus make the idea of being one increasingly accessible. We wanted to get people excited.
The series, which features the founders of iconic New York-based startups like Blank Street Coffee, has completely reimagined what “B2B marketing” means, and has since been mimicked by other startups that aspire to follow in their footsteps.
We knew we wanted to humanize these founders, the word carries so many connotations and here was an opportunity to show the wide variety of people with new ideas, all coming from wildly different backgrounds to New York to make it. They’re networking, finding partners, raising money, and trying to change the world. They’re also ambitious geniuses who are in their heads much of the time — not performers! — and don’t have much free time to sit in front of a camera, so meticulous planning was a must.
Before filming with each founder, a pre-interview peeled back the layers of who they really were, what drove them, and where they’d come from. That information was used to plan just one day of shooting each, that had to show off their business, their passions, their humanity, not to mention New York City, the one constant throughout the entire series. Why, we asked, did they choose to be founders in NYC and what does that say about them?.
The shots needed to look like they took hours to set up and lighting extremely wide interview shots was quite the challenge against time.
The success of the series blew everyone away: it even helped some of the featured founders raise millions, and the internet went nuts for the whole thing. Comments like “Sleek” and “This should be a whole show” flooded Twitter, along with hundreds of fire emojis and comments from VCs who invested in these companies after seeing the videos.
Personally, we’re thrilled with the way the series turned out. It’s beautifully executed and has made people excited by the idea of starting something, which is what the discourse around founders and startups should do, but so often does not.
